A Town Among The Hills

There’s a town way up there among the hills

Everybody there’s happy and gay

All the people there are busy all the day

Yet sweet smiles you see everywhere.

Oh town of Dupax… I’ll never forget

My humble home where I freely love to roam

Town of Dupax… keep me closer unto thee

Ever and forever we will sing thee mabuhay!

One's balik-bayan or homecoming would not be complete without a visit to say a little prayer inside the St. Vincent Catholic church of Dupax del Sur, Nueva Vizcaya, Northern Philippines. Older than the churches of Laoag City (Ilocos Norte) and Vigan City (Ilocos Sur), this witness to the Dupax of yore has for over two centuries now (1772-2011) remained the most durable symbol of the Isinay/Inmeas tribe even as the beautiful Isinay language itself is now starting to dwindle -- much like the huge molave and narra trees, the dutiful carabaos, and the Isinays used to build this glorious monument. 

ONCE IN A WHILE a time comes when, walking down a garbage-littered city street the likes of those we now see common in Metro Manila, suddenly a flash of half-forgotten images appears in your mind’s eye and then, although you have set your self for a busy work day in the office, you fall prey to the itch to write.

And so you write or rather pound furiously at the computer, unmindful of the day’s deadlines and do so by consoling yourself that, oh well, deadlines can wait... bosses can wait some more time... but not inspired moments which, when left unattended, will surely no longer come back and as sweet as they first knocked on your consciousness.

A thing like that just occurred to me today, with the song about my town Dupax del Sur, in southern Nueva Vizcaya, above suddenly coming back to my mind and sending off myriad images that, while parading in my memory, surely kept me oblivious of the filth and the garbage and the noise and the concrete and steel jungle that is Metro Manila.

First, there was the image of ricefields framed on one side by gentle mountains and on another by glistening rivers. The blue sky accentuated by a few cirrus clouds here and there, and a gliding hawk out there... give only one message: these fields are fortunately not yet polluted.

Farther back in time, there were the grassy hills west of the Dupax Elementary School. The gurgling waters of Abannatan. The gigantic acacia trees in the St. Mary's and St. Vincent Church compound. The mango and sapang and guava paradise I used to play kites on in Pitang. The starlit skies when there was no electric lights yet in Dupax. The long line of carabaos passing by the house in Domang. The picturesque country road to I-iyo that swirled with dust in summer and was a haven of mud puddles when it rains.

There was also the panorama of the whole of Dupax when you went to gather firewood up there in the remnant forests of Mount Abuwew, or when girls and boys in our part of Domang went to climb the highest hill nearby and set a bandera among the wind-swept rocks up there. And there was the image of the place we called Tamuhaha where in grade school some intrepid upper-class boy would lead us to during very welcome teacher-meeting breaks and we would all troop to the site, like little soldiers, to gather all the pitcher plants we could (for what purposes other than showing them off to our girl classmates I don't remember), and on the way find a muddy guava left unpecked by birds or outdo one another rolling brown rocks downhill.

The images were of course more than the fleeting and intangible shadows of a bygone era when childhood was bliss and all the town was free playground and the rainbows were frequent, for they came in full color -- along with their respective scents and sounds even -- that were part of the now fast vaporizing mementos of a half-century-old city rat compelled to be like that by circumstances all pointing towards the need to earn a decent living and keep family and soul intact.

My town among the hills may not have the luxury of superhighways, glitzy hotels, fast-food centers, and shopping malls that cash-strapped people  may crave for. But at least it has sweet and bird-rich mountains, rice-scented and emerald green scenery, and fish-endowed and unpolluted rivers that are now becoming a rarity in many Philippine towns. Reflecting now on this September 2010 photo of the grandkids of Junior and Isabel Calacala, was it very long ago indeed when as a child in the 1960s up to the early '70s I freely roamed this upstream part of Dupax del Sur myself and enjoyed sun-kissed places, forest-fresh water, and the thrill of "fish jumping as high as the sky"?  

I shall later write vignettes triggered by those returning shadows of those days in Dupax when, oh well,as the lines of the Brothers Four’s song “Time to Remember” go:

...when grass was green and grain was yellow

and dreams were kept beside your pillow

and love was an ember about to billow.

July 24, 2001