Leaves Over Water

Last year my project Quezon was mostly a solo affair. This year though, things are shaping up to make it a real family venture.

Pam has gotten on to it, as she has accompanied me three times already and seems to have embraced the “vision” of developing the parcels of land in our name.

Just recently, it was Cae’s turn. I was very apprehensive to take her with me. Mauban, with its tedious 4-hour road trip, unpretentious rural conditions, and lack of urban highlights, might be too lifeless or boring for someone as “kikay” as her. The past few days were dreary with rains too, compounding the possibility that she might find the experience traumatizing. Indeed, who would want to wade through a muddy rice field in the rain?

But off we went, on a Thursday at that, because I had to pay our real estate taxes, a couple of which have been overdue for years. Cae and I wore jeans, anticipating bad weather. Fortunately, the sun was out during our whole stay there. It was my first time to handle tax payments. It was a breeze as the municipal workers were very courteous and accommodating; unlike in a few others I’ve gone to (and swore never to visit again). It also felt good to be handling these things myself, as I really want to be on top of matters concerning our properties in Mauban. Cae sat beside me at the desk of the employee who handled our transaction. When I told her with a slight smile that someday she’d be doing these dealings herself, she looked at the papers in my hand, nodded and smiled back. Positive enough.

Afterwards, while we headed back to the car, the sun still shone brightly, it was still mid afternoon, and I wanted to maximize our stay. I took her to my aunt’s Villa Celerina up in the hilly terrain past barrio Lual. Upon seeing that expanse, with its columns of coconut trees, evenly cut grass, and charming nipa huts, Cae’s words stirred my gladdened soul: “Wow daddy, when are we going to have something like this?”

And I said soon, soon. Our property in Barrio Bato, an hour’s walk away, was twice bigger than my aunt’s villa, and I have promised to start developing it this year. Even as Cae reveled in this rural beauty, my farmhand Rene was there deep in the hills of our land, cutting the overgrown vegetation to fully reveal its expanse.

My gladness comes from seeing a possible continuity, from bridging a generational gap (real or imagined), from being assured that, this early, Pam and Cae (and years later, Caehl!) are aboard this happy journey not so much to share in the costly burden but at least to inspire me to see it through (and take over should I falter – though that’s not an option!)

In my youth, I was blind and deaf and dumb to the beauty of this inheritance, right up to just a few years ago. I hope I’ve started to communicate its loveliness to Cae this early in her life, and ward her off from that sense of indifference that had taken hold of me and my brother, when we were growing up.

* * *

It’s one of Tokyo-Tokyo’s successful draws for the hungry crowd: bottomless rice bowls. Order a meal and you can have as many rice as you want. Like anything free, it always brings a smile to my face (and doubtless, to countless rice-loving customers) because you know you’re getting a meal that’s really sulit.

Nowadays, though, we’re having all the rice that we need right at home - be it breakfast, lunch, dinner, or anytime in between. It’s a bountiful blessing coming from the palayan that’s now up and being maintained in Quezon. What we’re enjoying now are the fruits of but the first harvest last September. The next harvest is scheduled for late March or early April and we still have 6 sacks of palay remaining in the storeroom — more than enough to last for the next 6 months!

On certain still hours at home, i sometimes hover around the kitchen and look back to the times when Pam used to worry about our constantly dwindling weekly supply of rice. During the irrational country-wide rice shortage that occurred last summer it was no easy matter to always allot P200 every week (sometimes every 4-5 days) to buy 5 kilos of rice. It’s such a relief now to see that our small rice bin is always full. When i go to Quezon again this middle of January I’ll be bringing in a fresh batch of perhaps 100 kilos, which will last for about a month and a half.

This bounty is evident in our widening waistlines. Funny how I recall that, just over a year ago, I swore to skip eating rice because I needed to shed off the ‘07 holiday pounds that I gained so I could properly train myself back to my old badminton form. Now, everything’s been turned upside down. I’m not playing badminton anymore, and I’m gorging myself on rice. Even if I get home around 10 pm I’ll tend to consume at least two helpings of rice, never mind if I’ll be sleeping in two hours. For breakfast, there’s fried rice, which is even more delicious.

