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.