This is some of my nonfiction work. Check back for new excerpts.

Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1997

After the hike, we drive to the place that is my primary reason for coming to the open house—Station #7, the dwarfed forest of East and West peaks. Normally East Peak Road is closed to public vehicles; though one can usually walk its three-mile length, driving is a lot easier. The road clings to a ridge that strikes out in a southwesterly direction away from the main northeast-to-southwest chain of Luquillo’s mountains. Built in the days when ecology was less of an issue, East Peak Road came to exist at the expense of priceless acres of dwarf forest. As partial compensation, the drive provides instant and glorious gratification for scenery buffs as well as easy access to two dramatic patches of dwarf forest along East and West peaks. …

Dwarf forest is no place for trees. Wind and rain rule this region, and they impose harsh conditions. The wind is strong and continual, battering against the slopes and sculpting the trees into submission. Rain and fog visit the forest every day, often several times a day, and humidity is excessive. Branches drip water, and the ground is perpetually soggy. Those who have ever over-watered their plants know what should happen, but it doesn’t. The trees live, even flourish, but they aren’t “normal.” The wind gnarls them, the rainfall stunts them. These are nature’s bonsai. Few trees will put up with such abuse. Of the handful of tree species commonly found in El Yunque’s dwarf forest, virtually all are tough, runted relatives of trees found in lower, more hospitable terrain. Most are shrub size, with intermingling root systems and small leaves that reach for air near the canopy.

On the other hand, soggy dwarf forest is an epiphyte’s dream. One small patch of dwarf forest can host thousands of specimens and hundreds of species of epiphytes. Epiphytes are also known as air plants; they are plants which grow on other plants or objects, depending on them for mechanical support. Any number of plants, from algae to ferns to orchids, are epiphytic in the dwarf forest, and they cling to just about anything. Epiphytes revel in moisture; many of them literally soak it up and can be wrung like sponges or tipped like tiny buckets.

When the fog moves in—first as thin wisps, then as a pearly white gauze that erases all but the nearest vegetation—the forest is transformed into an eerie other-worldliness, the closest the natural world comes to those enchanted forests of fairy tales. Sit alone in this fog-draped kingdom for a while, and the trees cease to be trees, becoming instead misshapen dwarfs. Tree ferns turn into parasols, the sort that shaded Egyptian queens. Spanish mosses are now cloaks, bromeliads are ornate rings. Sit alone too long and the dwarfs begin to laugh and dance, flicking their cloaks, tipping their parasols, showing off their rings. They laugh and dance until the sun withers the fog. But beware: it is said—by an old stooped man, I imagine, who slips out of the fog, touching you with his skinny hand and fixing you with his glittering eye—that those who see the dwarfs dance never return to the world below.