Are There Volcanoes in Dupax?

TAAL VOLCANO'S eruption jogged my senses to the fact that my hometown Dupax, just like all the towns of Nueva Vizcaya, is practically surrounded by mountains.

And so, the question came to my mind: Is there a possibility that among the many hills of Dupax, one of them is a volcano?

This is a subject I intend to research on one of these days. In the meantime, let me share the following photos I took with my iPhone in the morning of October 1 last year:

The view of central Dupax del Sur taken from the hill behind the Dupax del Sur National High School. The blue hills in the far background are already part of Dupax del Norte.

This one on the southern direction shows a cone-shaped peak in the far background. Probably already part of the neighboring town of Aritao, the triangular peak looks very much that of a volcano.

Many hills of Dupax have this type of rock. Down the hill where I shot this, there is a large one that we called "Kompan si Araw" (Bell of Monkeys) standing like a huge ball that a giant may be able to push and roll farther downhill towards Abannatan creek.

On the western part of Dupax, boulders like this abound, some are as large as the size of a small house and mostly scattered as if someone playful threw them around or any which way he liked.

Remembering that there was a tuping (rock wall) made of little versions of rocks like this at the untu' (peak) of the hill when I used to climb it with my grade school classmates at the then Dupax Central Elementary School, my curiosity is aroused: Where did the rocks and boulders come from?

When Guavas Are Ripe

There was a time in my hometown Dupax when everyone’s childhood had guavas in it.

Yes, guavas as in the now forgotten ditty “Guavas are ripe, guavas are ripe, the mayas sang one day.” Guavas as in bayabas, bayyawas, biyabas, babas or whatever little boys and girls then, be they Isinay, Ilocano, Sin-ili, Ivilao, Gaddang, Panggalatut, or Tagalug, called the fruit that was green for most parts of its máta (unripe) life then became faintly yellow-green when it turned bahilitu (semi-ripe) then turned yellow when neyutu (ripe).

As a matter of fact, it didn’t seem normal then if during happy moments in grade school you could not share your own guava stories with your classmates when, during recess or when classes are suspended because of teachers’ meetings, you had ample time to talk about bayyawas instead of quarrelling if a dyet was faster than an eroplano, or if Manila or Bayombong was farther than America.

Among the sutsur (stories) we shared, many times over, were how big or mamis (sweet) a certain neighbor’s guavas were… how one almost fell when the owner of the tree he climbed came shouting upon seeing him up there… how one got their eeng (shirt/skirt) got nisa-ot (snagged) and nava’yat (torn) on a branch when after noon break the church bell rang the koling and signaled that it was time to go back to the ikwilan (school).

Unlike today when most children no longer know how to climb trees, Dupax then was guava country.

In our part of the town, for instance, you could count with your fingers houses that didn’t have at least one guava tree growing on their yards. Rare, too, were homes that didn’t have pisíng (ginataang bayabas in Tagalog) on their dining table at least once when guavas were in season and many fruits just fall on the ground every day and in such quantities that even free ranging bavuy (pigs) ignored them.

We had one tree, with yellow-fleshed fruits, at the back side of our once thriving poultry, that was already there siredye lan poto’ (since time immemorial). We had at least three smaller but more sweet-fruited trees in our “solar” across the little banaw (pond) on the western part of our house, including one that had a dalimahon (termite hill) on its base that made me say “tabí-tabí” each time its big fruits seduced the tree climber in me.

Our closest neighbors then, Apu Tansiong and Apu Kuana Seangoy, shared with us a living eyar (fence) that included two large guava trees that had nasusuwan (has nipples) fruits that my sisters and I loved to eat because of their “reddish” flesh. On the pond side of their lot was a smaller but very prolific tree the fruits of which often fell victim to typhoons but which I gathered on the grass-carpeted ground to give to our pigs.

Across the road, Uncle Ermin’s lot also had guava trees as fence posts. Their fruits were free for the taking, for as long as you didn’t stepped on the hog wire under them. I recall my cousin Nelson had a funny story that he relayed to me in a hushed voice when we were boys, concerning someone who climbed the tree and later exclaimed “Ana^ na lasi!” in Pangasinan.

My favorite guava paradise then was however the carabao grazing area we called Pitáng, on the western part of town just a stone’s throw away from our house. It was where Papa and I occasionally took a short cut to or from the Gabaldon school, and plus or minus the pesky grains of the grass called poot in Isinay (puriket in Ilokano, amorseko in Filipino) if the carabao trail on the side of the guava-rich lot of the Bato’ family was not so muddy.

