THE OLD LAPOG I KNEW

An endearing image of  rural place that certainly melts the hearts of homesick expats and small town sons and daughters, Photo credit, Internet

        Three years ago, I was asked to attend an office convention in Laoag City in Ilocos Norte. It was a chance to travel north which meant, if you take the bus, passing by Lapog (now San Juan), Ilocos Sur, my home town. 

       I was born in Lapog. I grew up in this town, spent half a life there, and my roots are deep.  The growing up years I spent soaking up the sleepy rural life have instilled my devotion to the place.

         My circumstances are similar to many Lapoguenian expatriates although I am just here in Manila (shame on me). I left for college, stayed in Manila because of work, got married, raised kids and when my mother, a public school teacher, retired and joined us her four children who were then all based in the city, the family house was left to the care of cousins.  

     Then my parents passed away; the family house was vacated; the homecoming got rarer until altogether, they stopped.

It was late in the morning when our bus took off from Manila.  We had taken a  Partas bus – “Wow, road trip” my son and traveling companion, John Henry was saying. To him, it was just that, an exciting road trip. 

    I would only be passing by Lapog, I wouldn't be stepping off my bus. But my homesickness was so intense, my heart ached. I have not gone home for so many years I am ashamed to admit how long. 

As my bus slid down the North Expressway (in my time there was no Partas yet; only Maria De Leon, Philippine Rabbit), I was greeted with the familiar landscapes along the highway – rice fields swaying in the morning breeze, goats and cattle nibbling on weeds and grasses, brooks softly flowing by, mayas flitting against the sunlit sky. The scenes slid along my line of vision like snapshots of a time in the past... yes, in Lapog.

Throwback, 50s and 60s. Photo credit, "Collage Jared 50" - Internet

Suddenly,  images flooded my mind. I saw a dusty old town as it breathed several decades back, a sleepy little town, a bit troubled maybe but nonetheless close to everyone's heart -- Lapog in my memory -- 

       In my mind's eye, the houses and buildings stood exactly as they did then, the images clear as day, along the dirt paths and  asphalt roads of the town-- bamboo huts, wood houses, a few big homes,  a quaint town hall, a lonely stone monument, a mossy old church, a forlorn gas station, a dilapidated school house, a spelling demon/tongue-twister of a health structure called the "...culture center" and a town market that buzzes with activity only on a Tuesday....

        The small town of my childhood had come alive: old places, familiar faces, kids like me then who now inhabit Facebook with children of their own, the older folk of yesterday gone to their Maker -- hometown neighbors, cousins, classmates, friends, teachers, oh, laughing, chatting and exchanging banters on bright mornings and on lazy afternoons, and whispering their fears as nightfall comes along... 

Oops, this is not exactly a panoramic country road, but it does take you to a river below in Lapog. Photo  credit- Angela Lagasca-Villamar, FB friend and neighbor in the town who  now lives in Australia but knew every nook ad corner of riverside as I do.

Take Me Home, Country Road

There is a dusty road that runs from the town market in the north southward to a river where our house stood by the edge of a low cliff. It runs straight in the direction of the town plaza, meandering along several back roads and ending at a sloping path to a river valley. 

            As a native of the town, this was my favorite route.

Along this major town route stood like sturdy senior citizens the old Gabaldon building of the south central school, the old town hall, the old Rizal monument, the old town plaza, the old tennis court and the old church of St. John the Baptist. 

        Oh, this gang of merry old buildings in the town are indeed aging. By a reckoning of more than half a century or 50 years from my time, many are due for retirement or may have retired.  But let's give these  old structures a due place as revered relics of our town history.

       I still remember a lonely monument at the east side of the town square, the monument of our World War II town heroes like Constante Castro who saved a whole town possibly being massacred by the Japanese. Pupils used to loiter there as they chewed Texas bubble gum bought from the store of Nana Tona where the monument stood right in front of the store under a towering acacia tree. 

      The last I heard, the local heroes' monument has been refurbished and that's good. We should teach more local history  to our children. "Tante" was a quiet lad, my father Captain Blood used to regale us his children, adding that he (my father) had to hide in cemeteries after the incident. Why? Well, I have forgotten that delicate part of the story.

