Listen

In the movie version of the Broadway musical “Paint Your Wagon,” the character, played by a young and very handsome Clint Eastwood (he had a good singing voice, too), complained that although he talked to the trees they didn’t listen to him.

How sure was he? Or was it he who could not hear them when they talked to him?

On KM 16 of Tandang Sora Avenue, a few hundred meters from the Culiat barangay hall stands a magnificent tree. I can’t tell whether it’s  narra  or some other tree because I haven’t yet seen its flowers. But it does look so unique.

When the street was widened some years back, the elevated soil around it had to be shaved off, exposing half of its roots. Thus you can see the wondrous way the road workers dug into the earth, going this way and that, root over root, until they had formed a formidable web that now anchors this beautiful tree to the earth such that, against strong typhoons and man’s destructive tendencies, it has stood firm and unshaken.

But what caught my attention about this particular tree was a face I clearly saw on its trunk as I was standing from across the street. The face bore human features, wearing a pronounced, pained look, with the mouth, quite shockingly, wide open in an agonized, silent scream. I hurriedly crossed the street to take a closer look at the tormented, horrid face that seemed like some character in a theater of the macabre, but when I got close enough, there was only a gnarled bark where the face had disappeared.

Still, it had such an effect on me that all I could do was sit on a piece of concrete slab that must have been part of a circular bench built around the tree before the road-widening project; and this was left by the road workers, exposing children, who could stumble over it, to harm. I leaned on the trunk to “draw the life force from a tree”—something that a young writer once told me we should do any chance we had, and which I have been doing ever since. I had learned through time how to “will” it, as she had taught, and I always felt relaxed and energized after every such exercise.

But this time I could sense some disconnection, a kind of tortured though subtle movement against my back that made me look up. Thus I became aware, to my horror, of the tarpaulin campaign materials, a metal sheet bearing the phone numbers and address of a “tubero,” sheets of plastic ads of a beauty salon and lots for sale above me—all nailed on the branches, the tree’s “limbs.” And through the branches crisscrossed electric lines and cable wires.

And when I looked down, I saw around the base of the tree accumulated garbage of plastic junk food wrappers, worn-out rubber slippers and shoes, and broken bottles and plastic water containers. Half-buried and sticking out from the soil were several layers of discarded nonbiodegradable straw sacks that must have contained the cement and aggregates used for the road widening and left there, blocking rainwater from running through the roots of the tree.

As I scrutinized the whole ghastly sight, I swear I could hear a muted moan coming from the very depths of the earth where the roots had crept into. So this was what the face with the silent, anguished scream wanted to tell and show me.

I felt an urge to continue walking the length of the avenue, taking my time to look at the trees lined on both sides, and every tree greeted me with the same sight in varying degrees of ugliness. The trees were obviously planted by a more humane breed of people decades ago, when Tandang Sora was just a “provincial” part of the Metro and home to a few houses and low-balconied, little “mansions” of the well-to-do, which were joined later by small art deco buildings that stood four stories high at the most.

The mango,  sampaloc  and  kamias  trees are still there, and so are the  narra  and  banaba. Almost all of them shared the same fate—unwilling hosts to accumulated garbage and tarpaulins, wires, strings and pieces of wood that most likely were the remnants of materials that once framed outdoor ads.

Since two months ago the city government undertook a dredging project that was able to remove from the canals and sewers mountains of foul-smelling sludge and rotten garbage that would have caused floods in this rainy season. Still, garbage is everywhere, mindlessly thrown around by pedestrians, schoolchildren, vendors, drivers and all the nontaxpaying denizens who simply cannot care less.

No local government, however efficient, can cope with this kind of cancerous apathy from a lazy and ignorant populace. Waste management should be part of extracurricular education, beginning at the grades level on to the secondary; and families must inculcate in their children the sense of responsibility to the community in which they live, with an awareness of the collective consequences of selfish apathy that will, after all, affect all of them in the end.

And, most important, local government units down to the barangay level must impose heavy penalties for any harm inflicted on nature in whatever form, such as nailing advertising materials on trees, because a crime against nature is nothing less than a crime against humanity.

That young man in “Paint Your Wagon” should have talked less and listened more to the trees around him in Frontier America. Thus he might have heard of the ancient Indian lore about the mountains, rivers and stars, mighty stories that they have committed to memory in ballads, myths and legends which could have saved America from its present monomaniacal path toward being the environmental disaster that it is now.

Had they listened to the trees.

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