When Nature Needs a Hand
by Catherine Schillinger • Sanbornville, NH

It’s October. My dog, Misty and I walk on Wells Beach. Migrating geese and ducks sweep by in long lines. The day is windy, with rough gusts. Monarch butterflies dot the air. They are also migrating but having a harder time than the sturdy water birds. Fragile and intrepid, they point themselves south and flap with single-minded purpose.

We walk the wrack line, where the tide has swept up a row of debris. We come across a Monarch clinging to a tangle of seaweed much too close to the advancing tide. It clutches the black clump and slowly flaps its weary wings.

I was the kind of kid who tried to save every bug, even the tent caterpillars who trekked across our street to devour my mother’s ornamental crabapple trees. My mother tried to discourage me from rescuing baby birds and from smuggling orphaned mice into my room. As I grew up and learned about nature, I learned to leave it alone. A mother bird will come back to feed her chick if at all possible. If not, she will wait until next spring for another clutch of babies. She knows what she should do--we do not need to interfere.
Mother Nature takes care of her own. Humans may have wandered far from the Garden of Eden, but animals still live there, in a place where there are few decisions to make and the laws of science and nature ensure that everything is as it should be.

Misty and I walk all the way to the jetty. I leave the butterfly clinging to the seaweed--Mother Nature will decide its fate. The image of the black and orange mosaic of its wings, and its tenacious grip on the seaweed, stays in my mind.

We turn toward home, and I can’t help it--I look for my butterfly as we retrace our steps. I have no record of its place among the scattered clumps of seaweed, driftwood, broken foam buoys from lobster boats, the shells and stones. Yet I come across it again as we trek upwind against the gusts. The butterfly still grips the clump of seaweed, but the tide is creeping in. One wing is caked with sand, and a few of the Monarch’s tiny black legs wave in the air.

To heck with Mother Nature. I grab the butterfly, rinse its sandy wing in a receding wave, and cradle it in my hand. I march up the beach with the rescued insect cupped against my body, trying not to crush the delicate, rigid wings. The butterfly holds on and waits without moving. Under the curious stare of a retired couple out for their morning exercise, I trespass above the high tide line. Misty and I tromp right up to the manicured lawn of a well-appointed beachfront cottage and set our freshly washed Monarch butterfly down, protected from the gusts and in a sunny spot where her wings might dry off. She is still there when I look back.

Later, back at my car in the parking lot, a butterfly swoops close to my face, nearly brushing me with a wing. I want to believe it is her -- bon voyage.


In summer, Catherine Schillinger and her husband live in an old movie theatre in Ogunquit, Maine where she is a chef at Gypsy Sweethearts restaurant. In winter, she’s a potter’s apprentice and freelance writer in New Hampshire. Her favorite things are adventure travel, contradancing, and her exceptional greyhound, Misty.