Pitang was then a wide open and semi-communal area that did not only have lots of wild guavas but also mangoes, sompalo (tamarinds), and sapang. I went there to run after the guava-loving bird pinuu’ (bulbul in English, pirruka in Ilokano, pulangga in Filipino) with my slingshot. When the trees around the house had very few ripe fruits, I went to Pitang to gather a little pail full of luscious guavas that Mama turned into jelly or the mouth-watering pisíng.

Alas, not so many remember the “Guavas Are Ripe” song anymore. You don’t see children climbing guava trees anymore. The formerly ubiquitous and freely growing guavas of my youth are no more!

How True Was the "How Dupax Got its Name" Story?

IF THE two-hundred-forty-five-year-old St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic Church is the edifice or spot in Dupax, then perhaps also the most photographed figures in Dupax del Sur today are these two sculptures in front of the municipal hall. On the left of the photo is a tablet outlining who they are and what they are doing.

Even as they are said to be depicting hunters who went into such reclining position due to extra heavy meal of roasted venison, I have this notion that they were in fact looking at a strange celestial sight in the eastern horizon.

It could have been a fully formed and multiple colored rainbow. They may not have a name for it in Isinay back then and so the two guys had to invent a noun that pretty soon stuck to their mind. It was “tavungeyon.”

Of course, of course, concerned Irupajs may cry "Ni'bot! Ni'bot!" when they get to read this conjecture. O, iiva, inesep u lohom niyen beyun sutsur. (Yes, brethren, that new story is just figment of my imagination.)

There is however a question about the authenticity of the story attached to these so-called reclining hunters. It came out in the exchanges in the Isinay Friends social media group in Facebook in 2014, particularly from my fellow born-in-August Isinay friend Jimmy Salirungan Guzman who died last year.

Here's what Jimmy said on Facebook:

Mu saon ya marin maserot an atna ri innunar nai-depict ri ni'busan di ngaron di beveyoy tau war. Alatlan mae-as ri impression dar iritaun Isinay siriyen poto. I agree that the name Dupax was used during the Spanish times but the story on how Dupax got its name was probably (started) during the American time when an English class teacher propably gave an assignment to the students to write a tale and this was the most acceptable story.

May I ask: Does "mandopaj" mean to lie flat with your back on the ground or lie flat with your belly on the ground? Whether it means either of the two, then there must be something that lies flat.

Based on that popular story, it's the person that lies flat. But I would propose if not prove what lies flat. If you are on top of the church belfry, you will notice that the topography of Barangay Dupaj is an elevated flat ground or what you call plateau. The ground then was, in Isinay word, "nadopaj." It is here where hunting for wild animals is done, followed by eating and resting under the big trees. Domang is on the other side or across the Abanatan river. In Gaddang, "dammang" means on the other side.

By the way, the word "sinay" in Gaddang means "out there" -- so we isinays from the Gaddang point of view means "from out there."

Jimmy ended his sharing with this line: "What do you think, my fellow Isinai Tribe?"

Almost immediately, his post was answered by another concerned Isinay, Dr. Ella Bedoya Tumaneng:

"Uwa Jim, this is a very good issue that could be raised during the summit. It's really embarrassing... some might be thinking that Isinays are lazy. Mayve we could note it and let researchers pursue it. Pavayvayin iman. Negative di impressions syempre ti areeyanar an marin managm-amta irita-u. Mae-as toy doddot nandopaj, contyento on napsuh. Nandopaj is lie flat and nanlu'buv is lie on belly. We will also tackle this. We hope to have the time. We will surely bring this out."

Unfortunately, Ella, who was the first Isinay from Dupax to earn a PhD, also nanpatanir (bade goodbye) last year. I belatedly found exchanges between them and me one time I was browsing over my old posts in Facebook.

My Monkey Memories

MY EARLIEST childhood memories that had to do with animals were not about dogs or cats or carabaos. Instead, it was about monkeys.

I happened to realize this one Sunday morning not so long ago when I walked along Cutaran Street (the one on the left if you face the Dupax del Sur Municipal Hall) to, among other nostalgic reasons, find out how far the St. Vincent Ferrer Church was to the exact spot in Dupaj where the late Magdalena Pudiquet Castro said she gave birth, around 11PM of August 9, 1951, to her first baby.

