The Kulaman Plateau Mystery I

(This is the first of two parts.)

While I was inside the house the previous Sunday, June 14, I heard an extremely loud rumbling from the sky. The sound made me so scared that I decided to go out of the house and glance around, expecting something enormous, metallic, and on fire to appear out of the clouds and come crashing down on me. The strange sound went on for about thirty seconds to a minute, and then the air became silent again, as it usually is in most part of Kulaman Plateau. It took me I guess a minute more to calm myself. When I went back inside the house, I forgot rather promptly what had happened. It didn’t occur to me again until lunchtime the next day, when CNN Philippines reported about unconfirmed “reports” about a “plane crash” here in Sultan Kudarat Province.

That could have been the end of it for me. News about plane crashes generally don’t pique my interest. I can’t give a definite reason for it; perhaps it’s because plane crashes get almost everyone excited, and the popularity turns me off, as what I normally feel about things popular. Even if the crash happened in Kulaman Plateau, I wouldn’t give it much attention, much less write about it. I decided to create this post, however, when I found out that the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines denied the occurrence of such an incident, or accident, as though hundreds of people in the plateau merely smoked hemp together and hallucinated the same thing.

The thing did happen, whatever it was. I heard the sound myself, and reportedly there were some people who saw something, specifically an object in the sky that exploded or was on fire. The claims are true, and the appropriate government agencies should investigate them. It is frustrating to think that this incident will likely remain a mystery forever, as what happened to the unsolved medical enigma that struck Sitio Parreño, Barangay Tinalon, last year. The residents of the hamlet butchered and ate a couple of horses that had fallen ill or died within hours of one another, and the meat made the people sick. More than a hundred suffered from headache, diarrhea, and vomiting, and seven people died. I heard that the Department of Health conducted an investigation. The doctors suspected that the affliction was caused by a virus, and this is both interesting and worrisome because horse-to-human viral transmission is very rare. (And I would like to call it SNAV or Senator Ninoy Aquino virus, after the name of our municipality). The results of the tests, however, were inconclusive, probably due to the difficulty of going to the remote area and sheer lack of willpower and incompetence on the part of responsible government workers.

Some people in my village estimate the sound to have lasted five minutes. Some say ten minutes. My own estimate, as mentioned earlier, is merely thirty seconds to a minute. I’m fairly sure of my calculation, even if I didn’t look at any watch or clock during or after the incident. Time seems to stretch ten-fold whenever all you are doing is observe something. This is what I often feel every time I cook instant mami or instant pancit canton and closely observe the boiling time. I don’t like the noodles to be soggy, and there are still remnants in me of my old obsessive-compulsive self, so I always make sure that the time that elapses from putting the noodles into the boiling water to removing the pot from the fire is no more than three minutes, as suggested in most packaging. During such waiting time, I often feel that a minute is as long as five minutes. Furthermore, when the 7.2-magnitude earthquake hit Bohol and Cebu about two years ago, I was in Cebu then on the fifth floor of an eight-story building, crouched between the upper and lower bunks of a double-deck bed, waiting for the whole world to collapse on me. The shaking and rumbling of my dormitory seemed to me to go on forever, but I learned later from the news that the temblor lasted for about forty seconds only. I knew since then that time could indeed be relative or our sense of time may not be synchronized with a mechanical device.

Stories about what people here heard or witnessed that moment will surely be less accurate by the day. I assume I don’t have to explain how our own memory can deceive us. So I’m setting out here today my own account, and I’ll try to be as accurate as I can be.

When I heard the strange sound, I was seated in the couch in our living room, reading Pete Dexter’s Paris Trout. I don’t know what time it was exactly. It must be between 8 a.m. and 12 noon. I’m sure that it was morning because electricity in our town runs for twelve hours only, from noon to midnight, and the lights were not yet on that time. The sound was like a thunder. Let me describe the volume. Imagine yourself inside your house while it is raining, and then you see a flash of lightning outside. I’m sure you’ve experienced that. When a lightning is that near, the thunder that accompanies it is usually so loud that it makes your chest vibrate. The strange sound was as loud as that. So I thought it was just a thunder. I expected it to die out within a few seconds. It went on, however, for a little too long for a thunder. After seven or eight seconds, I decided to check it out. I went out of the house through the backdoor.

