The interlocking network of stalks and branches and creepers was skeletal, the fossil yard of an extinct species of fine boned infection creatures. All of these bones, then, seemed to have been stained by sun and earth from an original living white to brown, and not the tough fibrous flower and seed-spilling green they actually once had been. Howard wondered about a man who had never seen summer, a winter man, examining the weeds and making this inference -- that he was looking at an estuary. The man would take that as true and base his ideas of the world on that mistake.

Tinkers