Flight Behavior ~ Part II Final
Dellarobia
Turnbow was born and raised in Feathertown, Tennessee in the southern
Appalachian Mountains, and feels trapped in her rural, mommy life and shotgun marriage.
One November day she finally feels ready to throw it all away for an affair
with a young telephone repairman. Yet as she climbs the mountain on the back
part of the family farm to meet her potential lover, she sees an epic vision of
orange covering the trees and flying into the sky across a valley on another
ridge. Without her glasses she cannot see what it is, but her religious
upbringing makes her think it is a sign that she is making a bad decision and
she returns home to her husband Cub and young children, Preston and Cordelia.
Dellarobia
and Cub share their property with Cub's parents, Hester and Bear. Because of
the collapsed economy and terrible weather that ruined the year's hay crop, the
farm is failing under an equipment loan. Bear signs a contract with a logging
company to clear-cut the mountain where Dellarobia saw the flame colored
phenomenon. Feeling guilty about why she was up there to witness it, Dellarobia
indirectly urges Cub and his father to check out the mountain before they strip
it in case there is something more valuable than trees up there. The family
takes a look and discovers that the trees and mountain are covered in monarch
butterflies. In church the following Sunday, Cub testifies to Pastor Bobby Ogle
and the congregation that Dellarobia had a "vision" that led them to
discover the butterflies.
The
small community is divided on whether the butterflies are some kind of gift
from God, but Bear is determined to log anyway, desperate for the money so the Turnbow’s
do not lose their entire farm. News of the butterflies slowly spreads, and
Dellarobia is unexpectedly visited by an immigrant family from a small town in
Mexico where the monarchs used to spend their winters before a recent flood and
mudslide that destroyed the entire community. Dellarobia is visited by
reporters who want to hear her "miraculous" story, but also by a
scientist named Ovid Byron, who has studied the migratory patterns of monarchs
for the length of his career, and sees their inexplicable roosting in Tennessee,
miles away from their usual routine, as an ominous sign of climate change. The
differences in ecology and temperature between Mexico and Tennessee could lead
to the death of the monarchs before winter is over, and thus their virtual
extinction. Ovid sets up a full lab with assistants to study the butterflies in
the Turnbow’s' barn, but often finds the local narrow mindedness about science
and global warming to be mind boggling.
After a
national news report erroneously claims Dellarobia was saved from suicide by
her vision of the butterflies, Dellarobia finds herself becoming uncomfortably
famous and wishes to have her privacy back, though she grows closer and more
attracted to Ovid as she begins working with him on collecting data for his
experiments. Though Hester and Dellarobia don't ordinarily have the best
relationship, Hester implores Dellarobia to urge Cub to stand up to Bear about
the logging. Hester's deep rooted faith guides her to continue in the idea that
the butterflies came to their property straight from God himself. As Ovid
persuades Dellarobia about the reality of climate change, and the risks of
flooding and mudslides that logging would bring to their property, Dellarobia
readily agrees with her mother in law, but Cub is harder to convince about
global warming's dangers, particularly to farmers.
The more
attracted she becomes to Ovid, the more Dellarobia realizes her marriage to
Cub, born of an unplanned high school pregnancy that ended in a miscarriage, is
a little more than fear of change and newness. Hester reveals she remained
distant from Dellarobia for all these years, because she always assumed she
would leave, too smart and ambitious for her son. Though Ovid's wife Juliet
arrives and Dellarobia is forced to admit her self-delusion that she could have
a future with the scientist, her conviction that her marriage is wrong for both
her and Cub remains strong, and she tells him they must separate. With the help
of Pastor Bobby and Dellarobia, Hester and Cub convince Bear to grudgingly
break his contract with the logging company.
Spurred
by Cub and Hester, they believe the butterfly invasion is the direct work of
God, channeling a miracle through Dellarobia, which could perhaps pull the
community out of the economic dumps, but only if they can turn the phenomenon
into a tourist attraction. God graced them with the butterflies. However, the
media focuses on the spiritual side of the story, constructing a narrative in
which the butterflies save Dellarobia from suicide, a type of miracle. Yet Ovid
Byron and the environmental groups that hover around the mountainside know
quite differently: the butterflies' millennia long migratory patterns are
shifting, an on the fritz reaction to rising global temperatures which is
rewriting the landscape around them. Two narratives to explain a single
phenomenon: faith versus science. The butterfly mis-migration speaks ominously
about the quickness with which climate change is occurring, and means the
monarchs could end up extinct.
The butterflies come through a
strange, mild winter and begin to make movements toward living in their usual,
although new migratory schedule. But after a week of spring like weather a
sudden and deep snowstorm makes Ovid and Dellarobia certain the monarch
population is lost. Yet as the world thaws again, Dellarobia witnesses some
fraction of the butterflies resuming their flight patterns. The world may be
completely different as Dellarobia plans to move off the farm with her children
and return to college, but it is more than possible that both she and the
butterflies will survive. The book is
deeply introspective and tells the story of a woman stuck in her Appalachian
lifestyle, but at the same time tackles the issue of global issue. It is an
interesting study of how global issues truly affect everyone, though they do so
in different ways.
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