The sound was obviously coming from the sky in the west, but I couldn’t see anything. The sky was almost filled with thick white clouds. I don’t believe in aliens, or in humanoid aliens that drive a saucer-like spaceship, but I thought that time that the sound was perfect for such a spaceship. It only seemed fitting for a spaceship to emerge out of the clouds and fly toward our house like a giant Frisbee. I guess I thought of a spaceship because the previous night, I caught on HBO some scenes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, though the scenes I saw didn’t have a spaceship in them. I walked the length of our house toward the front yard. Because the noise was obviously not a thunder and sounded like a cranky engine of a large truck, I told myself that it must just be one of the very few six-wheeler trucks that ply our village. But there was no truck in sight; our house is far from the road. And a truck could only sound that loud if I was very near it, or my ears were pressed against its engine. It then occurred to me that the sound might be coming from a thresher; a harvest had been going on for a few days at the farm lot about fifty meters from our home lot. I looked at the farm and didn’t see any person or mobile machine. I also realized that threshers are for rice, and the crop in the farm is corn.

Twenty or thirty seconds since the sound erupted, it became fainter. It’s a plane, I thought. It’s just a plane, but it still sounds odd. I looked at the sky in the east, where I usually see passing planes to and from General Santos City, but clouds still kept me from seeing anything. After a few seconds more, the noise died down, and I became aware of another noise—a truck running in the road about a hundred meters downhill. I was sure it was a truck because it blew its horn. I was sure that that the earlier sound wasn’t a truck, but because the last thing I heard was something familiar and harmless, I didn’t dwell on the matter. I didn’t want my imagination to get away with me, because that happened a few months ago and I seriously hurt myself physically. (But this is another story.) I went back inside the house and continued reading my book.

(The second part will be posted tomorrow.)

Big Ants

If I’m not mistaken, I haven’t featured in this blog the types of animals Kulaman Plateau has. Let me start this week, and let me start small—literally. Let me show you my photos of a type of ant here in our place. The ants caught my attention because they’re big, seven or eight times bigger than the usual ants that bushwhack your cupcake crumbs. The color of the ants also fascinate me. The rearmost part of their body—that giant cleavage-less booty (sorry, I don’t feel like researching the scientifically accurate name for it)—is maroon, and the rest is black. While the skin of ordinary black or red ants seems transparent, the skin of my ants looks solid and reminds me of Iron-Man’s suit.

I saw the ants in a rarely used part of our house, and when I showed my photos to my mother, she told me that the ants were called hantik. She also said they were not really that rare. I had thought they were rare because I had never seen them before. I don’t know what happened, but it took me almost thirty years to find out that such ants were crawling, working, and propagating just around me. My mother added that the ants’ bite was very painful. I assumed that the pain, just like the size of the ants, was seven or eight times more intense than what ordinary ants could give. I took no chances. With a broom, I swept the ants away with their cobwebby camp. They’re no longer around.

The second time I saw such an ant was at the top of the Toro-toro. I was sitting on the ground with my fellow climbers when I noticed a huge ant crawling on my arm. I was delighted to see a hantik, but when I remembered my mother’s words about its painful bite, I immediately swept the tiny creature away. To see how large a hantik is compared to an ordinary ant, look at my third photo below.

Notes on a Murder

It happened eight months ago. It’s nothing but a distant memory to me now, but it haunted me for weeks, months, after it happened. I tried to write about it. I expected to come up with a meditative, exhaustive prose work. But what I had in the end was a feeble attempt at poetry and a lengthy status message that I decided not to post, realizing that likes were not what I was seeking and comments of friends would not make any difference.

It happened eight months ago, and until now, the killer or killers are still at large. The investigators didn’t even have a suspect. That’s Philippine police work and justice system for you. The best solution is prayers. The text below, which incriminates someone, may or should not be taken as facts of the case.

October 12, 2014
To Carry a Dead Body

A nephew of a cousin-in-law, that’s what you are
to me, not too distant for me not to care,
not too close for me to not know what to do.
So I help carry your body.

You are lying on a blanket carried by six men
like a baby sleeping in a hammock
sung to sleep by your loving mother, except
you’re too big, too heavy, and dead.
Your legs dangle out of the blanket.
The blanket almost sags to the ground
even if the men give
all their strength. Or maybe they can’t give
all their strength, for they don’t want their legs
to brush against the blanket, they don’t want
their pants to be soiled by the blood
oozing from your head
and seeping through the cloth.

