Executive Overview
In contemporary literary nonfiction and short fiction, few narratives interrogate the friction between industrial expansion and botanical permanence with the quiet ferocity of Luis Ortiz’s short story, "The Arborist," featured in The Missouri Review’s exclusive online series, BLAST. Set against the stark, asphalt-driven backdrop of Greenwood—a fictionalized American small town hostile to the vertical lifelines of its ecosystem—the story traces the inner monologue of an unnamed, peculiar young protagonist whose reverence for trees serves as both a psychological anchor and a mechanism of profound alienation.
Ortiz, a polymath whose varied background spans advertising, swimming instruction, emergency dispatching, and book editing, constructs a world where the felling of a canopy is treated not merely as municipal clearing, but as an erasure of cultural and biological history. Through the eyes of a narrator uprooted from a densely arboreal city high-rise to a sterile, utility-pole-choked municipality, "The Arborist" examines how human displacement mirrors ecological fragmentation. This piece provides a comprehensive examination of Ortiz’s narrative, analyzing its thematic architecture, its exploration of intergenerational memory, and its broader commentary on humanity’s fraught relationship with the natural world.
Detailed Chronology: From Urban Canopy to the Concrete Void of Greenwood
The narrative arc of "The Arborist" unfolds across a series of stark geographical and psychological transitions, mapping the narrator’s alienation from the moment of his family’s relocation to the lingering echoes of his adulthood.
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Phase One: The Relocation and the Municipal War on Trees
The story begins with a violent introduction to Greenwood, a town characterized by its systemic hostility toward mature flora. Seeking a romanticized, serene lifestyle reminiscent of his childhood on a farm near Ponce, Puerto Rico, the narrator’s father uproots the family from a vibrant City high-rise neighborhood rich in foliage.
Greenwood, by contrast, operates on a logic of ruthless efficiency and commercial visibility. Within a single month of the family’s arrival, a forty-foot locust tree fronting a local bank is eradicated to maximize sightlines for a new sign. Soon after, a century-old oak on Market Street is reduced to wood chips to accommodate a convenience store’s parking lot expansion. When a drunk driver obliterates Mr. Moto’s Japanese maple, the act is symptomatic of a broader civic indifference. To the narrator, Greenwood is aptly renamed "Deadwood"—a wasteland devoid of structural grace where forty acres of nearby woodland sit cleared, abandoned, and overrun by scrub following a failed auction.
Phase Two: The Glass Tree and the Antique Emporium
Seeking solace from the sterile environment of his new home, the narrator navigates Greenwood’s commercial fringe and enters an antique store run by two sisters who evoke a medieval aesthetic. Here, he discovers a thirty-inch, winter-barren glass tree crafted from nutty-brown glass.
Displaying a characteristic tenacity, the narrator negotiates the ten-dollar price down to nine dollars and twenty-two cents by emptying his personal coin jug onto the counter. Meticulously wrapping the fragile artifact in layers of bubble wrap and wool blankets—resembling a sleeping bag containing a country ham—he transports it home in his mother’s gardening wagon. Placed upon his bedroom desk, the glass tree captures the sepia sunlight of dawn, its translucent branches casting grasping shadows across a sparse room dominated by books and bare floors.
Phase Three: The Classroom Blackboard and the Encounter with Vera
The narrative shifts into the social ecology of the local school system, where the protagonist’s encyclopedic knowledge of botany isolates him from his peers. Challenged by his teacher, Mrs. Julian, to depict various tree leaves on the chalkboard, the narrator renders precise anatomical sketches of maple, oak, elm, sycamore, an avant-garde barking dog reminiscent of Keith Haring, and finally a prehistoric Wattieza—the earliest known tree on Earth.
This botanical performance catches the attention of Vera, a tall, observant classmate whose pigtails evoke ram horns. Sharing a mutual displacement—having moved to Greenwood following her grandfather’s death—Vera approaches the narrator with a haunting inquiry: "Do dead trees have ghosts?"
Phase Four: The Midnight Vigil and the Epiphany of the Stump
Vera leads the narrator to her backyard to show him an unremarkable, eighteen-inch maple stump left behind years prior. She confesses that a pale, fog-like apparition of the tree rises from the timber during the deep hours of the night.
Bonded by their shared status as outsiders who reject the superficial socialization of their peers, the two teenagers coordinate a midnight vigil. Slipping out past abandoned, derelict houses that local children whisper are haunted, the narrator joins Vera in her shadowy backyard. When the stump remains dormant in the open air, they retreat to the kitchen window, watching through the glass.