The memory of my very first encounter with a monkey came back when I reached the end of the road and caught sight of the lot on the right corner. That was where it occurred.

I don't know whose house occupies that road corner now but when I was in grade school, I recall it used to be that of the Sagario family that owned the dozen or so carabaos that often passed by the road in front of our house in Domang.

Yes, the big Sagario house used to have a monkey on its yard, almost across the road from the solar in the Uruddu part of Dupaj, where I was born and spent much of my toddler days. The monkey was a large one kept as pet with a chain loosely attached to its waist and a horizontal bamboo pole where it walked from one end to the other waiting for food thrown to it.

Because of that monkey, I learned, from the Isinay children feeding it, that the way to call the attention of monkeys is to say “Krrrsss! Krrrsss!" Of course, I was still an Ilokano-speaking kid then, in the care of the Ilokano parents and brothers of my mother. It would be many, many years later that I got to learn that the monkey's name in Isinay is araw, not Krrrsss! Krrrsss!

My second encounter with a monkey was when we moved to I-iyo which was still a tree-rich sitio in the 1950s and only became a barangay and got renamed Palobotan in the 1970s. In front of the house was a kamarin that my grandparents used as shed for newly harvested tobacco. It was on one end of that kamarin that the pet monkey's bamboo pole home and playground was attached but was set low enough so I could feed it with camote, bananas, sugarcane, or peanuts.

Even as the tailed guy was often my only playmate at the time, it made me cry one time because it grabbed my newly bought kallugong (buri hat) and shredded it to pieces. Most likely because it wanted to look for head lice, but I recall I never had another pet monkey after that.

A FAMILY of monkeys used to serve as my entertainment when I was already joining my grandparents to tend their bangkag and their uma (slash-and-burn forest clearing in English, kaingin in Filipino)in Langka, farther upstream of town. The monkeys were a beautiful sight as they perched or walked on charred tree branches and bikal poles. They came out when the sun was already burning hot and my Inang Baket was either preparing utong, rangaw ken uggot ti karabasa, u-ong, and other such vegetables for dinengdeng. Or when nobody was in the uma, they would fall in line while looking for ripe bananas or papayas from the stands that my Apong Lakay grew at the foot of the hill.

Another unique memory was my having festering scabies (gaddil in Ilokano, gate in Isinay) on my calves and knees. No long pants for farm kids then, nor even sandals as protection of our feet from the spiny amaranth (kwantung in Ilokano, suwit in Isinay) when we went chasing fledglings of the bird called bulbul in English (pirruka in Ilokano, pinuu' in Isinay) and the martines (mynah) that both used to abound in the bangkag. And so the scabies were the price I had to pay for incessant playing in the thickets, in the hills, in the farm, in the river – and riding bareback carabaos – while barefoot and in short pants.

You may ask: What in the world did scabies have to do with monkeys?

Well, I heard my doting grandmother tell one of my uncles one day: “Ibirukanyo man toy ubing iti sunggo.” (Kindly find monkey for this kid.) It was probably a tradition or belief handed down to her by elders while growing up in Tagudin, Ilocos Sur, but my grandmother believed that the meat of monkeys was medicine for skin diseases.

Indeed, after being fed with roasted monkey meat, my sores and nasty scabies soon healed!

MANY CHILDREN of Dupax learned about the ways of monkeys through those kept as outdoor pet by neighbors. One such was kept by the Campo brothers Pascual and Otong in our part of Domang. We had fun watching it pick unripe guavas from the tree serving as its one-end-of-the–pole shelter. It would chew off the green peelings of one fruit, spit the bitter bits, then store the cleaned fruit on its mouth, then repeat the same for other fruits. We delighted seeing the bulge on both sides of its mouth created by the peeled guavas it stored.

We children even had games where one would act as monkey while being teased by others with a mimic of the monkey guttural sound “krrrsss” which would soon become “kurus banyas” (an Ilokano phrase that literally means “cross” and “monitor lizard”).

I also have in my memory seeing an Aeta kid holding a pink baby monkey like a doll near Landingan, Nagtipunan, Quirino. This was in January 1990 when I happened to be part of a fact-finding mission on the Ilongot tribe’s reaction to the then still to be constructed Casecnan Dam in Southeastern Nueva Vizcaya. Our group was composed of IP representatives of PAFID, progressive minded guys from UP Diliman and UP Los Baños, staff members of the Office of Northern Cultural Communities in Bambang, and Chip Fay of Amnesty International.

