Avalanche Lilies
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The flowers bending along the ridgeline are called “avalanche lilies.” Their name embodies both the harshness and tenderness that can exist on a mountainside.
Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park is well-named for its wind speed and variability. Mountains rise in every visible direction so fog can appear and dissipate in the time it takes to ask a question of the Park Ranger standing close by.
Behind his easy smile and fancy hat the fog rolls in to cover the trees that were sunlit and sparkling moments ago. It doesn’t phase him or many of the people around us. My weather-danger sense is triggered even though the car is only a few hundred feet away, I have a jacket tied around my waist, and a warmer than necessary hat covers my head.
But years of being taught not to be above treeline after noon make me sensitive to minute-by-minute shifts up here. I have the backstop of buildings and running water and civilization at the moment but that’s usually not the case when I’m in places like this. More often I’m on my own two feet with a handful of other people possessing only what’s in our backpacks.
My boys wander away on the path and I walk after them, wanting to make sure that they don’t get lost in the fog. Wouldn’t that be ironic, after all the time I prepared for something to go awry in the backcountry to have it happen on a paved trail. My younger son runs and bounces and leaps off all available surfaces including the stone wall that’s meant to keep us off the meadows. My older one moves a little slower and it’s he who notices the lilies first.
Here’s a bunch of them, he says, and he’s right. There are white flowers with yellow centers clumped around the trees and they look like but not identical to the kinds of stems placed carefully in a cut crystal vase. Against all the greenery the white stands out but then they’re muted by the rolling fog.
The scientist in me wonders about their naming, the avalanche lilies. I think back to everything I’ve learned about forest succession after a fire, and what plants come back first. Maybe that’s why, because after a season with lots of avalanches those flowers colonize the runout. The philosopher in me wonders why a flower has more meaning when we know its name. As if identification confers value. As if possession is knowing.
My boy keeps walking, and I bend down to touch the thin petals he just left. They are as gauzy as the veils of fog that brush across the trees only to swirl into nothing. They are as ethereal because I know just how hard life can be up this high on a mountain. For that matter, how hard life can be anywhere. They were born from the destruction of a falling wall of snow and they now live wherever their roots reached deep.
They are small and quiet but they bend with the wind and the fog. That, above all, is their strength.
Inspired by events on Hurricane Ridge, Olympic National Park
on the land of the Jamestown S'Klallam, Lower Elwha Klallam, Makah, Port Gamble S'Klallam, Quileute, Quinault and Skokomish (source).