Dupax: Once Upon a Forest-Rich Town

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!

THERE ARE TIMES when, walking down a garbage-littered city street the likes of those we see in less-visited parts of Metro Manila, half-forgotten images appear in my mind’s eye and then, even if I have set myself for a busy work day, I surrender to the itch to write.

And knowing that just like other flashbacks they would soon disappear -- forever -- unless captured and held on the breast like an old friend just passing by, I pound furiously at the computer, consoling oneself that, oh well, deadlines can wait but not inspired moments which, when left unembraced even for only a fleeting moment, will surely don't come back as vivid and as sweet as they first came knocking on the consciousness.

A thing like that occurred to me sometime back when I was still with a World Bank-assisted project based at the Department of Finance in Malate, with the song about my town above sending off the 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.

The images were of course more than the fleeting and intangible shadows of a bygone era in Isinay country. For one thing, they came in full color, along with the scents and the sounds even, that were part of the now fast vaporizing mementos of a reluctant city dweller compelled to be like that by circumstances that point towards the need to earn a decent living and keep family and soul intact.

The Dupax I write about was, of course, the quiet, pastoral, and clean town of my birth that I used to know. It was not yet partitioned into the Sur and the Norte that it is now, even as the municipal hall was located in Malasin (a barrio whose only advantage over the old town was that it was more centrally located, was nearer more progressive Bambang, and had a Sunday market that sold vegetables, fish, meat, bolos, petrol lamps, plowshares, bolos, harmonicas, rubber for slingshots, raincoats, canned goods, clothing, blankets, and second-hand clothes that Mama then called relief but which we now call ukay-ukay).

Yes, Dupax... where I freely loved to roam.

WHEN I WAS in the elementary grades, my teachers (including Papa and Uncle Ermin) used to mention with pride in our Social Studies classes that Dupax was the biggest town in the whole of Nueva Vizcaya. That was many years before the creation of Quirino Province from what used to be called the forest region of Nueva Vizcaya. and there used to be a map of Nueva Vizcaya in every classroom at the Gabaldon and Pre-fab buildings showing Dupax was a giant compared to Bambang and Bayombong and the second widest was Maddela. I remember somebody told us the total population of Dupax then, including its barrios Malasin, Ineangan, Lamo, Inaban, Mabasa, Mangayang, Sta. Maria, Belance, Bitnong, and Palobotan, was around 20,000 and we took pride in that, thinking that at least we were more in number than Aritao and Santa Fe (towns that I heard used to be parts of Dupax during the Spanish colonization period).

It was also during my grade school years that Dupax was timber-rich, judging by the number of sawmills that it had. There was one sawmill in Belance, another in Banila, another in Carolotan, and one near our part the town – a stone’s throw from the cemetery. Almost without fail, rain or shine, fiesta or not, I think even on Sundays, truckloads after truckloads of logs passed by the road connecting my boyhood barrio, Iiyo (aka Surong and Palobotan), to the ili (town proper).

The logs came from the forests forming the headwaters of Carolotan and Navetangan rivers on the East or the forests upstream of Banila in the South. They were carried by muddy and rusty trucks they call “logging” the fronts of which, to my best recollection, were equipped with winch and steel cable sets. On lazy afternoons, the sound of the logging trucks approaching our side of town gave us chance to play a how-many-logs-in-the-truck guessing game. The choices were isahan (meaning the truck carried only one huge log), dalawahan (two logs), and tatluhan (three logs).

Note that decades later, when I was already a forester, I remembered those isahan logs of my youth when I saw a cross-section of a dipterocarp log mounted in front of the Bureau of Forest Development office in Davao City; I swore to myself that my town’s logs were definitely more humongous than those in Davao.

Replicas of those logging trucks, complete with green paint and tin-covered “engine” and swinging back four wheels, were made by the Mamaoag brothers and sold for 50 centavos (half peso). My friend and neighbor Oret (Aurelio Calacala) made them build one for him then – for only 50 centavos, he said.

I envied how he and his older brother Base (aka Junior), who also had one of those mini logging trucks, were able to haul home a small mountain of fuelwood from the sawmill by just using those “trucks.” I could also only watch with envious glee each time I would be in the company of the two brothers and other Isinay boys when on weekends or during vacation from school they rode their wheeled toys downslope on the hill across the road from the sawmill while waiting for the engines to stop, signaling that outsiders like us could now go rummage, dig, and pull from the huge piles of sawdust, slabs, barks, trimmings and edgings whatever sawmill wastes we could haul.

Okay, Papa did manage to build me a “truck” once and I was thankful for such rare occasions of fatherly care. In fairness, Papa’s truck had four fat and perfectly circular wooden wheels (most likely crafted in the elementary school’s carpentry shop) and a “head” made out of solid wood (but no GI sheet cover). It also had a body strong enough to wheel around on the gravelly road in front of our house any one of my smaller sisters then -- it was Tessie or Judith I think, but certainly not fat Arlyne nor sensitive Merlie.

But the truck was not as heavy-duty as those of the Calacala brothers and I think it was good for only a couple or so trips to the sawmill – plus a not so smooth downhill ride in the spot where other boys with logging trucks waited for the sawmill to open. No sooner had I began to like my truck than its sapwood wheels split, and I was scared (always scared) of Papa’s “gaddemet salamabet ubet!” scolding, so I just parked the thing on one corner behind the kitchen and went back to using sako (jute sack) for hauling slabs, edgings, trimmings and dipterocarp barks (this last one dried more quickly and were preferred for cooking because they ignited faster and produced charcoal).

Oret is long gone now (his older brother Base/Junior said he has gone missing, probably salvaged by his Japanese-treasure-hunting activity companions). But up to now I don’t know how I never got to try buying myself one of those beautiful mini logging trucks. Maybe it was because Papa already made me one. Or perhaps the Mamaoag brothers only made trucks for relatives like the Calacalas. And then, too, it might have been that I was not yet making money then from selling scrap iron, vinegar and catsup bottles, and discarded aluminum caserolas to the presumably Chinese “bote-landok” buyer that came to Dupax weekly.

But looking back now, I think I just was not destined to be a logger or even a logging truck driver – I was born to be an environmentalist forester. In those days when the grassy hill now occupied by the Bautista family was still open-access pasture and playground for the Isinay kids in my neighborhood, I would shun their rough play with their trucks and rather veer away to enjoy the song of the cicadas and the comfort given by the shade of the mango trees.

Some other days I would prefer to gather sapang, look for kitkitiwit fruits, or listen to the mountain breeze as it shook marasaba mangoes from their unreachable promontories rather than join my playmates' unending quarrels -- in Isinay -- on whether eroplanos were faster than jet planes, or whether mangoes were sweeter than mansanas, or whether Manila was farther than Bayombong.