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When I thought I’d finally be able to resume the hunt, I found that the many thousands of miles under my butt had worn out Powdermilk’s second driver’s seat. I would have to replace it with the removed passenger’s seat. I am as mechanically inclined as a good pig, it didn’t quite fit, and I lacked the proper tools; it took me a whole day, but I got it in. When I finally kissed Thea and headed out on September 18, I knew that all this time off the road was costing me species in Arizona. But the ten days at home filled my tank, gave me a retread, and fixed my own struts for three more hard-travelin’ months to come.
At Sherwood Campground, the moon glowed red from the same smoke that burned my throat. In the morning, fire helicopters tried to drown out the chickadees and the river. Once under way, as I rounded a bend, Mt. Hood pounced out, enormous and as snowless as I’d ever seen it. Only the weight-watching glaciers and the odd ridge or cirque still held any dirty laundry. Pulling off just before Blue Box Pass to change from cool-morn sweats to hot-day shorts, I put up several Cal torts and a Polygonia that was dark enough to be the missing species oreas—but everyone was frantic, nobody perching. Lorquin’s admiral crossed the road as I crossed the 45th parallel—are we in the South yet?
When I crossed over the shoulder of Mt. Hood and dropped into the ponderosa pines and bitterbrush, the very first blooming rabbitbrush had a juba skipper on it, just as it should. Patches of it along a damp road through burned and cutover woods attracted zerene frits and scads of black and white moths. But there would be masses of rabbitbrush from now on, way too much to check with any care. All I could do was to keep my eyes out for white bits that could be the stubborn northern white-skippers, which I have long known by their older name, great white-skipper. The first candidate turned out to be a Becker’s white, a double-brooded species with a robust autumn flight. The next, along a leaky pipe on the road down to Lake Simtustus, where purplish coppers patronized the knotweed, was a melanic female cabbage white that looked like a gray marble in flight.
Plunging into the deep, deep canyon that embraces Warm Springs Village on the reservation, I thought, How did the Indians manage to hang on to such a good spot? When I later asked a Warm Springs friend, he said, “Because they gave up most of northern Oregon.” Beside the broad Deschutes River, I gathered tiny, rock-hard pears. I took a bite but found them bitter and gritty; hard to believe a ripe Cornice belongs to the same species. As I came out of the Rainbow Market, an older Indian man with a long mustache, who looked Tlingit, said “Semper Fi.” A younger man was admiring my rig. He liked the rack, the mileage, the whole deal. He offered me “thousands” for it, plus tropical weed and whiskey on the side. If he could just use it for a minute to get to the bank . . .
When I told Richard thanks anyway, he asked me for a dollar for beer. “Look me up if you want to sell it,” he said. Then, nodding at the old Marine, “We’re Navy, a different breed from him. We’ve got cash.”
East to Brothers and Burns through solid sage, the rain on it almost too fragrant to bear. Coming out of lightning down south, a storm caught up to me and moved off to the north, leaving silver raindrops and tumbleweeds in the headlights, and sage voles skittering over the road. In Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, fog blew off the marshes on a stiff wind. A barn owl ghosted past, as the kangaroo mouse it was looking for fought the wind across the pavement. Then hard rain, and after the squall, pale moths clogged the headlights. I arrived at Frenchglen at midnight. Just north of the fine old Frenchglen Hotel, I slept well under yellowing cottonwoods and awakened to roosters and woodpeckers. A phone booth stood beside a field across the road, so I called Thea to wish her good morning. As we were talking, a familiar form passed by across the road.
“Is that Ruth?” I called.
“No, can’t be!” said Thea. Then I saw Rick’s familiar russet shirt and beard. Ha! It was our longtime writing and birding friends, Rick Brown and Ruth Robbins, along with the Xerces Society’s treasurer, Linda Craig, and their friend Nancy Peterson. If I was surprised, you should have seen their eyes when they spotted me. Rick and Ruth each had a word with the equally amused Thea. Well, if you were going to run into naturalist friends anywhere, this might well be the spot. They had camped nearby and were about to head up Steens Mountain birding.
“Are you hunting butterflies up on Steens today?” asked Linda. I’d’ve loved to go up the long, high, isolated mass of Steens Mountain with them. So set apart is this alpine rampart between the Alvord Desert and the Malheur Basin that several endemic subspecies of butterflies have arisen there, including distinct races of the zerene, callippe, and Mormon fritillaries. But it was too late for any of them. I waved the others, well met, on their way.