       The town's sari-sari stores are hubs of the town pulse where the townsfolk squat in wood benches as they gossip on the town's news between gulps of sioktong or Ginebra (not beer). The triumvirate of  the sari-sari stores of Nana Tona, Nana Geling and Mang Maxie lorded it over in terms of sukis in those early years  of ‘moro-moro,’ 'kapet-kapet,'‘lubi-lubi,’ ‘kaskaron,’ ‘pasagad,’  ‘simmawa,'  and, sorry I have to mention the not-so-pleasing "saka-saka.'

The old town hall, witness to the town's colorful history. It has been transferred but as can be seen, the structures are well-maintained. Photo credit- RSQ Techno Park & Museum / Engr Roland Quilala

Coming from an errand to buy a bottle of ‘igado’ at the town market, I would drop by my cousins’ house in Bgy Pandayan, linger there awhile then run along, on to McKinley Street in Bgy Lira where at its dead-end a river runs.

A new town hall has risen where the old market used to be. Sporting a modern look, it overshadows a hundred times the old presidencia with its flaking paint where at the ground floor we would pick up our registered letters via snail mail. Then, your love letter travels one full month before it lands on your bleeding heart, I mean, on your lap. 

My provincial bus continued rolling away north, the sun now rising overhead in the blue sky. Twelve noon, more images, more scents, more sounds –

A Checkered Past, All Right

 I heard the wheels of calesas clacking into town on a Tuesday, market day. I smelled dinardaraan cooking in large vats, oily and tender and dry just so, the best so far I have tasted, together with longganisa starring in my dreams for authentic  Ilocano food day after day...

       Then I had to walk all the time under the sun because jeeps plied only the national highway. I did not walk barefoot, although I couldn't remember wearing shoes except to church and on Commencement Day and on special trips to Vigan with my mother to buy a new dress.

         Besides, the small town kids thrived in the streets playing kudisi in the sun till their skins got baked like chocolate brownies, yes, that marvelous Ilocano shade.  The boys flew kite out in the fields under the noonday heat. Every boy in town of course knew how to rub the kite strings with pulverized glass; corruption in the young, those shrewd kite flyers.

The good old calesa still plods the roads of Lapog but most especially in Vigan. Photo credit, Angela Lagasca Villmar-taken by her at Heritage Village, Vigan during one of her tours of the world.

I don’t know if, walking on the town today, I would still be seeing the rough old roads unmarked by street signs or the low wooden houses or huts with wire or bamboo fences to remember by. Sprawling mansions have replaced quaint wood houses— that's a happy sign of diaspora and progress.

What I enjoyed most, if I may dredge up that memory again, was the gurgling waters of the old river by the side of our house singing the hum of the bamboo reeds.

Well, not a beautiful memory of a river to be highlighting it here. It's not the crater of Taal volcano, folks, but my beloved  river "during summer?" Let's wait for the rains to come, it will fill the craters, believe me. Photo credit, Angela Lagasca Villamar.

But the town’s history is also clouded with not-so-happy stories. 

         I remember those early dawns when the distant sound of a gunshot, like a death toll from somewhere out on a deserted road, would awaken my family.  In the hushed darkness of our house, bolted inside by an iron bar, a piece of log and all sorts of improvised locks because we had gone paranoid like most of the people in the town – we held our breath…and waited for bad news in the morning. Those were the days of the so-called barefoot soldiers or “saka-saka.” 

This one I’m sure most of my contemporaries could recall: A firefight exploded in the middle of a program at the town hall’s second floor. Adults, children, we were all there. Despite our local troubles, life went on for the people of this small town. We the innocent kids loved shows and programs. 

          First a gunshot. Then a burst of Armalite. In just a few seconds, the presidencia and the town plaza became a roaring battlefield.  “Down! Stay down!” frantic male voices howled above the rapid fire and the screams of people running without direction.  It was bedlam. We crawled and dived into the adjacent rooms. I don't remember crying. I don't even remember screaming. What I remember was, we were piled in heaps inside the small room and I was pinned and I was whispering for my mother who wasn't there at all. It was horrible. Two camps exchanged fire, policemen from the second floor windows and some characters down at the town plaza. 

               After a while, the gunshots subsided, then stopped. 

             For a long time, an empty  room littered with piles of slippers  would haunt me in my sleep. If there were casualties, I couldn’t remember. I went home barefoot and sobbing. I held on to my Spartan slipper, its pair missing.

The town had a checkered past, all right. But towns, too, have lives of their own. Going through dark phases, like life, they emerge from the whippings of turbulent history to metamorphose into peaceful, progressive towns. 