Going back to monkey meat, I don’t recall having feasted on monkey again, while a boy, after that monkey meat as cure for scabies episode. What I do remember was when I was already a forester, I enjoyed monkey adobo as pulutan along with ice-cold beer in Zamboanga City in 1987, courtesy of a fellow forester.

How Do We Call the Nymph of the Dragonfly in Isinay?

WHEN MY mother-in-law died, my wife and her Baguio-based siblings and I naturally went to their far-from-the-madding-crowd hometown Barlig, in Mountain Province, to give our last respects to their mom and to participate in the burial rituals.

I'll skip my ringside observer account of the final sendoff ceremonies for now (I'll try to whip up a post, complete with photos, one day soon) so I can focus on and do justice to our topic today.

Among the burial-related rituals was the family get-together the day after we interred my mother-in-law in a tunnel-like "resting place" that my wife's uncle and male relatives dug on the steep slope of a hill in the vicinity of their family's terraced rice paddies.

The gathering actually consisted of going to the mountain stream that ran between Latang and Chakaran, two barangays of central Barlig, to fish, take a bath, and have a picnic.

Apart from rice, our entourage brought no other food even as the house had plenty of ducks and chickens, and huge chunks of pork that were part of the "watwat" for folks and relatives who came to condole with the family. Instead, we depended on the gobies (bunog), shrimps, crabs, tadpoles, and other edible creatures that the collective fishing was able to catch.

Among the "other edible creatures" caught were muddy brown insects that they call "chiyayap" in Finallig (the language of Barlig). These were actually freshwater dwelling nymphs of dragonflies that, for the life of me, I never thought were edible.

Indeed, the chiyayap look unappetizing not only due to their drab color but also because of their weird appearance -- yes, very much like miniature Godzillas. But cooked along with gobies, shrimps, and crabs, plus a sprinkling of edible fern, the creatures tasted creamy and much like eve (May beetle in English, abal-abal in Ilokano, salagubang in Filipino).

How a dragonfly nymph looks (Photo from lifeinfreshwater.net)

FAST FORWARD to recent times. In one of my trips to my hometown Dupax, as usual I went to fetch my hiking buddy (and consultant on the Isinay names of certain birds, insects, grass, and trees), Boni Calacala, to accompany me in going to my farm in Sinagat, about ten kilometers upstream of central Dupax del Sur.

As expected, while wending our way to our destination, Boni again gave me an update -- in Isinay -- on who did what and where, who died when and why, and other whatevers, while I was away.

He also related the remote places that he went to work as carpenter, such as the village of Sanggit where "Deem podda ri sappilanar siri… ni-avo'!" [There were so plenty of gobies there... spread like mat!]

My mouth watered as I "viewed" in my mind Boni's excited description of how the Ilongot village was so rich not only with river fish but also large timber, forest birds, bats, deer.

Then he asked if I still know Belino Seupon. "O amta' a... toy peren u ri ivanar Tony an pambatu' Dupaj si 100-meter dash", I replied. (Yes, I know him, of course... his younger brother Tony was my friend and was the bet of Dupax in 100-meter dash.)

Belino (real name: Avelino) now lives in Sanggit, Boni said. It was from Belino, he said, that he came to know the dragonfly nymph's name in Isinay is "siyayap."

Siyayap? Wow! I didn't know that Isinays even had a name for the creature.

All along, we called it "point Manila." I don't know who invented such name, but I recall my Isinay friends and I uttered it when we would chance upon a dragonfly nymph in Abannatan or in the wangwang (river) and we would press the poor thing's abdomen so it would put out its tongue and point to us where Manila is.

I didn't ask my de facto Isinay researcher if the people of Sanggit also ate dragonfly nymphs like they do in Barlig. Already my mind went a-whirring on going to visit the village and other formerly unreachable Ilongot communities of Dupax soon, or at least before my legs go too wobbly to do nature walks along sylvan trails and mountain streams.

I didn't ask... because I was pretty sure Wa Belino and neighbors had all the gobies in the world to feast on, and if they get "bored" of river dwellers, they have other wildlife to give their culinary attention to in lieu of siyayap.