Preserve
By: E.E. Murray

I work on New Karner Road, by the Pine Bush Preserve. Nabokov was here once, and named the Karner Blue Butterfly after the place. And what a perfect Nabokovian name for them, too. Kar-nar, car-near. Karner was once called Center Station, after the rail stop. Center. Cen-ter, Kar-ner, renamed after George Karner.

Nabokov described Karner Blue butterflies in Pnin before he named and claimed them. And isn’t it just like him, that pioneer of the paranoid style, to play a discovery close to the chest?

You name a place before you name what lives there. You build the place, buy the place, make the place sellable and sell it, name it after the man who bought it, all before naming what lives there. You write about it, you sell a book with the butterflies in it before naming them. Nabokarner Road.

The Karner Blue Butterfly’s larvae only eat one flower called the Old Maid, or the Old Maid’s Bonnets, a lupine flower sometimes also called Quaker’s Bonnets. Quaker, Karner, Center.

And lupine means wolfish. So you have wolf-flowers, or wolves-in-bonnets, like the end of a fairy story, like little-blue-riding-hood. Where the little girl walks down the tracks through the Pine Bush Preserve to her grandmother’s law firm only to find the old maid has been replaced by a coyote in a flower crown—“My, what big emissions you have!”

In Pnin—which doesn’t sound like “pine,” it just looks like it—the title character is consistently admonished for his poor English; a sign that also gives away the Wolf—“My, what buck teeth you have!” Pnin buys a copy of Son of the Wolf by Jack London, about a boy whose father is revealed to be a wolf in a hat. Or a bonnet—“My, what long fur you have!”

Jack London did 30 days for vagrancy at the Erie County Penitentiary. The Center Railroad that became Karner was built to avoid the Erie Canal—and you had to ride it to get to Buffalo, where the Penitentiary was. And maybe the vagrant Jack rode through Karner, hopped the trains as part of Cox’s Army. And maybe he saw the Wolf-in-the-Bonnet flowers and the nameless butterflies, and wrote about a wolf in a bonnet not knowing what he’d seen. Then Nabokov, an expert lepidopterist, took the wolf and the butterfly and put them in the book that looks like “pine” but sounds like “pain” and in which the pines appear.

Lupine, lou-pine. And why is the flower called lupine anyway? It meant wolf before it meant flower. Maybe they thought the wolves ate the flower, or the flowers ate the soil—and doesn’t “lupine” sound like a “lepidopterist”? Or rather like a scholar of leopards than of butterflies? A scholar of wolves is not called a lupinologist, or a lupinist, or a flower. She’s just a wolf biologist.