They say Buddha’s belly is a sign of plenty. Not that I’m complaining, but I hope none of us in the family end up that big…

That’s what they call this season. Literally “stealing-from-the-weather.”

It’s when the farmers, their small scythes ever-ready, hold constant vigil over the fickle turns of the climate. They huddle indoors while it rains and then charge back to the fields as soon as even the weakest of sunlight peaks through the clouds, “stealing” whatever they can out of such short-lived opportunities.

A more ominous term is “Pabulukan ng palay.” When rice turns to rot.

Palay, apparently, needs to be exposed to strong sunlight for the better part of a day to dry out moisture and make it last for months and even up to a year in storage. Harvest season during these stormy months of August and September are filled with portents of rice spoilage, poor yields, and wasted sweat and money. The rain could come down for weeks on end, jeopardizing one’s chances of laying out the newly harvested rice in the sun. Many tears have been shed over hundreds of kilos of rice that developed molds inside their sacks because they were inadequately dried out. Many heads have shaken in hopeless, wordless frustration at the rains.

It was in this kind of atmosphere that my aunt and I arrived last Saturday in Baranggay Santol in Mauban, Quezon, to finally realize the fruits of months of toil and prayer. The week prior to our arrival was completely sunny, straight through – unusual for a season when typhoons seem to arrive every two weeks. So I was really expecting it to rain – but when it did rain on the day of our trip I was still dismayed. Why, of all weeks, did the downpour have to come during our harvest time? The whole of Saturday we stayed in the newly-build hut, and our farmer, Rene, and I could only shake our heads at the irony of it all.

In fact, it wasn’t a simple downpour, it was an outright tempest. Typhoon “Marce” swept from the northeast and flooded Metro Manila and northern Luzon, showering itself over the south as well. News footage showed people and cars wading across several flooded parts of the metro. There was talk that the storm was actually just in Quezon’s neighboring province of Bicol. My distress deepened. It seemed we won’t be destined to have an easy time of it, I told my aunt. We’d have to be tested completely.

By some divine intercession, the storm veered off and Sunday dawned fair enough to allow Rene and his crew to start cutting off the rice stalks. Never have my prayers centered this intently on the weather before. For the first time in a long, long while, I felt how it is to do something that hinges on nature’s inclination.

Although it rained intermittently in the next three to four days, it was lighter than Saturday’s downpour, so the cutting and gathering of the rice stalks continued. They even managed to separate the chafe and bag the grains in a process called “blower.”

The next step was to dry out the grains in the sun – and that was the biggest challenge. I checked the clouds and star patterns Thursday night and slept praying for the sun the next day. Thankfully Friday was sunny yet gusty. Rene opened two sacks and spread out the grains evenly on the drying mat along the roadside. But the sunlight remained feeble throughout the day. Since we had to come back to Manila already on Saturday night, my aunt gave up and said that we won’t be able to bring home a sack of rice that was adequately dried out. While I myself was resigned to this despondent thought, I knew that if Saturday morning were to be completely sunny, we might still make it.

It was a long shot. To completely dry out the grains that we intended to bring home, we needed a day that was really summery-hot. I didn’t pray as hard anymore when I settled down to sleep. But I noticed that, even though it was a cloudy night, the wind was very calm. I didn’t know if I was reading the nocturnal weather right, but I deduced that if a night was cloudy and very windy, the following day would be somewhat blustery too. But there was no wind. At the edge of the horizon, I even glimpsed a star or two. That kept my feeble hopes up.

The next day was a total miracle. The sun broke through the clouds at around 7 am, its brilliance strong enough to banish the despondency of the past days. Mats were laid out on the length of the roadside leading to our fields as every farmer rejoiced. The heat dried out the gains by lunchtime, and Rene replaced them in the sacks to cool off in time for pounding at 4 pm, to strip the husks off. Thus, after being away for a full week, my aunt and I didn’t come home empty-handed.

