In the literary and cultural landscape of contemporary American prose, Luis Ortiz’s short story The Arborist, featured prominently in The Missouri Review’s online-only biweekly series BLAST, emerges as a profound meditation on memory, alienation, and ecological reverence. Illustrated by the evocative late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Polish artist Leon Wyczółkowski (Study of a tree), the narrative explores the worldview of a peculiar, observant young man whose profound connection to trees contrasts sharply with the utilitarian vandalism of the fictional town of Greenwood.
At its core, The Arborist transcends a simple coming-of-age narrative, functioning instead as an acute sociological and psychological critique of how human environments mirror human cruelty. The protagonist—uprooted from an urban high-rise dense with foliage and thrust into a small town hostile to its natural heritage—finds solace not in traditional adolescent milestones, but in botanical taxonomy, a thirty-inch glass winter tree, and a tentative, shared secret with a kindred spirit named Vera.
This review and literary analysis unpacks the thematic architecture of Ortiz’s work, tracing its narrative chronology, examining the underlying botanical and cultural metrics that inform its world, contextualizing the author’s remarkable biographical trajectory, and evaluating the enduring resonance of prose that refuses to be confined between the covers of a traditional print journal.
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Detailed Chronology: From the Urban Canopy to the Concrete Void of Greenwood
The narrative trajectory of The Arborist is mapped against a profound geographic and emotional displacement. The unnamed narrator, the son of a barber whose own nostalgic yearnings for a Puerto Rican childhood clash with reality, is pulled from a vibrant city neighborhood by his father. Seeking a "more serene way of life," the father relocates the family to Greenwood—a town the narrator mentally renames "Deadwood" due to its aggressive, systemic hostility toward flora.
The Systematic Eradication of Nature
Greenwood’s antipathy toward trees is introduced not as passive neglect, but as active, commercialized destruction:
- The Bank Locust: One month following the family’s arrival, a majestic forty-foot locust tree in front of the local bank is felled merely to optimize the viewing angles of a newly installed commercial sign.
- The Market Street Oak: Shortly thereafter, a centenarian oak tree is pulverized into wood chips to facilitate the expansion of a Wawa convenience store parking lot.
- Urban Trauma: Daily indignities compound these structural losses, such as a drunk driver obliterating Mr. Moto’s delicate Japanese maple, and the desolate expanse of forty acres of cleared woodland standing like a post-battle wasteland just a mile outside town limits.
The Sanctuary of the Antique Emporium
Against this backdrop of ecological devastation, the narrator seeks refuge in local commerce of a different kind. While hunting for manga in a town antique store run by two sisters who evoke the year 1551, he discovers a thirty-inch, winter-bare glass tree. In a transaction that highlights his outsider status and singular resourcefulness, he barters for the nine-dollar-and-twenty-two-cent artifact by emptying a heavy jug of loose change onto the counter. Transported home with elaborate layers of bubble wrap and wool blankets inside a borrowed gardening wagon, the glass tree is established as a domestic altar. The following morning, sepia-toned sunlight filters through its translucent branches, casting grasping, luminous fingers across his sparse, book-laden bedroom—an intimate rebirth of the natural world indoors.
The Awakening of Shared Mysteries
The narrative pivots when the narrator’s preternatural botanical knowledge—once displayed through obsessive leaf-collecting and Linnaean categorizations—finds a human counterpart. During a classroom demonstration led by Mrs. Julian, where he effortlessly sketches maple, oak, elm, sycamore, and even the primordial Wattieza tree on the blackboard, he catches the attention of Vera.
Vera introduces an element of the supernatural into the botanical landscape, confiding that she witnesses the pale, fog-like apparition of a "ghost tree" rising from an old maple stump in her backyard during the dead of night. Bound by mutual alienation and a shared suspicion of adult rationalizations, the two adolescents orchestrate a clandestine 1:00 a.m. vigil in Vera’s backyard.
Though initially met with quiet skepticism, the nocturnal stakeout culminates in a transient, shared epiphany: peering past the kitchen window into the gloom, both adolescents momentarily perceive a shimmering, neon-like phantom of a tree—a luminous manifestation bridging memory, myth, and nature. Fifteen years later, though the narrator has long since departed Greenwood to study botany at Cornell and Vera has pursued psychology at Auburn, the imprint of that single night remains indelible.
Supporting Context & Metrics: Botany, Mythology, and the Human Psyche
Luis Ortiz embeds deep ecological realities and folkloric traditions into the text, elevating The Arborist from a localized vignette to a universal commentary on deep time and human cruelty.
