yellow light: caution in the land of the dumagats
Sunday, November 13, 2005
more than a year ago, tragedy struck in infanta, quezon, the land of the dumagats. a strong tropical typhoon crossed this small seaside town wrecking havoc and bringing down a landslide of the ages. a strong typhoon mixed with environmental degradation of the nearby mountains will always make a potent disaster.
*****
i was in the town a couple of days ago. initial impressions didn't give off signs of the tragedy. it seemed that people recovered quickly from this. life actually looked normal. but sometimes, initial impressions don't last.
i first went to an area that was formerly a rice field. the opreative word here being 'formerly'. it was a rolling grass plain with fallen wood trunks scattered over a space of more than a hundred hectares. in fact, if the locals didn't tell me that it was one, i wouldn't have figured it out. walking across the expanse, i came across more and more fallen wood. it looked like wood sculptures from a distance and seemed as though that a part of the philippines finally became interested in culture and art. the southern sierra madre even provided a stunning backdrop to the stark landscape. it was such a surreal environment and yet it was so real. it looked so beautiful, yet so tragic.
i couldn't understand how large tree trunks the circumferential size of 2 to 3 people with their arms spread out came all the way to that area when in fact, the mountains are more than 10 kilometers away. the flood waters could have brought it there and yet, i couldn't phantom the idea. i was looking at a tall coconut tree when i heard someone say that floods in this area were as tall as grown coconut trees. and those trees looked taller than 2 floors to me. and in order to survive the ordeal, as many as 3 dumagat families perched on a single tree: moms with their babies, fathers tired from the vigil of monitoring flood waters, children being unable to understand the situation -- all in one tree.
that night, i retired in a resort by the beach. obviously, i couldn't see anything at night but they told me to brace myself for what i was about to see. what greeted me in the morning was more what i could have imagined.
by the side of the mountain, it was as if a giant cat clawed wound marks the size of villages and showed mud and earth on an otherwise green vista. by the beach, there was more wood: roots twice my height, tree trunks the length of 2 story buildings, trunk rings revealing century old trees -- spread across more than a kilometer of beach front. it was a sight to behold, not like when one sees a sun eclipse, but rather when one sees a person badly injured and with a torn limb; try to look away but can't.
i went around for a while. i touched the wood and looked closely. i imagine it would have been magnificent where this was before. and now it has come here to it's end. and yet people refuse to let it rest properly, with graffiti and carving on it's skin. i don't mind that people use it for a better purpose like make furniture and be their livelihood but to let it rest in that state, that is a tragedy, not only for the tree but for the people who live there as well.
i consider myself as an environmentalist and experiencing this brings all sorts of feelings within me. anger, rage, even a certain numbness. i just couldn't understand why some people have to be greedy. thinking about it, i'm pretty sure that the logging concessionaires don't even have an ounce of remorse. probably, when this tragedy struck, they were in their comfortable homes in posh gated communities, or out on the road in their european luxury cars. i mean, here they are, thinking that they need more money in order to keep up with the joneses or to be in the society pages. or else they would enter into a depression. (pathetic.) and here are these poor people in this town who have practically nothing and yet, they are able to smile and laugh on the simplest things -- despite being haunted by the tragedy. probably i'm putting them up as one-dimensional characters but a year has passed and sometimes an afternoon of rainfall can bring in the floods again. what more if it was another strong typhoon?
sometimes, this world can be twisted. and if we don't learn from this experience, it will happen again and again and again. but i'm not saying that this is doomsday either. it doesn't mean that it has to end there; problems need not end as problems. going to the source and unearthing difficult habits can bring about real closure. though filipinos are very gentle and an easily forgiving people, this thing must be faced. there is still hope for change. tragedies tell us only a part of the story. at the end of the day, if we allow it to, we will indeed have scars but we will also experience healing.
*****
i went to a lot of places over the fortnight and have plenty of stories to tell but this has to be written first. i wish i brought a camera when i was there.
posted by lex @ 4:45 PM,
