Butterfly Mountain

Certain Precambrian Routes

Cold blue, deep gray, and yawning crystalline across the basin of Lake Superior rests the mouth of an ancient, unnamed volcano. Geologists and speculators have retrofitted models suggesting the vent once held form as a peak atop a massive mountaintop. Contemporary place names, map projections, and directional bearings do more to distract than to orient. Named or unnamed, the mountain-as-mountain is long gone.

What, then, can be said of this mountain’s having-been-as-it-once-was? Or of its lingering influence? Though it has sunken to non-prominence, we might cup an ear to it, entertain its pre-Cambrian grandeur. As a geology outsider, I self-consciously, cautiously refer to this long-gone geologic phenomenon as Butterfly Mountain—a name I have also given to this book—because the long drawn out after-effects of dissipation, disappearance, and impermanence, mysterious and abundant as they are, inspire this experimental project. Butterfly Mountain achieved grand mass; oh, cloud-whisperer, what a stoney sight you were!, only later, with a lithospheric rupture and ensuing continental rift, to become the dark floor of a lake few know to visit, and even fewer will conceive, in stark contrast to today’s lake bottom, as eons towering, as casting long shadows, morning and afternoon. Butterfly Mountain has intervened mysteriously into the yearly flight patterns of Monarch butterflies whom migrate for multiple generations from locations in what is now Canada and Latin America. [difference between Monarch generation and lifespan of approximately 3-5 weeks] [Add note about Kingsolver book?] Lofted on bright orange and black wings, adult Monarchs cover xx miles in xx time, grazing on milkweed before moving again on steadfast route. What might seem predictable and ordinary among seasonally migratory pollinators is, however, punctuated by an anomalous turn, a haunted turn, as the Monarchs at the approximate geolocation of then-towering, now-lake-bottom Butterfly Mountain, change directions as if to fly around the mountain that is no longer there. In behaving as a swarm and changing flight paths as-if, the butterflies perform a curious and striking variety of gone-noting, offering an allegory to other haunted turns.