118 species of butterflies move through Flamingo — from the Mojave Sootywing to the Red Admiral to the mighty Monarch. We spent a year researching them while writing my new book, PLEASURE PRINCIPLES, now available for pre-order.
On certain afternoons, if you stand very still by the vegetable beds, you can hear a faint papery sound — the soft clap of monarch wings moving through the valley. She drifts up from the hillside, skirts the Macadamia trees, pauses over the Olives, and then beelines for the Narrowleaf Milkweed. No passport, no border control. Just a tiny body following an ancient map.
A few hundred miles from here, we’ve drawn hard lines across that same map. During the Trump Administration, steel bollards rose across the desert — thirty feet high, four inches apart. They are meant to stop people, but they also stop almost everything else — the sonoran pronghorn who travels to find water, the jaguar who needs vast, unbroken territory to find a mate, the bighorn sheep and mule deer who look for food and shade. Their corridors have been closed shut. The only ones who move freely through this fortified border are the smallest travelers: insects, birds, bats, and butterflies. Creatures light enough to slip between the bars, or high enough to fly over them. Freedom, for now, has become an airborne privilege.
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