Could it be that we are a family of monarch butterflies? Are we destined to follow our genetic memory by retracing ancestral paths of migration to protect our delicate wings and ensure our survival?
This might explain why one day in the late summer of 1971, my Uncle Bill Baker traded his slicked-back hair, black trousers, and tucked white shirt, for a pair of cut-offs, a bandana, and a handlebar mustache, before loading his belongings into a pale blue VW bug and driving due west from Rust Belt Buffalo to San Francisco.
Uncle Bill’s grandparents, Ozias and Helen Baker followed a similar migratory path over a half a century earlier, after all. Ozias traded his Niagara Falls insurance office for a sheep ranch in New Mexico, setting out in a covered wagon with his pregnant wife, before eventually settling in Alhambra, California.
Did Uncle Bill simply follow his inherited map? Or were other natural forces blowing him along this path? Maybe a bit of both. Buffalo was in severe economic decline amid the shuttering of manufacturing companies like Bethlehem Steel, one of the world’s largest factories. Fears after the demonstrations of the Long Hot Summer, Kent State, and the 1968 Democratic Convention further contributed to white flight and segregation. These events, combined with family shame over my Aunt Ann’s schizophrenia, my mother’s alcoholism, my grandfather’s attempt to saddle his sons with his failing restaurant business, and Uncle Bill’s divorce, must have made Buffalo feel like the coming cold of permanent winter.
For those who come to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
If you come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there
Monarchs know movement is necessary to seek protection, expand their range, and relieve pressure on their habitat. He was asked to be the best man in his friend Joe's Marin Country wedding. He was also in love with Joe's fiancé, Judy. San Francisco was the destination of possibility. And so it was for Uncle Bill, as he married Judy himself a year later.
Why do butterflies migrate westward toward sheep ranches and palm trees? For Ozias and Helen, there was no genetic memory of westward North American migration. No Bakers had ever traveled over those rugged roads and waterless expanses. But then again, New Mexico wasn’t even yet a State of the Union in 1910, and Alhambra didn’t even have a fire department until 1906. But all patterns must have a beginning. Manifest Destiny policies and the Enlarged Homestead Act may have lured them westward, further pushed by Helen’s undiagnosed mental illness, perhaps boredom working in the insurance business, or maybe even humiliation after his father’s failed attempt to operate a sheep ranch along the Niagara River.
We can never know for sure, left with only remnants of family photographs and folklore anecdotes. And so we assume it was for Ozias and Helen, as they traded starched collars and trimmed hats for suspenders and aprons.
Like countless butterflies who detect the chill of the northerly air and know it is time to leave, so went Ozias and Helen, and so went Uncle Bill. Escaping the lethal freeze of New York State, off they journeyed westward to dip their toes in the salty Pacific, and to awaken new offspring in the increasing warmth of the sun.
All across the nation
Such a strange vibration
People in motion
There's a whole generation
With a new explanation
People in motion
People in motion
Uncle Bill, 1974, Yosemite
Helen and Ozias Baker, 1910, Corona, NM
Lyrics: San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear [Some] Flowers in Your Hair), John Phillips, 1967