Botanical Realism and Deep Time
The narrator’s reverence for trees is rooted in geological and biological truth rather than idle sentimentality. As the text observes, trees existed approximately one hundred million years before the advent of dinosaurs. For ninety percent of Earth’s history, terrestrial plants did not exceed a height of a few feet, leaving insects and early organisms entirely devoid of shade until the first true trees surged toward the sun. Furthermore, trees do not die of old age; their mortality is exclusively the result of disease, drought, structural damage, or human intervention. In a frictionless universe, they would be biologically immortal.
Cultural Mythology: La Madremonte
A critical thematic bridge in the story is the invocation of La Madremonte—the mythic mother of the forest from Colombian folklore. Recounted through the memories of the narrator’s mother, who claimed to have witnessed the phosphorescent, arborescent leviathan in the Colombian jungle, this figure serves as a personification of nature’s untamed consciousness. While the narrator’s father dismisses the vision as an optical illusion caused by moonlight and shadow—encapsulating the pragmatic adult impulse to sanitize the inexplicable with the phrase "Nadie lo sabe" (Nobody knows)—the mother’s enduring bond with "old magic" shapes the narrator’s perception that trees are sentient participants in human history.
Literary Analysis & Critical Reception
Published within The Missouri Review’s BLAST series—a digital platform dedicated to showcasing prose too vibrant, urgent, and stylistically distinct to be constrained by traditional print formatting—The Arborist has drawn critical praise for its tonal precision and psychological depth.
The Prose of Exile and Observation
Writing in his second language, Luis Ortiz deploys a prose style marked by striking economy and sensory acuity. The narrative voice is simultaneously detached and fiercely protective. The narrator’s observations are diagnostic: he catalogs human behavior with the same rigorous taxonomy he applies to sugar maple leaves and primordial Wattieza fronds.
Critics have noted that the motif of the tree functions as an extended metaphor for the narrator himself. Like the urban elms stripped of branches and weighed down by utility wires, or the sneaker-laden ash tree in his former neighborhood, the protagonist feels systematically trimmed, pruned, and misunderstood by a society that values convenience over endurance. Epithets hurled at him by peers and authority figures—obstinate, set in ways, weirdo—mirror the town’s casual violence toward the natural environment.
The Architecture of BLAST
The decision by The Missouri Review to house The Arborist within BLAST underscores the publication’s commitment to avant-garde, boundary-pushing prose. By pairing Ortiz’s text with Leon Wyczółkowski’s impressionistic 19th-century study of a tree, the digital feature creates an intertextual dialogue between visual art and modern narrative, emphasizing that the reverence for arboreal life spans generations and mediums.
Authorial Background: The Renaissance Trajectory of Luis Ortiz
The thematic richness of The Arborist is informed by the extraordinary, multidisciplinary life of its creator. Luis Ortiz’s professional biography reads as a compendium of modern American vocations. Over the course of his career, Ortiz has worked as:
- An advertising professional
- A swimming coach
- An illustrator and art director
- A lifeguard and typesetter
- A teacher and book editor
- A 911 operator
- An author
Educated at St. John’s University, The New School, and the Parsons School of Design, Ortiz’s artistic sensibilities were forged early. As a teenager in New York, he published a Puerto Rican poetry zine titled X-ray Your Zebra (XYZ) utilizing a tabletop postcard letterpress—an early testament to his dedication to independent publishing and tactile, physical mediums (much like his protagonist’s collection of glass and paper trees).
Ortiz’s eclectic career infuses his writing with an authentic observational lens; whether he is describing the bone-dry counting mechanics of aging antique dealers or the precise architecture of schoolroom chalk sketches, his prose reflects the disciplined eye of an illustrator coupled with the urgency of a first responder. His recent contributions to publications such as LatineLit and Nonstop Press further solidify his standing as a vital voice in contemporary multicultural and ecological fiction.
Future Outlook: The Enduring Legacy of The Arborist
As contemporary literature increasingly grapples with eco-anxiety, rapid urbanization, and the psychological costs of displacement, works like Luis Ortiz’s The Arborist offer a vital literary compass. The story reminds readers that the struggle between utilitarian development and ecological preservation is mirrored within the intimate topography of the human heart.
The legacy of The Arborist within the digital archives of The Missouri Review ensures that future generations of readers will continue to encounter its quiet, unyielding truths. Whether through the sepia glow of a thirty-inch glass winter tree on a lonely bedroom desk or the ephemeral phantom of a backyard maple stump, Ortiz challenges us to look closer at the world around us—to recognize that trees are not merely background scenery, but the living bones of the world, silently bearing witness to everything we build, and everything we destroy.
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