River water

Rivers are a special place. Some of the best books I’ve read concern or revolve around rivers. The last one that I truly enjoyed reading was that by Norman Maclean, of course — the same guy who wrote about this river in Montana cut by the world’s great flood and its waters running over rocks from the basement of time. I read those lines several years ago and my mind took me back to that time when the Salog River in Leyte was a rock-strewn bed of sand and water spanned by a single-lane wooden bridge some 200 meters long that regularly got inundated or washed out in parts each time the weather threw a tantrum and its waters not just two or three feet high but three times that. I would sometimes think of the Salog River while in Bulacan whenever dark clouds overhead threaten to pour billions of gallons of water from the Pacific onto our little patch of Marilao, which is home, ostensibly, to the dirtiest river in the world. And I would think of that little wooden ribbon of a bridge already covered by a foot of silted brown floodwater, invisible to traffic but still passable because someone strung a long nylon rope across it to guide not just vehicles but people wanting only to go home from a long day of traveling across the then mostly unpaved stretch of highway from Tacloban in the north, down to Maasin in the south and beyond. The Salog River is where that long stretch of ribbon is cut, when timid passengers alight and wait for the waters to recede, but where some of the more intrepid drivers and motorists dared cross its surging anger, the perils to life, limb or property notwithstanding.

But the Salog is not all about misfortune. While a 200-meter long concrete bridge now spans the river, the result of lobbying by a local politician, the riverbed just below the bridge is one giant washing machine where one can have his soiled clothes cleaned for free. Sunburnt kids in shorts would swim next to a resting carabao just a few meters off a gaggle of laundrywomen thumping away with their palu-palo and baskets of clothes worn by gruff grown men toiling as kargador at the town pier or by farm hands who threw away the yoke and the nose ring at one end of the rope that controls the trusty carabao that labors from sunup to sundown in exchange for the gas and brake pedals of a tricycle. Such is life. The wife and I would wash the diapers of our firstborn in that river many times while I struggled to complete my college education or obtain employment, whichever came first. Disposable diapers were beginning to hit the local market then but obviously I could not afford them. What we had were run-of-the-mill lampin made of cacha cloth obtained from the local baker. We would soak them overnight with kerosene to remove their markings and they made for wonderful soil containment clothing. Because clip-on fasteners were not only hard to find but also expensive, we used good old safety pins that were not really safe because at two in the morning when one was drowsy but had to take care of an uncomfortable baby, inattention once resulted to a bawling bundle of agitation occasioned by an errant pin pushed a millimeter deeper than intended and past the cacha cloth and into frightened flesh. I must have been whacked by the irate mother beside me who would dwell on the subject of insensitivity even now some 30-odd years hence.

But she would love me for going with her to the riverside exercises once or twice a week where we would dry assorted baby apparel on makeshift clotheslines among river rocks that sap all water and moisture off the laundry in maybe an hour. Sometimes I would get a bonus when some comely lass or two would wash clothes some distance away and I would merely have to be careful the furtive glance was not caught or there would be hell to pay. At other times some nut with a flatbed truck would haul sand from upstream and it was all we could do not to get the laundry soiled by all that shoveling. It could also be a panting pair of carabaos allowed at times to take a dip after hours of dragging plowshares at a nearby cornfield, their constant sloshing agitating the sand as to foul the water with fine silt flowing rapidly downstream to where we were. But no one really cared that such agitation happened because the cool river water almost instantly cleared away of sand, silt or debris before it hit the next big rock downstream. Yes, it is that kind of water.

The last time I visited the Salog River was two years ago when I stood in the middle of the concrete bridge and saw to my horror that the river rocks were gone and in its place was a blue estuary probably a meter or two deep from bank to bank. In the distance, looking inland, was a gigantic mound of black sand looking to be transported elsewhere, at great profit to whoever was controlling its destination. I could no longer divine the piles of flat rock from where we would sit and punish soiled apparel with countless blows from the palu-palo. No one gets sand from the riverbanks anymore, assuming one secures a permit from the munisipyo and those bureaucrats even allow it, because there are no banks and in its place are deep cliffs instead. Saltwater mixes with the river now, the water turning jade green rather than its crystal hue in the past. The river’s mouth in the east, towards the Visayan Sea, is clearly visible now, and a number of pump boats are beached there, unattended for now. I wanted to swim that part of the river as a boy but never got the opportunity to do it and it is sad that I would likely never get to swim there at all. I have done estuary swimming in Mindanao while in college but not in the place where I grew up. Those exercises generate the most thrills in my experience, the taste of fresh and salty water washing all over you as you negotiate from one bank to the other.

So, on that day when I stood mid-bridge at the Salog River just after the sun popped up the Sta. Margarita mountains and soaked on the early morning dew, I wondered where all the rocks have gone and prayed that one day, I will have a satisfactory answer. In the meantime, I took a picture of that moment, my camera phone pointed west towards the mountains, pressed the home button and posted it on Facebook. It got exactly 33 likes.