As I was tucking the Bean into his sleeping bag on the floor he asked for a story. So I told him stories of a decade ago when I was working to construct a home roofed with cogon. The cogon grass grows tall in the lahar fields of Central Luzon. When harvested and dried, it is brown and tough and makes a fine roof. A bamboo rake with ominously rusty nails facing up was laid on the ground, and we would take turns beating the cogon against the teeth of the rake. We had prepared thousands of slivers of bamboo, each about 18 inches long, by cutting at pieces of the hollow sturdy grass with our itak, machete. We gathered the beaten cogon into tight bundles of three to four inches in diameter and tied them tight with the bamboo ties. The tied bundles were laid on the ground in piles. We would place three feet long, perilously sharp bamboo skewers, which we had prepared in advance, into the ground pointing straight up. Each cogon bundle was rammed down onto the skewer. The task took two hands, firmly grasping the cogon -- one on each side of the bamboo rod. It was not easy work. The cogon was itchy as hell. Sometimes my hand would slip during the impaling and the skewer would cut the inside of my forearm and blood would drip on the cogon. A complete rod of cogon would be laid flat on two bamboo rods prepared to keep the finished roofing tiles off the ground. Pile after pile of bundled, skewered grass were gathered over the space of a week and half of daily work. In the intense heat of the midday sun the other workers, all local rice farmers, and I would sit next to the rusty water pump under the shade of guyabano tree. They would banter in Ilocano and, with my Tagalog ears, I would strain to understand their stories. They spoke of women and of the harvest time. Someone would joke about penis size -- a variation on the same earthy humor to be found at every construction site the world over. There was one battered old metal cup at the pump and we all shared it. One day one of the boys from a neighboring plot of land caught a bayawak, a monitor lizard over three feet long. We grilled it and served it with vinegar and peppers. Another day as we were sitting looking up at the guyabano tree, one of the men pointed to a large, swollen nest of weaver ants, abuos, or colloquially, fire ants in the tree. We drew straws. The man with short straw, cursing goodnaturedly, climbed to the next and poked at its base with a stick. The ants fell down his neck under his shirt and stung mercilessly, but he kept poking till he had punctured the nest and the white ant larvae fell out into the plastic bowl he was carrying. We fried the ant larvae in oil and garlic. They were quite good. Once during the midst of work, someone starting yelling and gesturing frantically down the hill to the river. Everyone stopped and ran down to the river. I ran as well, although I did not know why, I just wanted to know why everyone was alarmed. Two carabao -- water buffalo -- were fighting the shallows. Carabao are among the most docile animals imaginable, but when they are angry it is terrifying. The river water was churned to mud. One carabao reared back on its back legs and crashed into the other. It was clear that the fight was not going to end until one of the carabao was dead. Two of the farmers -- the owners of the fighting carabao -- intervened, at the risk of their life, to end the fight. They succeeded in pulling the carabao apart. I would drive my locally made, owner jeep to the construction each day. The owner jeep, as they are called, was made with hand-me-down parts from old toyota cars, and a stainless steel body welded together at the local talyer. There were bandits and rebels in the area. I recall one day barbed metal spikes were thrown under my tires in an attempt to cause me to break down on a deserted stretch of road where I could be robbed. The spike stuck into my tire and, for some reason, it didnt go flat. I pulled the spike out and kept driving. A Manila mental institution was in the habit of dumping the unwanted insane in the countryside on back country roads. I remember one day driving between rice fields and tilapia fish ponds, when a fully naked woman carrying a long bamboo pole charged at me. The owner jeep had no doors and now windows, it was just a metal platform with chairs, really. She started hitting at me with her bamboo pole. I was afraid to accelerate for fear of hitting her. As I edged past her naked whacking, I got safely around her and was able to drive away. I remember another time there was a different naked woman wailing beside the road. I did not tell all of these stories to the Bean, but in speaking to him, I remembered, with a visceral feeling of sadness and longing, mixed with pride, those months over ten years ago. I remembered the trucks full of soldiers with machine guns that used to patrol the area; I remembered the elderly man who charged at the land surveyor yelling and waving his itak; the radio powered by a car battery; the Aeta tribesmen, not four feet tall, who would come down from the mountains to sell the deer meat that they had hunted with their bows and arrows. I remember the sixteen year old boy, who had managed to finish high school, and during our breaks in the shade wanted me to explain the Grapes of Wrath to him. I had been reading a copy before we started the workday each morning. And as far away as the dust bowl may have been, somehow it felt right to speak of Tom Joad.
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 05:00:31 +0000
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