A monarch butterfly is seen in the Montreal Insectarium, in November, 2022.Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press
Natalie Alcoba is a journalist based in Buenos Aires.
There comes a moment in a monarch caterpillar’s life when it starts to crane its head upward.
It has spent more than two weeks feasting and growing to almost 2,000 times its original mass, an astounding rate. The Very Hungry Caterpillar is not an overstatement. The insect’s existence involves eating and defecating, eating and defecating, until it starts to look up, and map out a comfortable spot to change into a chrysalis and take a transformative nap.
In Argentina, where my family is from, we may call this “buscando el norte” – looking for the north. A good way forward. The next stage, as we shed our skin and assume a new form.
I know all of this because my parents have been raising monarchs for many summers. It is an impressive operation that unfurls on their oak kitchen table in rural Ontario. Out comes a stack of Tupperware containers with caterpillars in various stages of growth. Some are filled with miniscule translucent eggs that were rescued from their garden. Others are nurseries of baby caterpillars blissfully devouring their endless supply of milkweed grub.
The morning routine involves removing the leaves they have been gorging on, replacing them with fresh ones, and cleaning out all the excrement that has piled up overnight. As the caterpillars grow larger, they graduate to rectangular mesh hampers that my mom bought at Walmart, with milkweed leaves placed in Popsicle trays filled with water. Once they have darkened in colour and plumped up, they climb the wall of the hamper, coil into a U shape, moult and form a chrysalis. A week or two later, they emerge as a butterfly, and the cycle begins again.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my norte lately – both in literal terms, after five years living in the Southern Hemisphere, and figuratively, as I contemplate my personal path forward. There are these moments when the flux is upon us, and we feel a shift coming – we are in that enigmatic stage of not one version, nor the other. An existence in suspension.
I moved to Argentina in 2019, after navigating the end of a marriage and wanting to cast off in a direction that required me to build again. I didn’t have a plan – I seldom do. In Argentina I experienced a personal and professional jolt to my system, a place that did not live by the regimented patterns of North American culture, where the hustle is like breathing and community is available in any old coffee shop. In Buenos Aires, the streets are political.
Almost immediately, I was swept up in the electric moment of hundreds of thousands of women filling the arteries of the cosmopolitan capital, pushing for the right to make decisions about their bodies. I understood the meaning of the word “movement” for the first time – it felt like we were moving, an intoxicating sensation in a hypermediated world in which so many of us are longing for connection. Here, people were living with purpose – perhaps drained, and beat down by endemic poverty, but rich in the networks that can heave a society in a particular direction. For me, a journalist, every conversation, every interview was a chance to piece together a part of my own story. The family rituals of my childhood made more sense now. My surroundings appeared in sharper colours. The Argentina that I had created in my imagination thanks to the memories and teachings my parents imparted on me and my brother faded from view a little, and in focus came the one that I drew, complete with people who, like me, had chosen it. We leave tracks. And find a way forward and back.
I have come home to Canada every year, but this summer, I saw Toronto differently. The urban landscape is rewiring. New patterns of work. New outposts of precarious workers – e-bike delivery riders as the connective tissue we barely see. I took detours to ogle at the depth of condo developments that appeared like archeological digs. Massive infrastructure projects that seemed fictional when I was a city hall reporter 10 years ago are now assuming position, as the city strains to catch up with its changing face. The cavernous Well condo and shopping centre, the Stackt fairgrounds with $40-an-hour pickleball courts, the exoskeleton of a new subway line. The city is levelling up, as an affordability and climate crisis plunges deeper. A clash of aspirational living, money and abandonment. “Homes don’t just happen,” signs along Dundas Street read. And still, this city holds onto what it used to be like. I walked the length of Tommy Thompson Park with my friend Trish on a muggy long weekend, grabbed the railing of a red footbridge with a clear view of downtown, and gave thanks for the silence. The sound, simply, of a Great Lake. “So glad you’re not too big for these quiet treasures, Toronto,” I wrote on Instagram.
We occupy territories that are elastic, not absolute. I chased down my heart’s desire to Montreal this summer, and Montreal cast its usual spell. So much sexy eye contact between strangers on the street. Community gardens everywhere. More Argentines than I’d ever seen in Canada to celebrate Copa America. I dusted off the vestiges of my Ontario public-school French, and took a class in the more romantic of our two official languages. It had been so long since I felt the stretch of learning, and language is such a clear barometer of our shifting capacity. You either know how to say something, or you don’t.
Except, that is not entirely true. Our bodies, our hearts, our words – they can render us naked as deftly as they subvert the intention to say what we mean, to be who we imagine. I took a rainy bike ride through Montreal’s magical Frédéric-Back Park, a futuristic expanse built on a former landfill, with touches of lavender that reminded me of southern Patagonia. Montreal had taken on a multiprismed importance in my mind’s eye after a season of grief in Argentina that I may never truly comprehend. It represented both refuge and turning point – a chance for metamorphosis. But that point of inflection – the distance to our desire, to borrow from the writer Rebecca Solnit – where does it start? And does it ever truly end? “Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant,” Ms. Solnit wrote in A Field Guide to Getting Lost. I felt the sunset in that park with a dear friend, and gathered the embers of love and loss for safekeeping.
The lessons of impermanence and picking up the pieces shone through another wildfire season, too. This time, it fell to Jasper, the iconic mountain town driven into frantic evacuation in July. The largest wildfire to hit the national park in a century. A transformation we knew was coming, but didn’t want to see. We can install sprinklers, and fireproof our souls, but sometimes we can’t stop it all from burning to the ground. “We know, as humans, we all find comfort in familiar things,” the town’s mayor told a news conference as he announced the delicate process of returning home. “Our residents will be looking for familiar faces, in familiar places. Some of that familiarity is gone.”
My brother and sister-in-law’s cat passed away this summer after a long life. For weeks, my three-year-old niece broke the news to me every time I saw her as if it was the first time: “Luna is gone.” Her absence became a presence for us, as Luna transformed into a sort of spirit friend who taught her songs she sang on our walks to the park. Some of the caterpillars don’t make it through their transformation. My mom said they may have been born with a virus, their destiny inscribed in their DNA.
No year is the same with the caterpillars. Sometimes there are 30. Other times 100. This year had the peculiarity of starting later than usual. It’s difficult to draw broader conclusions, my dad noted, as it’s a tiny microcosm of one garden on their property. Perhaps the butterflies simply laid eggs at the neighbours’. For my parents, the endeavour is about survival. Giving the creatures a chance to make it through the season. Giving my parents a connection to the world beyond us humans. “Number 31,” my mom called out as a new monarch did a lap and landed on a fir tree. “I do this because I think we’re doing something good,” my dad said.
In the last batch of caterpillars, one built its chrysalis on the edge of a Popsicle tray. The stem that affixed it to its base split and the cocoon fell. My dad created a paper-clip contraption to attach it to the roof of a hamper. The butterfly is born upside down, like most babies. It needs a bit of room to be able to stretch its wings before it flies out and up.
“Todo tiene una historia. Un proceso,” my mom said. “Everything has a story. A process.”