We pull you up to the dump truck. An impossible task
it seems to be. But somehow we’re able to do it.
As the truck runs to the funeral home,
we still have to hold on to you, to the blanket,
for you might roll on the floor.
We don’t want you to be hurt because you
have suffered enough from the bullet
that a man put into your head
the previous night.

Your shin presses against my ankle
from time to time as I sit on a spare tire
beside you. You’re not yet too cold or too stiff.
You can pass for someone alive.
Your legs are lean yet taut, darkened by the sun,
streaked with mud. Have you
been plowing the field? Dirt has resided
in your toes, and only the base of your nails
have remained white.

We reach the funeral home and lower you
from the dump truck. It does not seem
so impossible this time, but the blanket
has shifted, and your lower body dangles
out, so I have to hold your thigh.
You can pass for someone alive. Or
maybe not, for when the other blanket,
which covers you, slips down, I see
your grimy forehead and half-shut
yellowish eyes on the blood-soaked sheet.
No, your mother did not put you
on this hammock.

A neighbor did. He who got irked
when you parked yourself
on the road last night and recited the poems
of a drunk.


November 1, 2014
A Day for Souls

Here’s a Halloween story. Three weeks ago, a man was shot dead at midnight about a hundred meters away from our home. He was a relative of a relative, so in the morning, I helped carry his body up and down the dump truck that brought him to a funeral home. He had been shot twice in the head, and though he had been dead for ten hours when we were carrying him, his head was still bleeding, the blood seeping through the blanket where he was lain. At some point, the blanket slid, and I had to hold him by his leg. It was my first time to touch a dead person. It was a chilling experience. But the most chilling thing about this story is that it is true, and until now, the policemen are still clueless as to the identity of the killer.

This Halloween, as we get ourselves busy with party costumes, may we spend some time remembering the victims of gruesome killings. May we be aware that there’s still so much to be reformed in the justice system of the Philippines, and may we care, for if met with apathy, injustice will eventually creep into our doors. More than ghosts, dead men walking, and psychotic serial killers, what we should be afraid of are our ordinary neighbors, even our loved ones. If suddenly pushed to the edge, They can kill us even if they love us. They can kill us even if they don’t want to.

White Flowers

I created this post, which contains mostly photos, simply to offset my previous few posts, which are long and purely text. I also want to emphasize again how easily flowers thrive here in Kulaman Plateau, due to the temperature, quality of soil, and abundance of rainfall. While I am not particularly fond of flower cultivation and anything that requires tilling dirt, I seriously wish the municipal hall would see how flowers could boost the local economy. Individual farmers could grow flowering plants and sell the blooms in the plains, while the local government should build and maintain parks to attract tourists. Just like Baguio. I assume there’s enough public land in the poblacion for a large park or two, and if it doesn’t rain for a long time, Kulaman River has enough water to keep the plants alive and blossoming.

Why I Maintain This Blog

I should be making a list in this post, but won’t, primarily because I have an aversion to listicles. A numbered list is supposed to make an article easier to read—light to the eyes and friendly to the memory. But it doesn’t work that way for me. I feel that a list insinuates to the reader that each item is important and should be given attention. My brain finds that stressful. I don’t want to remember ten persons, things, or reasons. I prefer going over dollops of words and even paragraphs and take note of just one or two truly important ideas that are stated in the article or can be inferred from it.

So no, this post won’t have a numbered list in it, but it will have a list all the same. I will enumerate the reasons why I keep on writing in this blog. But the five or so reasons will be embedded, at no particular distance from one another, in the sentences and paragraphs. So here they are:

When I decided to create this blog, it was for a purely altruistic reason, believe it or not. I wanted graduate students who were doing research on the Dulangan Manobo to have less trouble looking for reference materials. I wanted this blog to contain links to all possible online resources on the Dulangan Manobo. I know it sounds like I merely wanted to do what Google was already doing, but the idea of creating this blog in fact came to me out of my frustration with Google. It was time-consuming to sift through the results for, say, “Cotabato Manobo” or “Kulaman burial jars.” Because of search engine optimization techniques bloggers employed, the “most relevant” results often turned out to be blog posts that barely contained useful information and plagiarized from one another. So contained in this blog—especially in the Bibliography page, the News page, and the tags—are the truly relevant results, I dare claim.