Fireflies and LED Lights

”We have to go back to our roots,” my cousin, Engineer Roland Quilala reminded his social media friends in one of his regular Facebook posts.  “Connecting with the past helps preserve our culture – those ways of doing things that seem rather odd today.”

Happy Retiree-Engr Roland Quilala  "among his souvenirs -" He collects interesting things and make the new generation remember the past. Thanks, Insan. Photo credit - RSQ Techno Park & Museum.

Now a retiree at the helm of NAPOCOR, Manong Roland keeps busy collecting antiques and other artifacts  for his private RSQ Techno Park and Museum in our town. His vintage collection has attracted visitors. In connecting to what he called the almost-forgotten “old town culture” through his preserved artifacts, he sought to showcase the history of Lapog.

 Among his many collections is a vintage lamp. “This was actually used,” he declares. You can bet on that.  The oil lamp connected our generation to a “twilight zone” at one time in our town’s colorful or was it “lightless” history?  In earlier days, we actually had no electricity. Step aside, Dr. Jose Rizal. I also did my home work in the flare of an oil lamp. 

Today, it is probably all dazzling LED lights in big houses. Coming home alone from a town event in the plaza one night, I took a short-cut at a neighbor’s backyard.   And what do you know?  The full moon suddenly disappeared, cutting off my only source of light! I was groping one banana trunk to another, and then another, in complete darkness  I couldn't recall how I got out. 

Well, I wasn’t traumatized if you ask. We were brave.  In a time of relative backwardness, who was afraid of darkness? The Ilocano, always the resilient bamboo, always found a way to adjust to difficult circumstances including finding some positive lessons in the blight of an unlighted night. I call it adaptation to darkness if there is such a thing. And then there was the magic of the fireflies…

The magic of the fireflies. Can it get any lovelier than this? Photo credit - Internet

Soon, electricity reached the town, at last.

By mid-afternoon, a slight drizzle fell on the glass window of our bus and interrupted my reverie. But then, it stirred another train of thought.  Rain memories, I was in the middle of a rice field and, you guess—

Exotic Plate, Fun in the Sun & a Stone House by the Road

The first rains of May. We had great fun chasing “simmawa,” those tiny brown beetles that kids hunted down in the rice fields once a year at the start of the monsoon season. The town kids looked forward to the arrival of the "simmawas" each year. If you discover a swarm of these insects under a log, ah, I remember that wonderful feeling. It was  like finding gold coins!

Exotic  bugs on my plate?  My fascination with this insect fare may have faded considerably. But, cooked “sizzling adobo style,” you can ask me—the catch (“simmawa” or “ararawan”) crackles like lechong kawali, wafts with the fragrant aroma of roasted lobsters and tastes…oops, how’s the taste? I’ve forgotten.

“After catching ‘simmawa,’” mused a Facebook friend, now a doctor, “I used to take shelter in that stone house by the national road.” The house she mentioned was a prototype of a 19^th century Lousiana plantation cottage, according to my engineer cousin. The structure stood strange and singular in a town of similarly built plain houses.

A Lousiana plantation painting -  a prototype of old Lousiana cottage existed in Lapog until it was torn down. Photo credit, Internet

Shaded by an enormous acacia tree, it stood across the National Highway in front of Maestro Pira’s house like an impregnable fortress guarding the highway. Many Lapog kids tell of fond memories playing in the house yard, I learned that later in Facebook, and happier still to know there was an old well in there. I could only recall it being unoccupied, and well,...rather dark.

My sister Jo and I, going home from Manila for vacations, would get off the bus at dawn when it was still dark right in front of this stone house. Barely dropping our travelling bags, we would scamper  off as fast as we could– huff, huff! – down the road,  running almost not breathing past the old house to the right, past another abandoned  building to the left, past an eerie churchyard again to the right until... we reach the town plaza. The familiar sight of the town square and the sari-sari stores calmed our juvenile fears. Giggling nervously, we would then continue our trek home.

       I believe that, as sisters, these scaring-each-other experiences then were our most companionable moments.

The old stone house by the highway of Lapog. Old memories. Photo credit, Engr. Roland Quilala

Today, I learned that the unique two-story stone house stands no more along the highway, another relic down, demolished by the demands of modernity.  

