We drove 850 round-trip miles to see TWO butterflies! We had nothing but gray skies and rain instead of sunshine at our annual WBA conference at Metaline Falls in late June. Not only that: our principal guest speaker got pneumonia and couldn’t come to enlighten us.

But were we disheartened, blue, out-of-sorts? No! Did we rebel and refuse to reelect our President Richard Youel if he couldn’t get us better luck and weather than that? Not at all!

No, our thirty-plus conferees just shrugged, kept smiling, and made the best of it. We simply turned our attention to other insects and to birds and also to scouring cliffsides for fossils. Most of us came away with at least one fossil from upwards of ten million years ago. We got to know each other better (often one of the “uses of adversity.”)

We got to enjoy two rather than just one scintillating, erudite presentations by our favorite lecturer, Jon Pelham. We watched Idie Ulsh’s delightful and always new slide show.

We enjoyed bopping around Metaline Falls and Pend Oreille County (the county name comes from earrings worn by Native American women viewed by early French visitors-we learned that, too!) The region strikingly reminded me of Rip Van Winkle country. As many of you will remember, Rip’s turf was in the Adirondack Mountains of New York state, nearly three thousand miles to the East. But it too is plumb up against the Canadian border.

Oh, yes! About those two butterfly species. They were a greenish blue and a garita skipperling. The skipperling was a new state sighting for me and several other loyal WBAs.

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