It was a success, but the twists and turns of the weather were a reminder that we could have easily failed too. We could still lose the crops now in storage if it should rain again without letup for several days. Then there’s the possibility of theft. These are desperate times after all.

Really there’s no room for complacency. Farm life cannot be smooth sailing. I’d rather learn it the hard way this early. They say harvest time in the summer months are more bountiful and laid-back. Nevertheless, I’ll still cross my fingers and be armed with a hundred prayers when we do get there.

* * *

As harvest time looms, I’ve been
going back and forth to Quezon almost every weekend now, checking up on the
status of the stockroom I’m having built, buying more building materials,
paying off the two workers. 

Never have I wished this badly to
drag the remaining months to their end. Never have I had a year strung like
this on a single thread of story, the story of building an actual rice field,
with all the months of planning and prayer to look back on. I can’t wait to
continue the story on to the next and much bigger plot of land, a
four-and-a-half hectare piece just itching to be developed, just a kilometer or
two away from the rice field.

One can’t really blame me if,
whenever I get back to the city, I feel sluggish and wistful, wanting so much to
go back there. There, your problems are nature-related: how the harvest will
turn up, how much the coconuts are going to produce kopra, how the weather will be, who’s going to be assigned to chop
the wood, cut the grass, make the clearing, take up some land issue with the
baranggay kapitan, and all that.

My mind can spin round and round
these tasks and try to come up with solutions and make financial calculations
to get them done and never get tired. In a way, this must be how it feels to
manage your own business: put in 110% of effort and enjoy it because it all
rebounds to your benefit. In contrast, I put in 100% of effort to my work as a
creative agency personnel and I get so beat up at the end of the day (or even
earlier). There are clients to attend to, write-ups to do, meetings and endless
discussions – all artificial problems that we manufacture in the name of
corporate survival.

Sure, it pays the bills, so I’m
grateful. But once the farm is fully in place and producing enough (and by
“farm” I’m talking not just about the ricefield, but all the pieces of
properties I’m trying to fit together), I hope to be done with my job. I’m
inspired by Pam’s assertion that she will retire at age 50. I can’t say anymore
that’s still a long way off – it’s just around the bend of 40, the ultimate
middle age we’ll reach in 3 years’ time. That’s why I’m buckling myself down to
business – this farming business – if only to give her and all of us a
beautiful, productive hideaway in the province.

The stockroom may look claptrap for
now, but by the end of next week, it would be done – just in time for harvest
– my first significant step to reclaiming a long-neglected birthright.

It seems I’m going to have to go through the tightest financial squeeze possible just to get this Quezon Project going. I’ve already paid the workers who planted the rice, I’ve paid my foreman Rene all his dues, and I was basically just waiting for harvest time this September. I was hoping to just rent one of the cottages beside the field as stockroom for the palay
(for, say, P500 a month), and so I thought I already put a ceiling to my expenditure.

But then it shot through the roof. I visited the lola who lives alone in the cottage just beside the field, hoping to negotiate and convince her to rent out her hut. It turned out though that her patched-up, plywood-and-tin-roof affair of a house is too rickety to hold up sacks of palay. It might hold 5 to 10 sacks, doubtfully at that, but certainly it would give way under the weight of 40 to 50 sacks. Just to test its frailty, I did a low jump (just two or three inches off the floor) — and the whole shack shook when I landed. I thought she was just holding out for a higher rent, but no, she was being realistic.

I inquired next from the other shanty owners if they had space available, but though they were willing, their shanties were just as frail. It dawned on me that I had no choice. I would have to suck it up and come up with money fast — or else harvest time would come and the palay would have no shelter against the elements. I absolutely loathe the thought of incurring more debt (for my pride and for the fact that the harvest earnings would just go to paying it off). But I gulped down the lump in my throat, scrambled for possible loan sources, and finally got the grace that I needed.