We were getting nearer to Ilocos Sur. But the sun was also beginning to soften to late afternoon and I was hoping we’ll reach Lapog before sundown before it was too late to get a good look.

 Yes, Virginia, A Reject is a Lover You Threw in the Trash

One of my most vivid memories was of the old Virginia tobacco days. 

Preparing the tobacco leaves for the final market was a tedious process but it offered many work opportunities to the locals: de-worming, picking, stringing, flue-curing, sun-drying, classifying.  The Virginia tobacco industry was a “gold mine” in those days. It spawned rural legends of car-riding tobacco growers and tobacco traders with bags of cash to burn that were, of course, folksy in the manner of homespun local stories.  

I like the black and white character of this old photo of a Virginia tobacco plantation although not taken in Lapog.  I like everything  about the Virginia tobacco except picking fat worms.  Photo credit, internet.

And so I will go back instead to my Engineer cousin. “Do you remember this?” He had posted a photo of a boy stringing tobacco leaves. The neighborhood kids strung tobacco leaves as a summer job.   Not a bad task, really. Have you ever tried peeling off the sap of the fresh tobacco leaves that accumulated on your fingers? It’s like peeling off Mighty Bond glue, that pesky.

As I have said, rarely was a Lapogeno who didn’t know first-hand about Virginia tobacco as he did about cooking Ilocano-style “pinakbet” (camote instead of squash, and simply boiled in bagoong, not sautéed). This one: How to classify the golden flue-cured tobacco leaves to A, B. C and reject? Easy – Class A is the smooth, perfectly cured golden tobacco leaf, the right size, no discoloration, no dark spots, no torn edges, a rare virgin Virginia. Class B is next to Class A and class C is next to B.

All right, a reject is like a lover you threw into the trash can for double crossing you except that it’s a tobacco leaf.  My grandmother rolled the classified rejects into foot-long cigars she would happily smoke inside her mosquito net. She lived for 105 years. Now, removing fat worms from the tobacco plants? Never mind.

The sunrays went even softer. They dropped gold upon the tree tops, bathing the leaves with gold-orange hue. It was a beautiful sight but it wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted the daylight when I reach Lapog. The afternoon sun was sinking fast and we were barely past La Union. My heart began to sink.

The gloom I felt spread to my line of thought. I was thinking of storms now, of rainy days –

If It May Rain or Storm, Life Goes On

Yes, monsoon rains. Fortunately, I don’t remember any destruction from a tornado but on the matter of typhoons, we get them in the north as regularly as getting hair shampoos. Typhoon Senyang, I recall, was so nasty it stripped off the roofs of many houses including ours and sent them flying everywhere like UFOs.  In 24 hours, the town went roofless and as bald as an eagle.  

No brainer, ask any Ilocano in the north. A naughty Senyang was but a bad hair day. Thank God, too, Lapog never gets really flooded – in my time—at least. The streets get soaked only ankle-deep, the non-stop rains creating freshets rushing gently to push along our paper boats we threw from our window. Having grown up watching raindrops and soaking on rainfalls, the rains was poetry. 

We remember.

We go home to our town often for funerals, weddings of relatives or plainly, for class reunions – silver, gold, diamond. These reunions renew friendships and strengthen filial bonds that nurture our roots and personal connections.  

But somehow they also inject the reality that life is fleeting, that time slips between our fingers like grains of sand to the sea. 

Life is an endless proposition, they say. It runs marathons and incurs sad losses. We are running at a speed intractable towards the sunset. Along the way, we get new and loving connections but we also lose friends and loved ones as our hair grow grayer, our knees get shakier and the cycle of life goes on.

Twilight Falls Over Old Lapog

Night had fallen. It became obvious I couldn’t catch the daylight anymore as I pass by Lapog.

As our bus slowly neared the bridge that signaled we were entering the town proper, I could no longer read the arch “Welcome to San Juan” in the darkness. The very first street westward after passing by the bridge would have taken me straight to my old home. It is a back road near the edge of the river. I’ve lost the road, too, in the dark of the night.

Sunset over Lapog. I missed seeing the old town with the nightfall. Photo credit, Angela Lagasca-Villamar.

The town, its streets now empty of people, stretched down the road in a somber shadow of houses and buildings in the moonlight.

Every time I plan a visit, I would think of the old house by the river now slowly collapsing, eaten down by the fading years. And then would come into my mind the images of all the early years I spent growing up in the house with my siblings.

