RIVER SONG

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.