My best vacation in a rustic barrio

Holy Week is supposed to make up the hottest days of the season, when even the leaves of the tobacco plant, which is supposed to thrive in hot and arid regions, droop and wilt under the hot sun. It is that time of the year when you dream of lying on a beach in the shade of a huge tree with a tall glass of cold lemonade beside you and the cool breeze and the lapping of the waves on the shore lulling you to sleep.

Then you wake up to the fragrant scent of coffee and the sound of many voices. You get up to find women and children huddled around a fisherman selling his catch. There are many types of fish whose names you don’t even know, but you buy some of the brightly colored ones for roasting over hot coals later.

As the big red sun begins to set, you take one last dip in the sea and lie down again on the sand to watch the stars come twinkling out one by one, and you try to recognize some of the constellations. Then the smell of roasting fish reaches your nostrils, and you suddenly find that you are very hungry. So you finally get up and head to your hut to be greeted by the sight of your beautifully colored fish laid out on the bamboo floor, no longer multicolored but a dull brown, the scales cracked where the white flesh shows.

Along with the roasted fish are sinigang broth with various vegetables, steamed camote tops, sliced tomatoes, and roasted eggplant. Eaten with hot steaming rice, there is no meal on earth that can be better.

This scene has been a recurrent daydream of mine every summer since my elementary school days, when some of my classmates told stories of their summer vacations in their home provinces. Not having a home province myself, being a true-blue city dweller, I envied them their good luck but could do nothing except daydream of spending a vacation in some rustic place with green fields, farm animals, rushing streams and rivers, lots of trees and plants, and a vast sky, blue with puffs of cottony clouds during the day, and black with stars twinkling like diamonds at night.

My good luck came during a time that was bad luck for many people: the war. When life became harder in the cities, my eldest brother was invited by his in-laws to evacuate with them to a farm in Pangasinan. My brother took with his family his three youngest brothers, then barely out of primary school.

There was hardly any civilian transportation to the province then, so we walked from our home in Malabon toward faraway Pangasinan, pushing two pushcarts containing our belongings. We never reached Pangasinan.

On the highway along Barrio Fugoso in Tarlac, two American Liberator bombers swooped very low over the fields. We thought they were going to land, but they only threw out leaflets. We scampered after the leaflets fluttering in the wind. They contained illustrations of American soldiers armed with carbines, then still unknown in the Philippines, with the warning that US forces have landed in Lingayen and pushing toward Manila, and advised Filipinos living near roads to move inland so they wouldn’t be caught in the crossfire between the American and Japanese forces.

We were caught in a quandary. If we proceeded to our destination in Pangasinan, we would run headlong into the invading forces and perhaps get killed in the ensuing firefight between the Americans and the Japanese.

So the kindly folk of Fugoso advised us to not proceed and instead go with them to the inland barrios. That same afternoon, all the people in the barrios beside the highway loaded their belongings on their carabao-drawn carts and we crossed the very wide river to the barrios of Sta. Maria, San Jose and Sto. Niño. Luckily, it was summer and there was only a stream running in the middle of the river that was usually a raging torrent during the rainy season.

The barrio captain kindly gave us a hut that was still unfinished and assigned the others to other houses while we built our own houses.

That was the beginning of a very long vacation for us in the rustic place I had been dreaming of. Barrio Sta. Maria, where we stayed, is an isolated place, separated from the mainland by the wide river and surrounded by thick growths of talahib. The farmers planted sugarcane, sweet potatoes, eggplants, and tomatoes during summer, and rice during the rainy season.

For us city-bred children, this was paradise. There was plenty of space to run in and explore. We found birds’ nests hidden among the talahib. We went with the farmers when they plowed their fields in the morning, and while they were working, we pastured the carabaos not yet needed and swam with them in the ponds and irrigation ditches.

We gathered wild kangkong in the ponds and some camote tops in the fields, gathered the tomatoes and eggplants that were becoming overripe. And we always went home munching on sugarcane. We helped in the threshing of palay and in taking care of the carabaos that became very close to us.

We stayed there a long time, until the war was over and we could safely return to Malabon.

At home, the old folks said it was good luck that we had evacuated. During the battle, a mortar round had exploded over our house and shrapnel holes peppered the roof and ceiling, including the large oil portrait of my mother. Had we children been there, they said, the chances were high that one of us could have been hit by shrapnel.

Today, I still dream of that sweet interlude. No vacation in the most luxurious and most expensive resort can better that vacation of ours with simple barrio folk in a rustic Philippine barrio.