The hut is now being built. It’s a 12 ft x 12 ft structure of marine plywood wrapped around coco lumber, with a modest front deck just wide enought to accommodate two chairs, and supported by four cement posts underneath to ward it off against possible flooding.

It’s amazing that six or seven months ago, none of this was even in my mind. If I had known beforehand that the total cost of this project would send me in quite a debt like this, I might have balked. Sometimes it’s really better to just plunge ahead, plan for only so much, and just have enough faith to say that those out-of-the-blue obstacles will not derail you.

* * *

The idea was conceived last
March, planned and acted upon last April, nurtured throughout May, and by June,
yes, we now have a rice field. Three-fourths of a hectare of land that was
parched and idle for more than 10 years is now well contoured and springing the
greenery of the grains of life.

I bow to my trusted farmer
Rene for his efficient hands that coaxed such life back from the soil. Cliché
as it sounds; I couldn’t have done anything without him.

And he in turn, couldn’t
have done it without aid from a number of people – the tractor operator, the
carabao plowman, the snail (kuhol) pickers,
the planters (nagtatalok), and many
others, including some of my aunts and uncles and their helpers.

 And I, in turn, couldn’t
have done it without money. Since this project started, I have spent over P21,000. I thank God for the relatively steady stream of sideline jobs that
made this possible.

Everything is just starting
– there are definitely bigger things to come. There’s an even bigger property
already in my name waiting to be developed – four and a half hectares of jungle
terrain planted with coconut trees which, according to Rene, would provide an
even more  exciting income for us.

I wish I could have done
this sooner – but I was so immature then. Like anything in nature, these land
projects need the right combination of time, resources, and yes, maturity, to
come to fruition.

Life moves fast, life alters in the span of a few weeks, a few months. Half a year ago, I had no idea that building a rice paddy – actually turning into a farmer, for that matter — would consume me.

Sometime
in 2006, I had set my sights on developing something like a fruit farm in five
years or so. Pam and I even talked about how the year 2011 carried a certain mystique,
because of a confluence of events (she’d finish off the car loan; I’d be able
to cash in on my pension plan and start preparing our properties in Quezon).
Mine were hazy plans, and only the cement posts I had commissioned a worker to
build and erect around one property were cast in concrete, literally and
figuratively.

When my tita and I went last March to oversee the laying of these
posts (and attend a clan reunion), we were astounded to learn that the aqueduct
for irrigation running along the side of the rice paddies and the road has finally been fixed and channeling water already. For ten years or so, that irrigation
trough had been abandoned by the local government, drying up hopes for the
paddies on both sides of the road. It’s been fixed for a year now and in fact
we came at a golden harvest time and received a lot of greetings from farmers
offering to work our land.

Plans were laid down fast and I prayed for signs
that would tell me if this was meant to be. As it happened, they were already
around me:

Financial blessings in the form of lucrative writing jobs on the
side came as early as February; and the windfall is coming in already.

My other
aunt, Tita Alice, alerted us about the presence of a new worker who settled
temporarily in her property, looking for work.

Then the nationwide rice
shortage crisis exploded around March—laughably incidental it may seem, but I take
it as a higher calling, seriously.

I stressed over these, I crammed my mind
with new knowledge about rice measurements like cavans , balde, calculated prices of binhi,
learned about certain workers’ rights under Agrarian Reform, about pilapil and how long it would take and
the going rates to till using a carabao or a handheld tractor. Rene, whom I
have already hired, reports from time to time about the progress of work, and
now we’re moving inevitably towards rice planting time.

I pray it progresses
with care and certainty. Many positive developments are also happening in the province of Mauban as a whole. The road to it is
100% paved, and I expect a lot of inheritors that have settled in Manila to turn back again and
dream, like me. Mayor Bantayan, who is of Pastrana descent and is a second
cousin (his mom and my tita were first cousins) is aggressively pushing for
many infrastructure developments after winning over a long-time family rival in
the last elections.

It’s an exciting time, an exciting life that I look forward
to sharing with Pam, my kids, my in-laws, my Tita most of all, and yes, my
brother, despite his seeming lack of interest in this project. I hope the profits of this rice paddy will cascade to help develop the other projects I
envision for our other properties.

