Tiger Lily
If you climb Marys Peak to the highest point in Oregon’s coastal mountain range, you might see Lilium columbianum. Western tiger lilies. Before you see them—electric orange blooms dangling like lanterns above meadow grass—you must hike switchbacks between thick Douglas fir, pale mint beards of lichen trailing from their branches. The forest ejects you into a clearing, and you’ll ascend the grassy ridge to the top. From 4,000 feet above sea level, you’ll look down to the eastern patchwork quilt farms of the valley. Small wisps of the city’s steam and smoke trail up to meet the horizon.
I first learned to look, to raise my eyes from the dusty trail, from my botanist mother. We would linger in the meadow on annual visits to the peak, hoping to catch a glimpse of speckled orange before we descended. When we didn’t see it, we looked for some other kind of brightness to carry away with us. I carry this: on a clear day, before the summer wildfires start, I can see sixty miles to the Pacific Ocean. A hint of indigo beyond a sea of firs, broken only by the jagged scars of clear cuts.
***
The first scar we daughters give our mothers happens the moment we are born. We change them permanently as we leave their bodies and learn to inhabit our own. Learn to breathe, learn to scream. I was born on my mother’s birthday during a June thunderstorm. She refused an epidural. Between comfort and fight, she would always choose fight. My mother would fight for her honor, for the validity of a ten percent-off coupon at Fred Meyer, for a stand of old growth trees. Nothing in the world could be fiercer than this small, determined woman. That day she fought her way to the title of motherhood, tuning into the piercing song of an infant.
Fight is a gene passed through channels we cannot see. On Marys Peak, ever-looming above our town, the tiger lilies erupted from an underground network of bulbs. Those who fought freezing temperatures and crushing snowbanks to bloom again, rising from between thick grasses and along roadside ditches glistening with snowmelt.
***
At five years old, with a newborn sister, I learned the word lymphoma. My mother having lymphoma meant that all her thick, waist-length hair came out in chunks until finally my dad shaved the rest of it onto the kitchen floor. It meant we would take family pictures in the spring, against the backdrop of bearded iris, my mother and infant sister’s bald heads pale against the deep purple.
We took many hikes, made escapes to wild places. This is how we reminded ourselves of beauty.
I soon learned remission. It meant a “clean scan.” It meant my mother ripping my father’s old ratty t-shirt in half, right off his back, in a fit of celebration.
I learned remission should be regarded as temporary. My mother had looked at her sleeping newborn who she would no longer be able to breastfeed because of chemo drugs, looked at her five-year-old bearing her own bright blue-grey eyes and woven gold hair, looked at the doctor who told her she had just months to live, and said bullshit. She looked winter right in the face and said I’ll be back for another blooming season.
***
It might be two weeks into July, or the very last day of June. You know they’re coming, but when? If you’re not so early that scraps of snow still cling to the meadow, but not too late, you’ll catch the freckled orange petals unfurling from green buds, curled away from their six long stamen. They flicker in the wind on mountainsides from British Columbia to northern California, not venturing farther east than Montana.
At fourteen, I ventured to the end of my growing range and raged with the weight of my failures. Not fast enough in sports, not smart enough at math, seeing that boy I wasn’t supposed to be seeing. My fighting mother had high expectations. This tiger lily wait-and-see was a game my mother and I played. She tried to shield me from being burnt too early, but I wanted to grow. Tired of living in her shadow, I pushed up past her in search of sunlight.
***
If you hike with my mother, the botanist, the mycologist, the walking encyclopedia of all things that come from dirt, you will walk carefully, stop often, and learn involuntarily.
This is wild ginger. Here, take a leaf. Roll it between your fingers. Doesn’t that smell wonderful? Buttercup, Ranunculus, tells you if you like butter. If you hold it underneath your chin and it reflects gold on your skin, you love it. What is the difference between Cantharellus cibarius, golden chanterelle, and Gomphus floccosus, woolly chanterelle? For starters, the latter could kill you. If you turn them over, the gills look different. And the coloring. You have to be careful of these imposters. If you go on enough hikes with my mother, you’ll be learning your own survival.
Even when I go on hikes without her, I can hear her guide voice. It tells me to pay attention to the shaded carpets of oxalis, to the witch’s butter fungi, sliming the edges of fallen logs. I like to imagine us always like this—uncomplicated—walking sun-dappled trails, kneeling next to plants, touching and smelling them, balancing their long Latin names on our tongues. But so often we let disagreements and harsh words creep in and dominate like blackberry tendrils or scotch broom to a pristine hillside. So often we raged through a growing season, accidentally sowing invasive seeds.
***
I could not unsee the stitches on her calf muscle, cutting a sharp Frankenstein line through her lean, toned leg. I should have been there. I should have driven her home from the surgery. I was seventeen, old enough to know better, as my mother fought a second battle with cancer. And I was seventeen, young enough to crave a rare day at the mall to escape the weight of her expectations. I was tired of fighting. I didn’t think she needed me when she could fight so well on her own.
She drove herself home that day I wasn’t there, full of stitches and grit. My mother, who always asks the dentist to hold the Novocain. Who doesn’t believe in microwaves, pesticides, or sleeping pills. She believes in grit. A kind of grit owned by the tiger lilies, whose lives are held in fragile balance, at the mercy of forces both human and non-human.
***
Skin and muscle regrew. Seasons changed. My mother survived again and again. At twenty-three I needed a place to live for a while and I returned to her. In her backyard, at the base of a Douglas fir, a single lily forced its way up through the soil. We knew what it was before it even bloomed. We wondered at how it appeared there. These were not valley natives; they hardly strayed into low elevations on their own. It was out of place among the invasive geranium and ivy, gleaming like topaz in a sea of muted pebbles.
For a summer it reminded us to be good to each other, as we worked together, moving about the forest pulling weeds. As long as it bloomed. Even after it died.
Tiger Lilies grow singularly, warriors with spear-shaped leaves. They spread out from each other, survivalists and beauties. Fragile but resilient. We daughters are a flash of orange, setting meadows ablaze, never as far from our mothers as we might think. When it’s our season, you might see us push up through the soil. You might see us reaching.
Katie Higinbotham is an Oregon grown writer and teacher. She earned her MFA from Western Washington University, where she was awarded the Outstanding Graduate Writer Award for her multi-genre work in nonfiction and poetry. Read more.