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Travel Photography > Great Basin > Loneliest Road
As other countries adopt more complex species laws, they'll read the stories of the metamorphosis of the American west, from a lonely and tranquil west, to a grown-up and complicated place of ranchers and lattes.
In art, tranquility is so often illustrated as a dark and wet place lit by the awkward flight of butterflies. The world of butterflies, like birds or orchids, exists alongside us as something infinitely complex, unimaginably colorful, intensely strange, and yet altogether unknown by us. They are odd. They exemplify uselessness. They employ something we call love dust, literally a dust on the wings, a chemical potion of lust.
Fabric trendsetters study their wing designs for next year's color combinations. Some color-experts hunt butterflies in the tropics. With a gun-like tool made by color-engineer company Pantone Inc., they 'grab' butterfly colors and enter them into their computers.
Some butterflies have a foot-long wingspan. These live eight months, and their wings are adapted for high altitude. Others migrate across continents.
But the Sand Mountain blue is just a small butterfly, only an inch wide. It falls in a genus of four species. It is one of six subspecies. Its habitat is a thousand acres, it is close to extinction. If anything, its distinction is that some people call it the Star-Spangled butterfly. That's because the colors of the females' wings look like the American flag.
Writer Vladimir Nabokov dedicated much of his life and creative passion to these blue butterflies of America, the sub-family Polyommatinae, of which the Euphilotes are a genus. He spent years reclassifying and amending their taxonomic breakdowns. In his novel Lolita, the main character had a nickname; Dolly. In Greek, Dolly means chrysalis - that in-between time, between when a butterfly is a voracious and infantile eater, a caterpillar devouring his world. Between when he sprouts wings and becomes responsible to the next generation.
This whole debate is really about one thing: should our endangered species be managed by our human caterpillars or our human butterflies?
In the warm evening sun. I kick a Coke can in the air and it goes whizzing, spitting out sand into a spiral. A dozen engines above growl like injured dogs. Jane, with her bare feet now on the dashboard and her book to her nose looks at me. She looks hungry. “Dinner in Reno?”
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