Thanks to these circumstances, it might not take
five years after all before we taste the fruits of the land. May the spirits of
our ancestors, to whom I owe it all, guide us to where we have long wanted to
go.

• • •

I’ve heard it said or read somewhere that each generation
affects the state of a family’s wealth. The first generation lays the
foundations for prosperity; the second generation makes it grow or starts to
squander it. The third generation tries to maintain it, or sees it all decline
in their time. If the wealth survives this phase, the fourth generation is the
one that blows it all away.

This generational cycle is called the Midas Curse, as I
discovered in the net. An article from MSN Money entitled “The Curse of
Vanishing Wealth” even states that six out of 10 affluent families will lose
the family fortune by the end of the second generation. And nine out of ten
will have depleted the family wealth by the end of the third generation.

The article also reveals an ancient Chinese adage: “Wealth
never survives three generations.” There’s a disturbing ring of finality to it.
But I don’t need to read case studies on it. My family lived through it.

My tita and I went to Mauban, Quezon this last Saturday to
finally continue work on – what I fondly call – the “farm,” and from time to
time she shared stories about the affluence enjoyed by my ancestors, chiefly my
great grandparents or so. They used to own huge tracts of ricelands, commanded
the respect of the whole town and neighboring districts, held their
Spanish-bred complexions and noses high in the air, flaunted their corsets and
brocades, and contented themselves with the idea that they would always have
their wealth.

How the mighty have fallen. Now the second   and third 
generation of “Pastranas” and “De La Cuestas” who witnessed those high
times are frail, nostalgic lolos and lolas, and their children roam the streets
in ordinary shirts and sandals, holding on to the empty power of their names, or are
totally oblivious to it. Their rice fields have since been broken apart, taken
by the government for schools and other municipality works, and the ones that
remain languish in neglect or from simple ennui.

More than thirty years of my life passed before I pieced all
this together within my full consciousness. Finally I can now step back,
objectively assess the mistakes of the past, and understand the frailty,
confusion, and helplessness of my mom and her sisters – a helplessness that saw
their remaining parcels of land driven nearly to the brink of abandonment. It’s
still a miracle that my Tita Panching, all skin and bones
of her, held on to her land titles and fought stubborn, cheating tenants with
all the remaining will she could muster and won, and then transferred the
titles to my brother, my family and me.

Now I’m starting to find my place in this generational tale.
My mom and my titas belong to the third generation of that hazy legendary patriarch
Don Ramon Pastrana, and I think the Midas Curse ended with them. The lands
remain, the titles are with us, and I am now in the position to start the cycle
again, to build on something that can – must – be passed on to the next
generation. Let me take on all the hard work; let me suffer to make this happen.
I gladly take it upon myself because, in the grand scheme of things, I am now
building on a birthright that will honor my past, and help secure my family’s
future.

* * *

It’s fun to clackity-clack away on one’s keyboard especially if it’s new — like what I’m doing now just hacking away on the computer without rhyme or
reason. Actually there are full of reasons, but somehow I’m not up to it. Just
have too many thoughts crowded inside my cranium they need to be sorted out
properly to be let out… well, properly too.

My personal website is like a dimly-lit star floating in the
backend of the universe of the world wide web, very seldom noticed or visited.
Which is appropriate because, hey, it’s intended to be a private journal after all, right? But why do I seem to feel envious
lately of my friends and relations in multiply, mySpace, and other supposedly
livelier sites? I’ve even commissioned a friend to revive my long dormant and
nearly forgotten multiply account. I know it would be fun to be read and to
communicate and receive comments and all that, but somehow I still can’t bring
myself to transfer my freewebs content to it. As I said to my other friends
before, I’m quite content with my friendster and yeah, my freewebs accounts. (or
else I’m just lazy, yeah). Maybe if I find the time (actually time is not the
problem – it’s the motivation), I’d really sit down and start tinkering with my
multiply.

