“Hey love, you’ve been saying you miss traveling,” ventured my husband one evening. “Looks like tickets to Belize are pretty cheap next month.”
“Let’s go!” I responded. “Where’s Belize?”
Not long afterward my family and I arrived at the Central American nation’s only international airport knowing little more than: 1) it is slightly smaller than Massachusetts; 2) the official language is English; and 3) it has both Maya ruins and tropical rainforests.
We told ourselves that the thrill of traveling was in the adventure of discovery. Happily, Belize did not disappoint. For three days we were the only visitors lodging in a rainforest conservation area that sometimes doubles as a base camp for archeologists studying Maya ruins. We giddily climbed unexcavated ruins and then marveled at the rainforest that had reclaimed the land around it. The forest pulsed with life. Deafening cicadas, fork-tailed hummingbirds, leaf-cutter ants, mango-stealing foxes, and red-eyed tree frogs were just a few of the many animals we encountered.
The forest was magical, but also terrifyingly fragile. Surrounded on all sides by treeless farmland, it felt like a green jewel in a sea of sand. I worried that a direct hit from a hurricane or a wildfire would wipe it away.
In the five years since that Belizean adventure, news of record-breaking environmental disasters have become a weekly and sometimes daily occurrence. Lately, it’s hard not to feel like the entire planet is a desert, strewn with a few green trinkets, as fragile as glass.
Los Angeles Times journalist Diana Marcum is well-acquainted with this feeling. In 2015 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on the experience of agricultural workers during drought in California’s Central Valley. She describes being struck with “eco-anxiety” as if “the environmental threat had seeped into my very cells over the years of drought and fires.”
Rather than give into despair, however, Marcum and her partner, Jack Moody, moved to a rainforest in Belize to spend a year learning and writing about one of the world’s first live butterfly farms, The Fallen Stones.
When asked why, she says her first thought was, “I liked stories about miracles.”
Marcum’s evocative descriptions of the butterflies and the forest community surrounding the farm transported me back to my brief time in Belize. But the stories that seemed at least as compellingly miraculous were the stories of the people who love the butterflies. This is Marcum’s specialty. In an interview with Zócalo Public Square, Marcum said, “I want to introduce people to each other. As a writer, that’s my main thing.”
Marcum introduces us to the people of Fallen Stones by telling another miraculous tale, the story of how Clive, whose passion for beautiful, fragile insects lead to the creation of the farm and a global live butterfly industry that incentivizes conservation rather than destruction of rainforest.
Into this story, Marcum warmly weaves the story of the Maya men whose devotion to the Fallen Stones’ butterflies keeps the farm afloat in the face of hurricanes, fire, and even a global pandemic. They include Sebastian, the farm’s serious but kind-hearted manager, ebullient poet-philosopher-groundskeeper, Profilio, and butterfly caretaker and romantic family man, Sammy.
Marcum’s story, though, is the thread that holds the book together. She opens up her life and reveals the emotional legacy of her adolescence and the challenges of a new relationship with Moody when they are both middle aged. But these things are all leavened with self-deprecating and humorous descriptions of the joys and trials she and Moody experience living and working on a butterfly farm in Belizean rainforest.
Like the first time Marcum opened the door to the house they would be staying in and just managed to stifle a scream when a bat swooped out. According to Marcum, these bats “were not cute. They had rodent ears, mini pig snouts, and vampire wings. They were furry, not like a dog but like mold on peaches.” Or when her hopes for a romantic birthday breakfast were dashed by Moody’s offering of a plain bowl of oatmeal, without even the benefit of a heart made from raisins. She mourns, “this was my life. No romantic highs. No raisin hearts. Just a bowl of nourishing gruel served from a pot. This is what happens when you get old.”
The many miraculous stories, all told with Marcum’s compelling voice, creates what Publisher’s Weekly calls, “A deeply human story, and one filled with plenty of hope.”
I have to agree. “Fallen Stones” reminds us that despite the challenges our world faces, we can still take joy from everyday miracles - like butterflies. By telling us about the real people who are dedicated to keeping these miracles alive, the book provides us with inspiration and a template for us to follow. It gives hope that working together, we can make miracles happen too.
At-a-Glance
Title: The Fallen Stones: Chasing Butterflies, Discovering Mayan Secrets, and Looking for Hope Along the Way
Author: Diana Marcum
Summary: A journalist whose work focuses on environmental crises spends a year living and working on a tropical butterfly farm. There the miraculous animals and people give her hope.
Publisher: Little A
Pages: 222
Price: $24.95
Release Date: March 1, 2022