Pulling up the grade, saying, “This feels like a day to see the great white-skipper,” I saw a rabbitbrush covered with them! Or so it appeared. Actually, it was bindweed’s white blossoms twining over the bush. Laughing at the decoy, I thought I saw a female, but it was just a big checkered-skipper. A dust-pale ringlet gave a third false alarm.
Beneath the Catlow Rim, alongside Roaring Springs Ranch, a golden-mantled ground squirrel nibbled on a road-flat Pacific rattlesnake. A pair of harriers worked a dry valley, the Long Hollow, up to Catlow Valley Road. As most of it would be from here on out, this was big, lonely country. An imposing juniper sign announced the “Steens Mountain Cooperative Management & Protection Area—Private + Public Lands”: the final form of the agreement to conserve this long-contested landform. Skirting the Pueblo Mountains, I cut off the bottom of the Alvord Desert, which has its own endemic checkerspot in season. The OR-NV state line was a cattle guard in dusty Denio.
Through the Quinn River Valley, a long stretch of deep yellow rabbitbrush buzzed with a million moths and flies. The long, straight road over the alkali playa was dressed in shadscale and white dust. It came to an end as narrow 140 ran into U.S. 95. The best endless roads always end too soon. But beyond Winnemucca, past Battle Mountain, Copper Canyon, Buffalo Valley, Antelope Valley, Jackrabbit, and Ravenswood, a sign called U.S. 50 “the Loneliest Road in America.”
The Loneliest Road in America was chock-a-block with big trucks. I turned south toward Tonapah on Hwy. 376, also billed as the Loneliest Road in America. An arroyo about ten miles on produced a surprising fresh female of Queen Alexandra’s sulphur. As I was about to go on, a Noctua pronuba emerged from under the dash and flew to the window and out. This chunky orange underwing moth belongs to Europe but has spread widely in the Northwest in recent years. Did it come from home? If so, I’d just introduced it to Nevada!
The pointy Toiyabe Range rose on my right, the Toquima Range on my left, with Wildcat Peak jutting across a white playa like a mini–Black Rock Desert. The terraced tailing piles from Smoky Valley Gold Mine looked like the bases of enormous Mexican pyramids.
About fifty miles north of Tonopah, I stopped for a white patch on rabbitbrush and found it a male checkered white. And then, just a mile or two on, I spied a small white flutter in my peripheral. Hopping out, I watched a shadow become the first monarch of this particular trip. Following it, I came to a smaller white thing. It basked, I got a good look, and yes! A great white-skipper at last. I saw a few more and caught one—wings nacreous, black border pattern pen-and-ink crisp, thorax shiny teal blue from body hair refraction. They were all bright, fresh males. Weirdly, for the season, that monarch was struggling against the wind, heading due north. But it led me right to the skipper.
So at 2:30 P.M., September 21, I was finally back on the books, with Heliopetes ericetorum, its very name a jazz riff. I’d hoped to find it on the way home from Montana at a reliable location called Pelham’s Boneyard, two weeks ago. That made a fortnight without a new butterfly! I’d have to do better than that. But I was plumb happy for it now. Across the vast flats, the Kingdom of Chenopods rolled on. Came the junction with U.S. 6, extension of Sixth Avenue, the south boundary of my childhood neighborhood of Hoffman Heights. Tonapah was a place of casinos, cheap motels, and false fronts. The Mizpah Hotel, the glans-domed courthouse, and some other limestone solids were all built on mine tailings and alkali flats gullied like claw marks on chalk. Southward toward Alkali and Silverpeak, the first Joshua trees appeared. Now I really felt south.
At the Lida turnoff, the former Cottontail Brothel was for sale, along with the rest of the Lida Ranch: “40 to 3,300 acres.” Then Scotty’s Junction, almost back to Death Valley—no time for his castle, any more than I’d had for Hearst’s, across many mountains to the west, last January. There was a defunct brothel for sale here too, with a pink van by a pink and yellow trailer out back. Then I passed one that was in business: Shady Lady Ranch @ Petticoat Junction. A small tarantula crossed the road. Amazingly, it passed safely between my wheels, the eighteen that passed me just then, and four big ones oncoming. Better odds, anyway, than I’d give it at Petticoat Junction.
Down in a moist, green valley lay a hot springs, with horses grazing in marshy bits that looked like Nokomis country. Then on the outskirts of Beatty, a pink sign for Angel Ladies: “free all night truck parking, pull through for truck trailers, free showers, coffee, phone.” Leonard Cohen said of his “Sisters of Mercy,” “I hope you run into them, you who’ve been traveling so long.” It’s not hard in Nevada. But my painted ladies were free, except for the gas. Besides, I had a date the next day with Carole, or at least Carole’s fritillary, up in the Spring Mountains.