I’m just rambling, yada yada, because I know I’ve been
forsaking my journal site for quite some time. Somehow I’ve lost it and begun
to ask myself: “What’s the point?” I used to do update it every week. Now I’m
down to one entry a month, if at all. I’ve never been one to put in entries on
a day by day basis like what some people do (Today… work sucks, I made a few
phone calls, squeezed one out, and called it a day…). I love the essay type of
entries. No one will read it anyway except me.

But I’m getting back to the hang of it again. The PR, Web,
and Accounting group of our company will be transferring to a new office on the
third floor by April, and I’m looking forward to enjoying the privacy of my
cubicle very much. I’ll be able to tinker with my computer (and blog away,
yeah), without being conscious of some passerby (it could be my boss, you know)
who may happen to glance and get curious of what I’m doing.

My off-office work lately started to pick up again and I’m
thankful of the little blessings that I get on the side. At the very least,
I’ll be able to contribute regularly to my paluwagan
in the office (which will be going to a more noble obligation someday). I’ll
also be able to do some more work on the farm that I’m trying to put together
in Quezon.

Lately I’ve slacked off again in my badminton game. From
twice a week in February I’m down again to playing just once a week. My last
game was last Saturday March 15 and the heat inside the court around 2-3 pm was
incredibly energy-sapping. Only towards the end of the day, around 5 pm, did
the temperature cooled down somewhat (and the games heated up!). I had a great
last game in which the advantage in scores played back and forth between our
opponents and my partner and I, but after a grueling third round we won. I went
home immediately after, with a little bit of sun remaining, knowing that I had
taken the best game of the day already. I knew I won’t be able to play again
until after Holy Week, so at least I have that high point to look back to and build on again when i return to court.

Well, I’ve managed to put in enough content here to start
several other topics. It’s now Maundy Thursday and very early tomorrow I intend
to go to Mauban (more than four hours’ drive) for that big family reunion with
Tita Panching and her cousins and for me to talk to the workers we’ll hire to
erect the fences around one property.

Rambling over.

* * *

I never thought I’d actually do it. It had played in my mind plenty of times, but I didn’t think I’d get right down to it. Now I’m surprise at how much I like doing it after all.

I’ve been skipping rice for about a month now – not just reducing my intake or avoiding it only during dinner, but totally eliminating it from my meals. The final straw was when our kumare Eyna stressed that you could eat anything and still reduce your weight simply by avoiding rice, which, according to her, is the main culprit that really piles on the poundage. I’ve heard all the diet solutions there are and I guess the thought of dieting had been ingrained deeply in my mind for some time and her advice came at just the right moment because I really soaked it in good. There may or may not be some fancy science to back it up. The only thing I know is that I always felt heavy after every rice meal I took – so much so that I really had to sleep in the office after eating lunch or else I wouldn’t be able to think straight.

Besides, the timing was right. I stopped playing badminton around mid-October, loaded myself up with lots of food during the holidays, and by January was worried that my knees might give way or that I might be too sluggish in court if I start playing again because of my excessive weight. So there was the perfect solution – the only carbohydrate I need to cut is rice; anything else, such as pasta and pancit canton, is ok (of course, in moderation).

I think it worked. My stomach is not as bloated as it was after meals, and I don’t feel lethargic after eating. Plus it feels good to be taking in salads or wheat bread along with my baon, after years of gorging on rice. It’s a break from the routine, an out of the box experience for someone like me who has painfully limited food preferences. When I first started, I told myself I’d do this only for a month. But now the thought of going back to eating rice seems unpalatable already. When my boss Lorenz treated me to lunch about a week ago, I only managed to eat half a cup of rice for politeness’ sake.

Playing badminton is still my main motivation for doing this diet thing — however imperfect it may be, and even if my officemates tease me about it. I know my body best. My three hard sessions of training seem to have paid off, I’m lighter on my feet, my footwork is great, and my cardio is back to enduring the rigors of the game. I’ll take whatever unpolished road to health presents itself, all in good time.

* * *