First of a series
THE floods — made more morbid by tales of corruption and the recent deadly one somewhere in Nepal — have prompted me to take another hard look at how we relate to nature.
Fifty years ago, while still a teenager, I helped my parents till a small rice field. Often, family members did the cultivation, planting and weeding. Farmworkers always helped, having seen how the other rice farmers did it. But paying for their wages would have been costly, and we were usually short on cash. We had relative plenty from survival crops, like camote and gabi, because my parents Hilario and Maria also worked hard on our upland farms during the rice-farming offseason.
My hometown in Eastern Samar lacked rice fields. But I liked rice farming because I had other interests. I loved snaring wild birds and putting them in cages. There were schools and schools of them in rice fields during summer, when the fields turned golden, the time crops announced they were ready for harvest. Like us humans, other living creatures were drawn to the free food. There were red maya (Lonchura atricapilla) birds that could cover whole fields when they descended from neighboring valleys. Flying together, they formed like a giant Arabian rug, hovering in a variety of shapes most likely orchestrated by how the winds blew, or wherever the scarecrows surprised them, before landing on their feast.
Yonder, farther afield at the edge of valleys where sloping hills came into view, were dalakit (Ficus philippinensis) trees that stooped to almost ground level when heavy with ripe fruit. Their branches drooped even more when a variety of other birds, wild pigeons and korokoro (Phapitreron leucotis) among them, feasted on the fruits. The flapping of their wings in a feeding frenzy was a stunning sight.
But I spent most of my time around the rice fields where quails were easier to trap. Like mice, this mostly pedestrian, pint-sized bird has a big appetite for grains, especially rice. Hours on end under the midday sun, I set traps between stalks of native rice — which were much taller than what the rice farmers plant today — and seemingly oblivious of the heat.
I’m not sure now if I did it for reasons other than vanity. The bird meat, when cooked over an open fire, smelt like any other protein-rich food. My friends and I sometimes gathered to barbecue them. They were delicious to the taste. But being small, they hardly satisfied hungry bellies. No meal was worth the effort required to cook and set them out on the table. Other ends could hardly be justified as well. Not being born to be domesticated, they could not be tamed and kept as pets for longer than a couple of weeks. In the end, these irreplaceable treasures of nature were simply wasted.
At 66, I feel like a remorseful accountant. The examination of how I contributed to the melancholic poverty of nature is a sobering thought. Under a mango tree, in a place where I grew up before the search for livelihood sent me to faraway places, the table with either a laptop or a chess board on top of it has yet to materialize. I have long desired to set this table up. To me, chess or writing can consume the hours otherwise claimed by a conscience nagged with remorse. But, somehow, the work had not kept pace with the desire. There are raw materials nearby, mostly scraps of hardwood probably discarded years ago. What adds to the lack of will is that neither the laptop nor the chessboard exists.
This nook is in the backyard, just a few steps from the old house my maternal grandfather built two years before I was born. He built it with hardwood — concrete materials being mostly unheard of in that era. Yet it has survived the most devastating typhoons that hit the country, including the 2013 Super Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) that claimed no less than 6,300 Filipino lives and left almost 2 million families homeless. No other proof of his elite craftsmanship can be more compelling. But quite unlike him, I could not get around to building this table even in my idle time.
I also have the weather to blame. An hour of downpour would leave the mango tree flooded for several days. This has been a good enough excuse for me to postpone putting in the woodwork needed to assemble the fixture. Every time I look up and see the clouds gathering low, rain is sure to follow, even during summertime. I could tell this was not how it used to be. It makes me miss my youth in the rice fields when the climate kept the seasons true to their calendar. Today, the seasons have lost their rhythm. It can rain any hour. The sun may or may not show up at all. Or it shines imposingly, generating heat beyond bearable levels.
So, the table under the mango remains unticked among the priority to-do list. I realize now that many things are left undone despite keeping oneself busy in one’s youth. The lifespan of Filipino males averages at 67 to 71 years, so the pressure to rush things up a bit mounts, knowing there is little time left while there are still lots of promises to keep, “before I sleep.”
When Robert Frost wrote in 1922 the following lines: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep,/But I have promises to keep,/And miles to go before I sleep,” he painted the contrasting colors of a quiet, alluring peace of nature with that of a restless pull of social duties and human obligation.
To be continued on Sept. 5, 2026
email@aberia.xyz