The arrival of his wife quickly ends that fantasy, but not Dellarobia’s new desire to branch out on her own and see if she can make a future for herself and her children. Unlike Cub, Ovid earns Dellarobia’s respect, and she develops a crush on him. Despite her limited background, Dellarobia gets a job working for Ovid and finds a sincere passion for studying the butterflies. Dellarobia has always been considered intelligent, but she is aware that her hometown provided a subpar education to her because the emphasis was on becoming a farmer, not on going to college. While doing so, they learn a great deal about their significant socioeconomic differences.
Ovid believes that the butterflies’ arrival presages a disastrous result of global warming.ĭellarobia, Ovid, and Ovid’s assistants begin to work together in Ovid’s makeshift lab, which he parks on the Turnbow property. They usually migrate to Mexico, but severe flooding due to logging destroyed their homes, and for some reason, they came here to Feathertown. One visitor, scientist Ovid Byron, meets Dellarobia and tells her that he needs to study these butterflies. Meanwhile, visitors and tourists from all over the world come to the Turnbow property to have a glimpse of the butterflies, and the family begins charging for tours. The religious Turnbows share this knowledge at their church, and the vision is declared akin to a miracle by the pastor.īear is not convinced that this is God’s work, and because his family desperately needs the money, he pushes on with the logging project. The entire family heads up the trail and is awestruck by the sight of the bright orange and black insects filling their forest and valley. When Dellarobia finds out that her father-in-law, Bear Turnbow, plans to sell the land where the butterflies had roosted to a logging company, she encourages her husband to look the land over first.
Believing this is a sign, Dellarobia decides not to pursue the affair and returns to her home a changed woman. As she grows resentful and bored of her life as a stay-at-home mom and farmer’s wife, she decides on an act of self-destruction, only to be stopped in her tracks by an fantastic sight: thousands upon thousands of monarch butterflies are hanging from the trees at the top of the High Road trail. When she was seventeen and pregnant, her shotgun marriage to Cub Turnbow seemed to cement her future. Desperate to do something to sabotage the marriage she is trapped in, Dellarobia sees adultery as a means by which to express her unhappiness. The novel begins as Dellarobia strides up the family’s mountain path to meet up with a man she plans to sleep with.
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