Karner Blue

Karner Blue Carol Cióos . . . those distant times whose long light finds so many ingenious ways to reach me. —Speak, Memory As a young girl, through our fields and a patch of woods, I carried a musUn sack on a weekly chore. Two quarts of milk, a pint of sour cream, and a pound offarmer's cheese for hairy, old Damkopf who lived a half-mile away. The sweating glass jars cUnked when I'd skip on the path or trip over roots. On the way back, I'd dawdle in the pine-patterned Ught, stopping to stroke pink lady's-sUppers, to pick lupine, to strip birch bark for covers ofmy smaU, pungent books. Some days butterflies joined me. I don't know ifKarner blues were among them. The velvety lady's-slippers, I knew, were not to be picked, but the lupine grew in profusion underfoot, flourishing in the acid soil under the pitch pines. Cypripedium acaule. Lupinus perennis. Had I then known the way things were named in the natural world, I would have added these to the books that curled in my palm. I was also not aware that the green larvae of the rare Karner blues fed exclusively on the lupine's leaves, before resting for their ten-day metamorphosis . The emerging butterflies are very smaU, each blue-lavender wing about a half-inch wide. Twice in the season, the female Karner blues return to the lupine to lay eggs on the stalks and leaves. Lupine blooms are droplets ofviolet-blue. Butterfly and bloom just a few gorgeous hues apart. Our farm, along the edge of the Great Pine Bush outside Albany, New York, was a lovely piece ofproperty—so lovely that within ten years ofmy father's purchase it was being encroached by developers. My father's fields were once the dunes along an Ice Age lake. On their wheat-colored, sandy soil, cleared from the pine barrens during the last century, he grew the best melons and vegetables around. 62 Carol Cloos63 In 1944,Vladimir Nabokov, writing in the entomologicaljournal Psyche, precisely classified and christened the Karner blue for taxonomy—Lycaeides melissa samuelis. An expert lepidopterist, Nabokov had studied various Lycaeides specimens intensively in books and laboratories and fields. His ardor for butterflies, especiaUy "the blues," was such that in 1944 he wrote his friend, James Laughlin, the publisher of New Directions press, imploring him to search out foUage ofspecific vetch and lupines, and particular ant species. When Nabokov had visited LaughUn in the Utah countryside, he had coUected these and then mislaid them. His letter includes a highly detailed hand-drawn map showing topography, byways, and even the locations of cows. Nabokov and Laughlin had been acquainted for three years and were frequent correspondents, but Laughlin must have been bemused at this unique request. Both lupine and ant must comefrom that precise spot. Kill the ants with alcohol or carbona or any other stuff handy (just drown them, do not squash) and put them into a small box with cotton wool. Theplants can be mailed in a carton or in any other way, but try to keep themflat. . . .The otherplant, the vetch, although growing in the vicinity ofWalker's Lane, along the roads, must comefrom the limited locality. N Nabokov, however, did not himself capture a Karner blue until May of 1950, when he stopped at a site off Karner Road in Pine Bush. It was a good spring on many accounts. His autobiography—later titled Speak, Memory—was about to be published in America, and he was working on a new, complex novel. He knew it would cause discussion, but could not guess how it would shape the course ofhis life and his artistic reputation. In subsequent years, when traveUng between CorneU, where he taught Uterature , and Harvard, where he did research on butterflies at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Nabokov revisited Pine Bush, which he caUed "that sandy and flowery litde paradise. " Today its gentle hüls are gouged by trails of aU-terrain vehicles, and a shopping maU has been built in its midst. At one point, the maU owners answered environmentalists' protests by suggesting a "corral" at one...