I have pretty much scoured the Internet by now, more than two years since, for information about the Dulangan Manobo, so my original intent for maintaining this blog no longer holds true. It has been replaced by, among others, another altruistic reason: to help promote Kulaman Plateau as the next ecotourism hotspot. The place surely has the potential. It has a hundred caves, for one. The best that has been discovered so far, the White Cave of Kuden village, is one of the most beautiful in the world. Try googling the best caves in the world and compare their photos with that of White Cave. It would not be an exaggeration to say that White Cave is at par with the others. There are other beautiful things in Kulaman Plateau aside from caves, but I’m not going to expound them here. Please check my other posts.

I won’t claim, though, that I’m doing good in promoting the touristy qualities of Kulaman Plateau. I call a piece of shit a piece of shit, so I don’t sugarcoat anything about the place. I have posts about how bad the road here is, how incompetent the government officials can be, and the like. I don’t want to promise paradise to anyone who might be enticed to explore the place from reading this blog. So I help promote Kulaman Plateau, but I’ll never call it a haven or anything. The most generous description I’ll say of it is that it is a rough, raw beauty. Exploring this place is like riding a horse, not making love to a woman. It will take at least a decade for this place to be friendly to vacationing retirees. But, backpackers who like roughing it, I invite thee.

I’m also maintaining this blog for future writers and researchers. I want to record even the inane facts of living here in Kulaman Plateau because it might someday benefit writers of local history or historical fiction. I don’t want them to have the same difficulty that I’m having. I’ve written a few stories set in the past, and it was difficult for me to create characters and scenes with verisimilitude because I don’t know how ordinary everyday life was like back then. I couldn’t find good sources to draw my stories from. Someday, say, 2050, writers writing about the 2010s would be thankful to this blog for recording how different Kulaman Plateau it will be from today—or, hopefully not, how unchanged it will be. I may not be able to brilliantly document or make sense of my generation today, but one writer in the future might be able to by usings as a source, but not plagiarizing, my humble writings.

Now let’s go to my selfish reasons for maintaining this blog. The main item on this subject is my goal to keep my hands moving—to write regularly. I believe in what experts say that writing is like dancing and playing basketball—the more you do it, the better you become. Writing posts for this blog is a good exercise. I won’t run out of things to write about—from humdrum daily lives of farmers to noisy fiestas and noisier horse fights, from dreary village centers to magnificent caves in hidden locations, from the meager meals of many locals and tribal people to exotic food. I write here mostly in a conversational style, so I’m able to write fast, to write as I think. All that I write here will be published, so while writing, I don’t have to worry about the taste of the editor or the superiority of the work of other contributors, which can intimidate and suppress creativity. I sometimes skip copyediting, for it can be tiring and time-consuming. (Once in a while, though, I review old posts and make necessary corrections.)

I’m also using this blog as an online CV and to keep track of my literary progress, if I may call it that. The page about the blogger includes a list of my published pieces. But that’s most likely the most personal, vain, shameless, or uncensored I’ll share here. I’ll spare you from two cents’ worth on the latest national issues, rants on how unfair life is, and names-less accounts of sexual trysts. (Not that I have a lot to share in those departments.) This blog is not about me. I am only one of the thousands of residents of Kulaman Plateau, and I hope to keep that in mind.

A Note on Human Behavior

The previous Holy Week, when my younger brother, my nephews, and I visited some interesting spots in Bagumbayan town, we didn’t have a laid-out itinerary. It was my first time in that part of Kulaman Plateau, and I didn’t know where we should go and how much time we needed to reach and enjoy each place, so I didn’t insist on having a schedule, list of things to bring, list of things to buy, and what have you. So we winded up barging into people’s kitchens and cooking our food there. It was, for me, the weirdest of the things that we did—weirder than sleeping on a tarpaulin used for drying corn, hitching with other groups in exploring caves because we didn’t have our own flashlights, and stuffing ourselves (six persons) in a motorcycle that, at the kind of road we were traveling, should be carrying three persons only at most, including the driver.

