TRAILS UP NORTH

Mt. Polis mossy forest getting destroyed
GLORIA A. TUAZON

The outskirts of Bontoc, Mountain Province though not so popular to everybody else has great views and lots of stories to offer too. Cruising the Bontoc-Banaue Road one morning made me realize that.

We left the cloud of dust behind at Bontoc and made it up high on the crags of Bay-yo. From the road at the viewpoint is a dirt vehicle path leading down to a cluster of houses located at the other side of the mountain.

Right beside and above it is an elegantly carved terraces, unlike all the rest I have seen. Their gardens are designed in lines and curves and circles that would almost resemble the mysterious crop circles in other parts of the world, only here in Bay-yo they are done in a tiny scale.

Bayyo is just one of the sixteen barangays of Bontoc, Mountain Province located higher up than the rest. A small area that lies adjacent to Barangays Talubin and Gonogon and on another side to Ifugao.

The population is somehow controlled, the residential cluster being small. Everybody here knows everybody else, and most of them are relatives to each other. There is a a brightly colored cathedral situated in the heart of the village and a school too. Most days are spent working, on the fields or inside the house as children play about in the yards.

It is a quiet town, shy in a kind of way to the rest of the world. Typical small town until you realize the place has so much more to it. And with the opening of the road above it to usher traffic in, expect changes to happen in the near future.

Moving a few hundred meters away from the residential and terrace views is the Mount Polis Pass, just a stretch of road almost always obscured by the crawling mist, leaving your face moist and your hands cold.

In this high altitude, the place is ideal for erecting communication towers and so two were constructed. At that time, the ongoing boundary scuffles were raw and rebels took it to themselves and went out of their way to bomb the towers.

A police outpost was erected in the area after the incident, and to avert the insurgents from committing similar destruction, a 30-foot statue of Mary the Virgin was erected beside the reconstructed towers. The rationale there was to stop hostility and so the place would be respected as a sacred area, and of course to protect the twin towers behind it. People no matter how inconsiderate they are would think twice before desecrating a religious icon, and so the towers stayed.

Looking up, the ominous sight of the Bayyo mssy frest seems promising. But from the highway below you could already sight columns of smoke rising out in numerous places. These smoke columns are evidences of burning inside the natural mountain forest, the desecration ongoing, uncontrolled process for want of agricultural spaces by farmers.

Where once the tree line welcomes you from just across the road line, it now receded further up the mountains. In its place are freshly scorched patches of earth, some planted with yams or sweet potatoes, some with cabbages and beans.

Trees are also being cut down everyday for lumber, the chainsaws screaming loud into the forest, scaring the natural fauna that was once abundant in the area. Rare bird species such as the "whiskered pitta" once thrived here, their loud moaning permeating the other echoes heard there.

This specie and the other animals that used to abound here loved the cool, muggy atmosphere of the mossy forest. Orchids hang about on tree limbs and branches, rooting on the thick moss like parasites. But even the moss and the lichens are slowly going, their oak habitat destroyed and in a hurried pace being substituted by pine trees.

In comparison, according to study, these trees (oaks) like the moist environment, they grow in thick profusion, better to hold more water and soil, making them very good retainers of both while pine trees grow hardy even on dry, parched land and are spaced apart. Pine trees do not hold as much water and since spaced apart cannot prevent much soil erosion.

No wonder it is a common occurrence for the mountains to collapse and erode on the road line along the Bontoc-Banaue Road, to add to the devastating fact that the mountains are being pulled apart and turned into rock quarries. A great number of aggregate businesses cropped up in the once lonely, isolated mountains of Mt. Polis and still adding up. The beautiful mountain pass now seem like a human leg, wounded, scarred and bleeding.

Agriculture and businesses are a good thing, for they sustain the basic needs of man. But without our disciplined use of environment, or to say it bluntly, our misuse of nature, what would be there left for the future?

The arrogant reasoning that the "need to live" is a more important purpose than the "balance of ecology" is an ever troublesome subject to solve. In the meantime, we cry with nature and maybe would lick our wounds later.