by: Kerima Polotan
"Bahay Kubo" by Hugo Yonzon
"Bahay Kubo" by Hugo Yonzon
The Tarlac Dike that is reported to have cracked and sent thousands fleeing for their lives was the dike of my childhood. Many years ago I Iived in Tarlac, in a house off Tañedo Street whose kitchen overlooked that dike. It stretched from one end of town, from the railroad station all the way to Agana Bridge, and the dike was what I took to Tarlac High. People lived in rude little huts huddled close to the wall, on the land side, and from the dike as I walked by. I could look into their lives.
The dike curves ever so slightly in my memory, as though describing the arc of a slow ball. It was made of cement and had steps on either side, every often along the way. You could walkup to the ledge and walk down into the River if you wished, but the river was not the fearsome one reported today but a friendly, familiar one in which the debris of living floated-old chairs, dead pigs, empty sardine cans.
It never flooded in the years I lived there but the waters rose to the ledge when it rained, lapping against the wall. In summer the river behind my house disappeared, and it was the unending puzzle of my young life where it went because then in summer the river bed dried up so completely that we could cross it, my friends and I, balancing ourselves on the huge stones that the June rains hid, on our way to the barrios across, where the fruit trees awaited our plunder. And such plunder it was! Guavas, unripe mangoes, chicos, the fruits of childhood that haunt the periphery of the tongue no matter how far one has gone and what diverse tables one has sat at.
I had a good friend then who would later become one of the richest women in the province (or so I'm told); but I don't suppose she cares to remember the nipa hut she used to live in and the horse that pulled the rig, which was the source of their livelihood. I remember helping her walk their horse occasionally-a privilege, I thought, because it was a handsome animal. A calesa ride was five centavos, a fast and exciting race down main street behind a spirited animal, but since five centavos was all I had to live on every day, I took the dike instead, saving my money for a slice of cake at recess.
It was a cool, damp walk in the morning on the dike, and if all one thought of was getting to school, you could reach the back of the Trade School Building in ten minutes, walk down the steps, cross Romulo Boulevard, and be in time for the flag ceremony. But there were diversions to seeㅡlife stirring in the dark interiors of the dike houses, breakfast being set, children hushed, a wife nagging, a husband scratching himself at the window, clothes hung out to dry, flower pots watered, detours of the imagination that help the passerby and delayed him.
But the walk in the afternoon was the best part of all. We dragged our wooden clogs and our school bags, taking our time, my friends and I, thinking of home and supper. Along the dike the mothers called to their children; the houses sprang alive with kerosene lamps. The smell of the river would come up to us, and we would look across it to the other bank, talking of approaching summer, planning forays to melon patches.
On clear nights the river would glisten, one huge sheet of dark glass from our kitchen window. My friend has gone on to wealth and status, not too easily accessible to people these days, but I do enough remembering for the two of us. I suppose we weather everythingㅡI have survived her success without envy, and my reminiscences must leave her untouched. Only the wall two high school girls had thought would last a hundred years has crumbled, a casualty of government neglect and shortsightedness.
But my mind never lets go. The dike that the papers say has given way stands stubbornly in my memory, a sweep of cement and sand, and the paucity in my children's lives includes the absence of such a memory in their lives.
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