My companions, of course, asked permission to use the kitchens, but I still felt as though we were marauders. I don’t visit anyone’s home unless I have texted or called first and the owner of the house has told me that I could be accommodated. In the three houses we went to, we just parked in their yards, said we haven’t had our meal yet, and asked, “May we cook our rice here?” The owners of the house would say yes right away, as though they were just asked to lend a ballpen or anything that is not private or intimate. For me, letting someone use your pot and wash in your sink is akin to baring your soul. By letting someone into your kitchen, you are revealing to him your socio-economic status, sanitation habits, and personal taste. In any case, my nephews showed no hesitation when they asked the favor. In that part of the world, barging into people’s kitchens seemed a natural thing to do.

That’s one good thing about community spirit, about living in a rural or mountainous area, where everyone knows almost everyone. If you suddenly find yourself without a roof to shield you from the rain, without a bed or floor to spend the night on, without a hearth to cook your rice in, and even without anything to eat, you can count on the nearest house in sight to take care of you and your emergency needs. Try doing that in a crowded urban neighborhood. Your neighbor’s mouth would utter a polite yet vague excuse why he couldn’t be of help even if he wanted to, while his eyes would dart from one spot of your body to another, checking if you’re hiding a knife or something, for he would suspect you’re just trying to find a way inside his house to steal his iPhone or HDTV.

I’m not saying, of course, that people in the boondocks are good and people in the cities are bad. Dichotomies are for dummies. I want, in fact, to show you the two sides of the community, or communal, spirit in rural areas. Because there’s no strict sense of privacy and property in rural areas, some people can sometimes be shameless, unmindful of the difference between sharing and stealing. When we left my cousin’s fish pond after letting out most of its water and catching a moderate number of fish, one of the neighbors took over without permission and, using an improvised device for electrocuting fish, was able to catch bigger fish than we did. I didn’t see the man myself, but the other neighbors told on him to my cousin. I even gathered that the man had been doing the same thing whenever my cousin and her family were away.

I try to understand why the man must have felt he was entitled to a share in the product of the pond. One reason I can think of is that the pond is actually a stream dammed with rock and soil. He must have felt that the stream, like the sources of potable water, belongs to everyone in the community. I have observed the same mentality in my own village. If you have a well in your property, you keep it clean and make improvements at your own expense, and your neighbors are free to fetch water from it anytime they want. (Much of the village now, though, is served by a water system.) If a stream passes through your property, your neighbors are likewise free to catch fish, crabs, and bakbak (frogs) in it and gather shells, takway (taro runners), and tangkong (swamp cabbage) from it. My cousin’s thieving neighbor, however, failed to take into account that my cousin’s family spent effort, time, and money damming the stream and releasing commercial tilapia hatchlings into the water. And what I find most disagreeable about him is that he gained unfairly from my nephews’ labor on that particular day. My cousin did not allow her sons to empty the pond of its water and fish, so the barriers were returned to their place and we left. By this time, the water level was already very low, and it was easy to catch fish, especially if you were using a device to electrocute them. The neighbor took this opportunity to obtain a week’s worth of free meal for his family. It looked as if my nephews spent the whole morning shoveling mud and sweating buckets just so he could conveniently pick up fish at noontime.

Let me conclude this rant by employing a lazy writing technique—by telling the reader that this post is getting too long. That’s it. I want to say that living in an open and close-knit community has its endearing and frustrating sides. Of course, I’ve long known that, but I had not given it much thought, I had not been keenly aware for a long time of the specific situations until I decided to disrupt my humdrum everyday life and went someplace else for the Holy Week. This is what travel does to you. (And I mean travel, not vacation.) It makes your blood run a little faster. It makes your eyes see a little farther. It makes you a little more alive, more human, than you have been.

My 150th Post

I plan to create at least 500 posts for this blog, and this means that, if my average number of posts per year is 50. I have to maintain this blog for at least 10 years. I still have more than seven years to go.

There’s no shortcut to my 500th post, so I have to do it one post at a time, and to mark my progress, I’ll allow myself a celebratory post for every 50th post. So here it is—my 3rd celebratory post, my 150th blog post.

I think I sound silly in the preceding paragraphs. A “celebratory post” simply means the title goes something like this: “This is my xth post.” It is still not much different from other, ordinary posts.

For this post, I’m featuring a very short video I took of a Dulangan Manobo dance. The dance was performed last year in the fiesta of my village. The quality of the video isn’t very good because it was nighttime and I used the zoom feature of my camera. I didn’t go near the stage to shoot because I didn’t want any undue attention. The audio is good, though, because the speakers of the sound system were loud. The dancers were Dulangan Manobos studying in the local elementary and secondary schools.