See the mats of clematis running across the trees like mangled telephone wires; notice the dry dirt beneath the ivy, how gray it looks, how it is sickly compared to the rich, dark mountain soil that is gossamered with those little flecks from the edges of fir cones, and peppered with roots of things, pipsissewa and wintergreen and strange little queen’s cup, which grows low and limp like thick pieces of grass.

I still remember the first time I saw it, queen’s cup, on a backpacking trip just before my first year of college, along the edge of Clear Lake in the Cascades near Eugene, the air filled strongly with wildfire smoke, but not enough to block out the sky, just enough to make it paler than usual; how we walked along the water, passing by deep trenches where submerged tree stumps sat black and ghostly, carpeted with some kind of aquatic slime.

And I remember crouching down to hold the queen’s cup between my thumb and forefinger, my bare knee right in the dirt, and everyone else walked past me, kept right on going, and I stayed with the queen’s cup for a moment, memorized it, vowed to look it up in my plant book later, and then I caught up to the group, running, panting, the smoke making the sun feel both heavy and thinned out, magnified and also swept away from us, and there was that buzzing silence you get in the mountains, especially near water, in those low places where the Douglas firs ripple in the distance, and the water throws up its coldness at you, rattling through the dry leaves of the manzanita, and I think of it still, how I have seen it since, all of it, at other times and places, but never quite so vividly.