TRAILS UP NORTH

Big dreams, big dams
GLO A. TUAZON

TABUK CITY -- Recently while attending and documenting a festival here, I took a brief escape and was guided to a place much higher than the leveled, flatland areas of the city. Taking the road to Bulanao from Dagupan, the car drove past commercial areas, across rice fields planted with either hybrid or inbred rice varieties, past carabaos that stared back.

Up a dry and humid road we drove to this place they started to develop to become a viewpoint. I kept thinking to myself what was so special in this arid land where the heat comes out as steam condensed in the nose canals and clog my ears too comes 10 in the morning? That is when the sun casts shadows a little bit off to my left but the haze is visible from the base of my feet, creating illusions of ugly creatures while I squinted my eyes to evade the salty droplets of perspiration.

Then we stopped halfway up the big knoll. To my amazement, I could see everything from here. It was almost like looking at a map up to a level where the horizon gets lost beyond the greens to the lost valleys on the next bend. A river went parallel to the knoll where I stood and the Pasunglao Bridge cut somewhere at Barangay Calanan.

Further to my right was Tabuk City Proper. The buildings clustered along Dagupan and Bulanao to taper off in individual abodes as the road stretches away from the city. Somewhere in the middle I could make out a wide structure from where the river starts. I was told that is the Chico Dam.

There in the heart of Bado Dangwa Barangay was the dam I so often heard way back. The dam that was the inspiration of many talks and poems and stories and cause of rebellion and death of some rights and freedom fighters from Tinglayan, Kalinga way back when the strongman dictator of a President started to push the damming of the Chico River. It was at that time when this man called Macliing Dulag went out of his way, corroborated and supported by fellow Bugnay folks to fight this project from happening.

I never understood the rationale of it then being just a kid and stories are just stories. But two years ago I had the chance to visit and stay a few days in Bugnay and then I understood. I was with some missionaries to attend the 18th anniversary of the seed planting of Christianity in Bugnay and at one point tired milling around and about the place, sat on a stone and was reading an inscription on the flat concrete area at my feet.

Jumping up when I realized I was sitting right at the grave of Macliing Dulag. Then his story was repeated to me as I was taken to the edge of the village to look down at the Chico River. This village sits on the sloping area a little bit above the river line. Damming it would have raised the water level up to the village, drowned it and washed it away to extinction.

These people have lived here all their lives. Relocation was offered them but they explained the place shown them was not good and no proper retribution for what they would give up would actually be compensated by a promise to be forgotten once they leave this beautiful place they call home. Dreams were made here they said, and it would flourish here with the changing of the seasons. Tolls of lives were taken and paid. Some dreams shattered, some rights violated.

Here in Tabuk, atop this knoll, a few miles from Bugnay, Tinglayan, I viewed the Chico Dam. It could have generated power that supplied current to thousands of households. But further behind was the colorful, tragic history of its birth and existence. How do we justify where the line between necessity and preservation and survival starts and stops? -- email: twilight_glo@yahoo.com