As the boundary between rational skepticism and supernatural possibility dissolves, both teenagers experience a fleeting, transcendent vision: a flickering, neon-bright phantom of the missing tree glowing against the dark. It is a moment of shared vindication that defies rational explanation, anchoring their fragile friendship in an unspoken pact of mutual understanding.
Supporting Context & Metrics: The Biological and Cultural Weight of Trees
To fully appreciate Ortiz’s literary framework, one must examine the empirical and ecological realities that underpin the narrator’s worldview. The text intersperses narrative progression with stark botanical facts that elevate the story from a domestic coming-of-age vignette to an ecological meditation.
- Evolutionary Primacy: As the narrator notes, trees existed approximately one hundred million years before the appearance of dinosaurs. For roughly ninety percent of Earth’s geological history, terrestrial plants did not exceed a height of a few feet, meaning the evolution of tall arboreal structures fundamentally altered planetary shade, moisture retention, and microclimates.
- Mortality and Immortality: Unlike mammalian life, many tree species do not succumb to biological senescence (aging). In an idealized ecosystem free of anthropogenic intervention, disease, drought, or mechanical damage, trees possess the physiological potential for indefinite cellular regeneration. Their deaths are almost universally environmental or violent.
- Cultural Mythologies: The text draws heavily on folkloric representations of the forest, specifically through the mother’s accounts of La Madremonte—the mythic mother of the Colombian jungle who manifests as a phosphorescent, arborescent cloud of mist. This mythological framework contrasts sharply with the father’s rationalist reductionism, symbolizing the ideological schism between an intuitive, ecological consciousness and an analytical, utilitarian worldview.
| Botanical / Ecological Theme | Narrative Manifestation | Empirical Significance |
|---|---|---|
| Urban Canopy Destruction | The felling of the Market Street oak for a parking lot. | Highlights the prioritization of commercial infrastructure over urban heat-island mitigation and psychological well-being. |
| Deep Time & Longevity | The reference to Wattieza and prehistoric plant evolution. | Contextualizes human habitation as a microscopic blip within a planetary chronology defined by botanical endurance. |
| Intergenerational Trauma | The father’s homesickness for Puerto Rico vs. the narrator’s botanical precision. | Illustrates how displacement manifests differently across generations, split between nostalgic longing and hyper-fixation on localized ecosystems. |
Official Statements & Critical Perspectives
While "The Arborist" is a work of fiction, its publication in The Missouri Review’s BLAST series places it within a specific critical discourse concerning contemporary prose styles, immigrant dislocation, and eco-fiction.
Literary critics evaluating Ortiz’s bilingual background and his trajectory through institutions such as St. John’s University, The New School, and Parsons School of Design note that his writing operates with a visual artist’s precision. Ortiz’s history as an illustrator and art director directly informs the hyper-visual prose of "The Arborist," where light filtering through a glass tree is rendered with anatomical exactness:
"The translucent glass branches shaped the dawn sunbeams into fingers that reached out and grasped everything in my small rectangular room."
Furthermore, commentary surrounding the story’s publication emphasizes the dexterity with which Ortiz writes in English as a second language—a linguistic friction that mirrors the protagonist’s navigation of an alien cultural landscape. The narrator’s hyper-awareness of vernacular and his deliberate emotional detachment function as a literary defense mechanism against the unsympathetic civic architecture of Greenwood.
Future Outlook: The Legacy of Greenwood and the Persistence of Memory
The narrative concludes with a profound temporal leap. Fifteen years after leaving Greenwood, the narrator reflects on the trajectory of his life and the lives of those he left behind. Having pursued formal botanical studies at Cornell University—while Vera pursued psychology at Auburn—the protagonist’s childhood obsession evolved into a lifelong vocation.
The physical geography of Greenwood has continued its inexorable march toward modernization, yet the psychic imprint of the "ghost tree" remains indelible. The narrator’s frequent visits to his mother in Colombia, contrasted with his visits to his shrunken, raddled father in Greenwood, underscore the permanent fracture caused by displacement.
Ultimately, "The Arborist" challenges readers to reconsider their own immediate environments. In an era marked by rapid urban expansion, climate anxiety, and the systematic commodification of natural spaces, Ortiz’s work stands as a poignant reminder that trees are not merely static decorations within a municipal landscape, but the living bones of the world—silent witnesses to human folly, carrying the ghosts of our collective history within their rings.
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