 It was a simple house, its floor was laid out in hardwood, and we the children had huddled there on the floor with three layers of blankets on cold Christmas mornings.

Our old family house, not impressive, just a familiar wood-concrete structure but it held priceless memories. Nobody lives there anymore. Photo credit, Angela Lagasca-Villar. A million thanks to you, my friend, for preserving the memory for me with your lenses.

I would think of my old folk, and how, as a child, I came into believing they’d be around as long as I live, my mother in her faded sun dress hovering in the kitchen, my father in his gabardine trousers waiting on his kids to go home at the toll of the Angelus. 

And contemplating on the town I could barely see now, and thinking of that old house by the river, a great painful emptiness filled my soul. Because I knew, as I had lost Lapog in the covering of darkness, I would never see my old folk again.  I would never go home to my old town and to this old house with the certainty that somebody would run out of the door to meet me when I call.

“Entering Cabugao,” the bus conductor disrupted my thoughts. It was the next town where I studied high school.

 But I was already out from the past, out from Lapog. I was gone from my reverie, back to my son   beside me who spoke Ilocano without faltering but knew so little of Lapog. Even his generation of millennials was past climbing trees and catching June beetles, we their parents half a century before them.

  The night was getting deeper but I knew the sun would be out the next morning. It would sparkle on the surface of the nearby river where a bunch of bronze-skinned town boys waded all day long.  It would brighten the town plaza that it might erase its dark memory of gun fights many years ago.  It would shine on that deserted road where my sister Jo and I, going home in the stillness of dawn, would outrace each other to get past the abandoned houses by the roadside, running.

           I know it would forever shine on the town to welcome its sons and daughters and cuddle them each time they go home. 

   

RIVER SONG

The River Beckons

Breathtaking view at sunrise, Lapog River as background
 - Note the  stream hardly flowing

If you happen to walk through the outskirts of Lapog on a hot summer day in the 60s, you will come upon a dusty back road that runs parallel to the sprawling rice fields at the border of the town proper in the west. The road stretches from the north end of poblacion where the town market is located down the south end where a river runs.

Walk along. It is midday, the heat is suffocating but old acacia trees will give you shade.

Follow the road southward to Purok Lira until you come to a crossroad where a weather-beaten signboard says “McKinley Street.” Jeeps seldom reach up to this point so you may find children playing under the sun in the middle of the road.

Take a few more steps until you reach a dead-end slope, past a plain two-story wood house – our house - that stands atop a cliff bank.

Stop awhile and take a breath because the downward path is rather steep. Be careful with your step because the bain bain that carpet both sides of the path prick the toes of strangers then snap shut their tiny leaves.

From where you stand, you hear soft gurgling sounds; you are now looking down a river valley. A river gently flows here from the nearby mountain. Your eyes sweep the wild beauty of bracken ferns and bamboo groves along the river bank and the verdant woods farther on one side of the floodplain.

If you are lucky, you may hear the scream of a salaksak possibly swooping down for fish on the running stream. Near the bridge of Lapog in the east, the Cordilleras loom blue against the sky beyond. A light breeze wafts from the waters below.

It is quiet in the river at this time of the day. I invite you to walk farther down the stream and dip your tired feet into the sparkling waters. It is cool and refreshing, the flowing stream hardly ripples and the water is so clear you could see the smooth gray pebbles mirrored at the bottom.

On tranquil nights, too, when songbirds are already quiet, you hear the river softly humming.

By morning with the first streak of sunrise, the town kids come to swim in the river and the men to fish along its length. The river never runs dry. It flows constantly into the South China Sea about two miles away.

River Children

You see that mountain range over there? That’s the Cordilleras, my mother used to say in one of those rare times she brought me along to school in Barangay Asilang at the foot of the mountains where she taught in the elementary. You could cross over by foot to the other side of the mountain, she said, and there – it’s Abra! I imagined the river of Lapog meandering patiently from Abra River up there in the mountain then flowing down to our town. Its river source, after all, was not the Amburayan River every Ilocano is familiar with, where Lam-ang dwelt in our famous Ilocano folklore.

What does it matter? With or without a fantastic river hero, I pay tribute to the obscure river of Lapog. It is my river and I grew up in the decades of the 50s and 60s with this river flowing right next door to our house.

I woke up mornings to the faint call of the river running. Oh, but I went to bed to the mad chorus of toads and crickets singing below my window!

