Back to Puerto Rico

My first novel (The Irony of Tree Ferns, as yet unpublished) starts off in a rain forest on the island of Puerto Rico in the year 1942. A teenage boy discovers the body of an American woman in a remote section of the forest. Who was she, and why was she there?

El Yunque National Forest

When I began that novel, in the 1990s, two possibly clichéd guidelines came to mind – write what you like to read and write what you know. I liked books wrapped around a mystery. And I knew Puerto Rico, having lived there for many years, and particularly knew its famous El Yunque National Forest, having written a nonfiction book about the place (Where Dwarfs Reign: A Tropical Rain Forest in Puerto Rico).

Five years ago, my husband and I left Puerto Rico and moved to the city of Spokane in the state of Washington to be closer to his aging father. For a couple of years, it seemed important to stay in Spokane year-round, to adjust to those four distinct seasons, even the cold winters. Yet after all that time in the tropics, when a winter day shines bright under a blue sky, it’s still difficult for me to understand why the sun is so ineffective in raising the temperatures.

El Escambron Beach, San Juan

Then Hurricane Maria hit, and Puerto Rico plunged into more than a year of infrastructure nightmares and uphill recovery efforts. Even when the island returned to a sort of normalcy, I hesitated. It seemed strange going back as a visitor – without a home, without a car, without a schedule of things to do on the island. The first trip back would be the hardest. Armed with that awareness, I nudged myself to make plane reservations to Puerto Rico for the last two weeks of March.

So here I am. The place where, during World War II, the teenage boy, Eduardo, discovered the body of the American woman and took often perilous trips from his home near the forest to Old San Juan, to the mountains, even to Mona Island, obsessed with solving the mystery surrounding her death. Where, decades later, an American woman came to the island to teach and found out about a long-buried family scandal connected to that very woman. The place where I spent much of my adult life.

Heliconia

For several blogs I’ll chronicle my current trip to Puerto Rico. Then I’ll go back and forth, from present to past, alternating the worlds of the Inland Northwest and Puerto Rico in the same way they alternate in my own mind.