All we wanted was the butterflies, but the only way to get them was to buy tickets for the entire museum. Since Joyce was still nursing a broken ankle, we didn’t especially want the whole museum, but we paid our way anyhow. After five minutes with the butterflies, Joyce turned from where she been watching them and said, “This was worth the price of admission.” She was right.
We were in Rochester for the Fourth of July, and we were waiting when they opened the doors at the Strong Museum. We had come specifically for the Dancing Wings Butterfly Garden.
Which of course was at the exact farthest point from admissions, so we figured we’d better trundle over there by wheelchair. I slung the walker over my shoulders, and when we arrived the staff member said, “That’s a GREAT jetpack!” Strong IS the National Museum of Play, after all.
She gathered a handful of us for the day’s first experience, and led us through a sort of airlock into a tropical space… warm, humid, two stories high, bursting with plant life.
And 800 tropical butterflies.
I’ve always adored butterflies, and spent many hours as a barefoot boy in their company. Now with every step I could open my arms and gather in a dozen or two.
Not that I did, of course. Even proverbially they’re delicate, and it isn’t allowed. Love in this case is to leave them alone. But they flit and float all around you, and sometimes – if you’re still – even light on you. Who is more favored than one who is favored by butterflies?
Even though the space is small, the high tropical brush makes each winding trail its separate adventure. Perched on almost every frond are butterflies up close, personal, and patient. They fill the brush, and they fill they air. One rode the shell back of a tortoise. Twenty minutes later it was still there, for all the world like the bird and turtle in the B.C. comics. Besides the turtles, tortoises, and butterflies, the space is home to button quail… tiny birds who dart in and out underfoot, ever on ant patrol.
Some of the butterflies, like the ghost sulphur, would cover my entire open hand, while others are tiny. None of them live more than a few weeks once reaching adulthood, so the population is always refreshed with insects brought along in staggered stages, from egg to pupa to adult, to keep the garden full. When we leave we pass through air jets, and a mirrored hall, to make sure none of them are hitching a ride with us.
While waiting for the museum doors to open we had wandered the outdoor Discovery Garden, which is noted as a monarch migration station. The gorgeous orange-and-black monarch is the first butterfly I learned to recognize, even before starting school and learning to read. At junior-college graduations in Pennsylvania, and at the Curtiss radio-controlled model airplane fun flies in Pleasant Valley, I used to watch these wonderful creatures on their migrations, maybe one a minute, each following the others in line. One unforgettable evening outside Bath, we stood open-mouthed as hundreds passed over at once – and once in a lifetime. What a tragedy that the numbers of these beautiful harmless creatures are sinking. Most of our eastern butterflies winter on just a few acres, all within a short walk, in Mexico. This alone makes them as vulnerable as a species as they are individually, with their wings thinner than paper, and far more fragile.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, not noted for being the cheeriest of souls, wrote “Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you sit down quietly, may alight upon you.” I think he must have been a butterfly boy too, not too many miles from where I was the same.