Stroller at Large

As my very first entry in this blog, this piece should give you a preview of the contents of this web site, and who your sylvan stroller is.

Yes, this is how I look like. This photo was shot by a brother-in-law one sunny day early this year when we went to my farm in Sinagat -- about eight kilometers from central Dupax del Sur, Nueva Vizcaya, the Philippines -- so that, among other things, he and my sister and their only son could enjoy a real farm and discover how it differs from the virtual farms and animals they play with in "Farm Ville" and even the actual ones in Australia.

Aside from showing proof that I have two legs to bring me to tree-rich places (plus a bulging tummy as added reason for doing more strolling), I inserted this picture for two reasons:

First, this photo will serve as memory trigger that I shall go back to in case of writer's block. It was taken near where as a kid my Ilocano maternal grandparents introduced me to the joys of life in the hills, the fields, the river. A kilometer or so downstream was the spot where I speared my first big dalag (mudfish) and where, after work in the fields, my fellow farmkids would go romping by the river often using carabaos as diving board as well as bait for the blood-sucking leeches that we played with. When I was much younger, on a tiny farmhut downriver, I used to be lulled by the song of crickets and cicadas and the gurgling of water as it played with the rice while in the nearby kaingin (swidden) crows, martins, bulbuls and sometimes monkeys would quarrel over some ripe papaya or a bunch of plantain.

Yes, I grew up among rice-growing, upland-farming, and river-using folks when my hometown was still a logger's and hunter's paradise and its rivers were still fish-rich and sylvan. I shall write about the sights, scents, and sounds of those days, including the then feared indigenous forest dwellers that used to people it.

Many of my entries in this website shall be memoirs of my nature-blessed boyhood. But they shall be so written to at least be of help to readers, historians and researchers interested in how life was in that part of Planet Earth ...when deer, hornbills, monkeys and other wildlife were still aplenty ...when lowlanders still avoided going to the hills in summer when the bagbag (Erythrina) tree put forth its fiery blossom signaling the Ilongot braves' head-hunting season ...when native carp and mudfish literally jumped in the then rarely murky nor drying river ...and when it was still normal for barrio kids to have slingshots, bolos, bamboo stilts, and sardine cans for toys; turtles, martins, monkeys, and May beetles for playmates; and the grasshopper-rich hills, dragonfly-abounding streams, cicada-adorn groves, and sun-bathed ricefields for playground.

My second reason for pasting the photo here is to also remind me to look at the days ahead and not merely recollect the bygone days. In other words, to do something positive rather than cry over spilled milk.

Long before I bought this land in 1994, the hills above it and certainly all the other hills across the river and vicinity used to be jungle. The river that serves as its eastern border also used to be merry and full of clear and fish-friendly water from the timber-rich mountains of Carolotan upstream. Today the hills are a paradise of cogon grass that go tinder-dry and prone to wildfire during the sweltering months of March to May, the same time of the year when the river and the mountain springs that feed it run dry.

Efforts have been made by the still few farmers in the area to "reforest" the hills to mango, citrus, and gmelina. In 2005 when I went there to supervise the scraping of the gravel and rocks (some the size of a carabao) that buried a huge part of my ricefield, I also learned that a barangay ordinance was in force prohibiting the use of electronic fisher to catch goby, catfish, mudfish, tilapia, shrimps, crabs and whatever else could be caught in the river for food.

Positive local initiatives at conservation, we might say. But I shall go out on a limb and put all that I learned from my years of "strolling" in academe and in projects run/funded by the United Nations, the Ford Foundation, the World Bank, the ADB, etc. to transform the three-hectare patch into a real-life "farm ville" complete with free-ranging chicken, tethered goats, penned ducks, organic vegetable plots, a "bahay-kubo" (plus a tree version of the crops listed in the song), a series of upland fishponds, and indigenous Philippine forest-trees and fruit-trees all around.

My dream is to walk and work my talk and creative juices as a forester, environmentalist, extension worker, and nature lover and use this patch of land between the barren hills and the drying river as my live canvas as well as community learning site for agroforestry, biodiversity, soil and water conservation, organic farming, and climate-change mitigation and adaptation.

It will not be easy but I shall try, brick by brick, to lay the foundations for this vision -- enough to warrant a blog entry each for the twists and turns that I shall encounter as I stroll towards the fulfillment of that dream.

#88 Amistad, Camp 7, Baguio City
Saturday, July 17, 2010