On April 7, 1992, I visited the river of my youth. It was the first death anniversary of my father. From the cemetery where I lighted candles and offer prayers for my dead parents, my brother Silvestre and my sister Concepcion I walked to the river, less than a kilometer away. Since my family took residence in the province of Bukidnon, I rarely came to visit the place where I grew up and spent my adolescent years.
I sat on the much trampled amorsiko grass at the cliff where memories beckon me to come and to tarry. The broad leaves of a cluster of bananas shield me from the hot rays of the sun. This cliff is the humbled version of what it used to be. It was much higher then, rising gradually from its downstream end and abruptly dropping at the mouth of a creek on the south side. An acacia tree once stood at this end of the cliff with the exposed roots hanging against the crag.
I look around. The sight of the much degraded Maigo River ushers in a nagging feeling of nostalgia, its pathos is as deep as the poignant memories of my departed loves ones. The river then was narrower but deeper. Now, I stared sadly at the washed-out bank at the other side of the river and the flood-prone coconut grove adjoining it. Over the years, silt deposits have reduced the once deep river into a shallow channel of sluggish flowing water. At low tide, people can cross it on foot.
I remember the time when the mullets and milkfish that swam at high tide were so big and plentiful to be fair games to people who used rifles to catch the silvery fish. Due to man’s greed and lack of foresight, the river that once teemed with fish is now almost barren. Through the years, continuous fishing, both legal and illegal, marginalized the river’s fauna. Upriver inhabitants killed fish in the river’s creeks and streams by using the milky sap of a poison vine called tubli. Downriver inhabitants and outsiders hurled dynamites.
When some unscrupulous people started using insecticides, the fish kill that resulted from the indiscriminate poisoning would stretch from the streams up in the mountains to the mouth of the river. The fish kill would include rarely caught fish such as giant carp and kikilo (spotted scat).
The fresh water snail we called osaba has survived until this day but the fresh water clam that used to thrive in the riverbeds at the edges of the riverbanks has become a rarity.
Because of the gurgling sound of water rushing downstream, the foaming, bubbling and shallow waters of the river are called taganas. The deep or calm waters are called linaw. The river’s taganas and linaw harbor a variety of fish (mullets, guppies, carps, gobies, bitter fish, mudfish, catfish, gouramis), shrimps, crabs, eels, turtles, clams, snails and shells.
Anytime in the months of November or December, the big flood came rushing from the mountains. As long as the integrity of the watersheds remains intact, the annual flood as a natural occurrence is relatively harmless and even necessary. The crabs needed the flood to complete their life cycle. The floods flush or clean the banks and constricted sections of debris and encroaching vegetation that disrupt the smooth flow of the river.
During the crab season (November and December), the upriver crabs take shelter at the bottom of big stones and in the holes and crevices in the riverbanks. There are two species of freshwater crabs – kamangkas and kalikis. Kamangkas is much bigger than the kalikis. It has big pincers and white underside. The crabs remain obscure and unperturbed in their natural habitat at the headwaters and tributaries of the river. The annual floods carry the crabs downstream. In the brackish water, the crabs mate, reproduce and die. In March, a long line of newly hatched crabs converge at the water edge as they swim en masse upstream to the river’s tributaries in the mountains – to grow, to mature and to complete the crustacean’s life cycle.
Around this time of the year, schools of fingerlings we called hipon would also start their exodus upriver where they grow and mature into a finger-size fish. The matured hipon is locally known as anga. This fresh water gobies live and spawn in freshwater, but their larvae drift to the ocean, where they develop into tiny fish, before they swim up into freshwater rivers and creeks again.
The tidal basins of the Maigo River stretched from the estuary to as far upstream where there is brackish water. Luxuriant growth of nipa palms and mangroves provided shelter to the tidal basins and made them fertile habitat of the brackish water mud clam locally known as tuway. Most of the nipa palm groves are now gone, intruded by houses and crops. And the clam population dwindled at the rate of the degradation of the tidal basins. With the introduction of galvanized iron, the demand for nipa singles dwindled. People no longer gather tuway but the stray pigs that grub at the drying patches of nipa palm groves foraged on the vanishing clams.
Up in the mountains, the forests are also gone. Deprived of their natural habitat, the indigenous animals that once flourished in the forests became endangered, if not extinct. Almost gone are the monkeys, wild pigs, deer, civet cats, eagles, woodpeckers, parrots, owls, pythons, and other animals that keep the critical balance of the environment. The skewed food chain brought forth the dominance of more fecund, hardy and adaptable animals such as rats that became pests and plundered the farms.
Hundreds of years ago, the tropical rain forest that covered most of the island of Mindanao had nurtured the island’s river system. With abundant rain, the trees in this forest were always green, the green foliage of branches and treetops spreading out like a huge umbrella to shade the forest floor. Lianas, rattan and other vines hanged from the tree branches and canopies, providing natural highways for monkeys, squirrels, civet cats and lizards. The mesh of tree roots kept soil erosion in check. Aided by the thick covers of leaves and other debris, much rainwater was absorbed and retained in the soil. The water seepage from the watersheds fed the springs and tributaries of the rivers. The forest maintained the ecological balance by hosting a variegated fauna and flora. Greens, decaying logs and debris were fodders to insects and other herbivores at the bottom of the food chain.
The primitive people that once inhabited the forest lived in harmony with nature. They lived off the forest by hunting and gathering fruits and nuts. Later they became farmers, clearing and burning patches of the forest and planting tubers, bananas, tobacco and grains. When the soil worn out and grasses began to invade the fields, they then cleared a new place in the forest or moved to another area. Since the forest population was sparse, the damage to the forest ecology was minimal. The deserted farms would slowly recover with undergrowth of shrubs, ferns, grasses and second growth forest. Much later, people started cutting trees at the rate beyond the ability of the forest to rejuvenate. New waves of people settled in logged areas and opened farms.
When we arrived in Maigo in 1951, the abandoned steel rails of logging trains were still intact, laid along the unpaved national highway. The logging operations in the virgin forest of the coastal towns of Panguil Bay started at the beginning of the 20th century. Logging trains transported the logs to a coast in Kolambugan for shipment abroad. As the logging operations crawled up into the mountains, the trains had to give way to McCormick and Mercedes Benz trucks.
The slow but inevitable death of the Maigo River started when a foreigner-owned logging company got a concession to cut the trees in the watersheds of Maigo River and the rivers of nearby towns that drain into the Panguil Bay. Legal logging is now limited to reforested areas since the virgin forests are gone. Illegal loggers cut whatever trees left by legal logging. Slash and burn farming by kaingineros, hasten the degradation of the lands. Many uplands and steep lands remain denuded; the absence of vegetative covers revealing man’s utter failure as stewards of the lands.