All day, I tracked down all kinds of river creatures -- from tiny shrimps with their transparent silvery bodies to lazy crabs with hollow shells and fat pinchers to sleepy round or pointed snails salivating in the mud to wiggly mud fishes and their shy relatives. Like a wily Detective Conan, I stalked these aquatic species in the crevices of the riverbank, under moss-covered rocks, on the slimy mud or under carpets of algae and water lilies (I have not had the bad luck of sticking my hand into a mud hole and got bitten by a snake. Riverside kids had amulets). Who cared if what I picked up then were non-edible birabid?

For lunch, we had those crabs, et al thrown into the boiling pot and smothered in tamarind or seasoned with bagoong-- bless my mother again who was an inventive cook.

Yes, swimming in the river – my siblings and I were rarely sighted on land; we were amphibians.  All day long we splashed upstream and downstream like crazy mud fishes, bobbing in and out of the water those long remembered summers!  The boys, even girls competed diving into the river like Olympians. I’m afraid I started to grow fish scales like most riverside kids of our generation then, I tell you.




Must be my Manong Nap here & his barkada?haha! (Pic from National Geographic)

You know why my sister’s hair is brownish sapon, not black? Because her hair is so fine, our daily river swims burned it, err, dyed it sizzling brown. My brother…Well, his skin turned from gorgeous Ilocano brown to night black, sorry it’s -- bronzed, like a sunburned Machete. I got skinny from ingesting too much river sediments, I mean, minerals.

River Wild

Ah, but the river is not always pleasant.

In those days, an improvised narrow bamboo bridge spans the river when the currents are rough after a strong rain. In Ilocos, storm signal number 3 is…well, so what? Rain would fall for days without let-up – nepnep - like in biblical times but not to bother. Kids in the north are accustomed to Yolings howling overhead at 200 kilometers per hour. We were throwing paper boats from our windows, squealing as we watch them dissolve in the torrential rain like tissue paper.

Back then, the streets of Lapog never got flooded. Instead, we frolicked in the ankle-length waters under the driving rain.

One day, when the river calmed down, smooth but not totally tame, my sister and I went our way for another river escapade. We were crossing the bamboo bridge when ---one of us, my sister, slipped. It just rained and the bamboo bridge nearly touched the rising water. The bridge was basically sturdy except that, on that fateful day, the river decided to bully us stubborn children into learning a good lesson in river safety. The water whirled below and my sister was flailing and kicking like mad, trying to stay afloat while I looked down stupidly, frozen like a Magnolia twin pops.

We survived, thank God. I don’t remember if mother saw us coming up the river bank shaking white as bed sheets, my sister whining and dripping like a wet chicken. What I remember was, my sister was able to grab the edge of the bamboo bridge and I hauled her up. I pulled and pulled with all my might, my body bent backward like my bones would break and my breath would snap, like I would die if I should fail to get my sister out of the water.

Fast forward. “Remember the nights?” My sister was saying. Ondoy was wreaking havoc in Marikina, people in rooftops, on rubberized boats. “In Lapog during a storm, I refused to sleep. I was counting the thuds of soil falling like an avalanche; I was listening to the roar of the river.” I, too, never slept. I imagined the river swallowing our house and sweeping it down to sea.

Picture from Internet of a  rampaging river. This is how Lapog River exactly looked overflowing its banks after a storm
- dangerous currents of  mud, minus the floating debris  

The danger was there. Every time the river swells, it erodes the surrounding slope and eats up chunks of the riverbank. I used to overhear my father and other elderly men that unless actions were taken, the river may soon reach us, and then the house of the Purugganans next to us and then next the house of the Corpuzes, Sinamar and Saniata until –God fobid --the whole Purok Lira or Barrio Baliw on the other side of the river bank where a former classmate Orlino is now Bgy Chairman, disappears like the lost city of Pompei.

The men were talking about a dam but the dream project probably cost millions then and thus never got around being built.

The morning after a storm, when the rains had cleared, the townsfolk of men, women and children trekked down the river to inspect the rampaging waters. People lined the riverbank for various reasons that brought them there. In the roaring currents, logs, uprooted trees, animal carcasses and debris of all kinds tumbled past in full speed. It was the town’s biggest and most dangerous river show of the season.

Contrary to my fears, the houses near the riverbank were spared, praise the Lord again. But nothing alarmed me more than the sight of my docile river going berserk from a gentle flowing stream to a sea of rampaging mudflow not unlike the river in Cagayan de Oro City.

And so it was that I learned to be vigilant with rivers, even rivers that sing all day. They are not always in the mood for adventurous Tom Sawyers; they may get cranky like old gentlemen and bury you alive.

Life At ‘Tabing Ilog’

Bad moods notwithstanding, the river bound our community, neighbors, families and their friends in an incredibly simple way.  It is the kind of laidback lifestyle that today’s generation of high tech children with their push-button toys and one-click gadgets, may not find particularly appealing.

To live at tabing ilog is to commune daily with nature in its rustic glory. We the Lira children or probably other youngsters of Lapog have much to be thankful, really, for growing up in an endless adventure with a river that was very much alive. It is the kind of experience that I quietly wished my own sons had the opportunity to enjoy when they were very young.

The river is the communal picnic ground of locales. A close look of photos uploaded by Lapogenos at Facebook would show familiar get-togethers of families and friends held where else but down the river.

Among us neighbors then, our kind of bonding was amazing. Occasionally, the late Uncle Anno or our neighborhood fishermen would occasionally gather the riverside children down the river to enjoy a picnic of fresh harvest from their rama or improvised fish pens. Those were the picnic days and they were grand. We cooked the fish catch right there on the river bank, served them in banana leaves and ate kamayan-style.

Basin-ful of 'bunog' - a river delicacy

The picnics were such a big hit that,  at the first rumor of a fish pen being dismantled, we all marched down the river like children charmed by the Pied Piper of Hamelin, not to drown, of course, but to enjoy the boodle fight for free!

Decades later, the tangy taste of jumping salad and crabs, mudfish and bunog straight from the river and cooked in tamarind broth, all natural without the flavor granules, still tickles the taste buds of my memory. I could smell even now, as I sit before a quick dinner of fast food burgers in a Styrofoam box, the peculiar aroma of fresh-water catch cooked in kamias roaring from the clay pot by the campfire under the aratilis tree.

Missing the Old River

That was decades ago. Today in 2012, I am looking at pictures of the river taken only recently by my town mate, neighbor and now Facebook photographer/friend Mang Angela Lagasca: Why is it that I want to cry?

The caption says Lapog River, but I do not see any river at all. All I see is a long forlorn stretch of a river bed, rocks, sand, pebbles –dry, no water flowing. The river that once vigorously ran to the sea now lies at the edge of the town in a wide barren field; where fishes once splashed, people walked on a stony wasteland. All that is left are choking patches of grayish green water choked with dead bamboo leaves where cows take their Jacuzzi baths.

Lapog River as it looked when the picture was taken this year, what  a dreary sight! The bridge of Lapog at the distance.

 Our river is dying...Or is it gone?

Whatever the reason for the river having woefully receded, I can only speculate. It must have been that the river dried up because it’s summer, my friend said hopefully.  I desperately hope so, too because that would be easier in the heart to take…

Environmental pollution, expanding population, the effects of industrialization and other factors may have affected the condition of the river. We have seen similar deaths of rivers, lakes and waterfalls from man’s own negligence.

Mang Angela took her walk on the dry riverbed and mused in her Internet post: “My nostalgic walk on a river toward the glow of sunset…”

What a sad refrain for a lovely river that used to be a town’s treasured water resource that sustained such a diversity of river life! My town mate who now lives in Australia captioned her images of Lapog river with the kind of poetic longing one feels for people, things and places that have been lost irretrievably.

I prefer to be more optimistic.

Rivers grow old. Like the energetic river children that they cradled in their silvery waters of long, long ago, rivers also had to weather the ill-effects of technology and climate changes in their sunset stages; they get frail, they get polluted, their waters diminish. I pose a challenge to the present generation in our community to help conserve our valuable freshwater resource. It is never too late to rescue our river and nurse it back to life for the sake of the next generation. 

This is not Lapog River, but I swear ! In my time, it  looked not very far from this  lovely sight.

So that one day, going home to Lapog on a sunset summer, I may again hear the lovely river singing  its river song. And the children of the future, too, to enjoy it the way we did in our time.

NOTE: The pictures of the Lapog River belong to Ms ANGELA LAGASCA. Thanks to her for giving me the permission to publish them for this piece. The other images were taken from the Internet.