Tulatulahan, Part 1

Published by Vartan Koumrouyan at February 4, 2025

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Image by Datingscout from Unsplash

The temperature rises above 40 degrees Celsius between noon and 3 pm. The birds and crickets stop their noise. An invisible pressure weighs on the air and makes everything come to a halt. In the distance towards the Canaro jungle, shimmering sheets of vapor appear through the white heat like a mirage rising from water.

Except that there is no water — and little relief from the brilliant sun.

Sheryll and I put the banig mat on the floor and lie down on it, hoping to feel the freshness of the cement, picayune as it may be. It hasn’t been exposed to the sun. At night during this dry season, the temperature won’t get below 35 degrees before midnight.

Yet we love it here, far from the urban life of Puerto Princesa. We enjoy the struggle of getting what we need, and of avoiding excess waste. It makes us feel in harmony with nature, to live with the bare minimum and to experience the seasonal changes and elements, the sudden rains when heat and dampness disappear, the squirrels and monkeys clambering on the rambutans.

But when it gets so hot for such a long time, people start to think the natural order of the world is deranged. They expect an earthquake or a big storm, a punishing force to atone for guilt, or a deluge like the Bible story to redress nature and mankind to their predestined ways.

Sheryll and I work hard to establish ourselves here at the edge of the jungle, pushing forward in our tasks irrespective of circumstance or weather. We need to make things work, because we no longer wish to be a part of city life, with its uncertainty and alienation. Here on this land purchased from Sheryll’s family, we have no one to compete with but ourselves.

It’s our chance to be who we are, rather than who others think we ought to be.

So when the soil hardens due to long stretches of days without rain, we find our chance to grow stronger. When the ground where we planted banana and avocado seedlings after the last rains turns to broken crockery, the soil lying in heaps beneath fast-spreading undergrowth, we get our tools.

All along the path of the house, wild grasses reach up to our knees, intermixed with new shoots of monkey-banana, creeping vines, and bamboo. The jungle replenishes itself with the night dew, morning fog, and scattered rain drops while we work.

When we began, we needed more help. We hired Mero and his cousins to clear the way to the hill, to carry the materials to build the house, and to set a tent up to keep the cement and timber dry once they were delivered. Mero and his cousins also built us a long shelf for a kitchen and dug a hole in the ground to cook.

Then we hired Razel and three of his cousins to clear half a hectare. They collected all the felled trees and shrubs in mounds to burn and lit huge bonfires, the flames cracking like fireworks as they consumed the thick logs day after day.

Sheryll told me that the ash would fertilize the soil, and the fire would purge it of creeping insects, colonies of ants, tarantulas, and scorpions. And as long as the ash remained, the smoke and smell of burning wood would keep snakes and other creatures at bay.

In other words, it marked our territory in the jungle kingdom, however small it might have been. Standing there in the clearing atop that hill, with a northwest view overlooking miles of rainforest canopy, I recognized the immensity of the surrounding nature. Its sunken, rolling swathes daubed with graded green hues only stopped when it reached the mountains.

For the natives nearby, it signified our attention to this land — no one else could now hunt turtles, set monkey traps, log trees, or shortcut through with their carabao to the rice fields in the valley. Perhaps they followed ancestral footpaths, but the land belonged to us now, so I fenced it in with barbed wire and posted signs saying, “No trespassing, private property”.

The dryness of the air over these many weeks has emptied the dawn’s freshness. Sometimes a thin, transparent mist descends from the hills and floats in the moonlight in defiance of gravity, far beyond the old ipil tree where green parrots nest. But as the sun rises and brings shape and luminosity to the trees again, it steals the mist away.

Rain is the topic of conversation in the sitio, among the rice farmers who wait for the rainy season. Their survival depends on it.

Tricycle drivers also talk about the weather’s vicissitudes. They wait under the palm trees or in the kanto for customers. They use one name to designate the culprit: “El Niño”. No one remembers the last time it rained, and confusion ensues regarding the weeks and months.

They say the weather has ‘changed’, that it’s not following its usual pattern, and they reduce the length of the dry season to an adjective quality as they argue. The fact that we need the rain gets forgotten.

Almost anyone in Quintillia’s grocer stands outside the shop to rub shoulders and exchange their views about the drought. We’re proving our “togetherness”, that we belong to each other and share the same destiny, whether our journey to this store takes an hour or half the day.

We still have an inch of cold water in our well. I carry 20-liter water containers up and down the 100-meter hill twice a day to access it, panting and sweating. The water has the taste of the rocks it seeps through, drop by drop.

The wells in the lower barrio have dried out, and some around the rice fields taste of mud. But ours being from an elevated position in the hills, directly under the untouched canopy, makes it cold, limpid, and fresh, unmatched in taste as far as my tastebuds can tell.

My friend Juhn has a word for it. “Limpio”, he says, smiling as he savors it. Tourmaline water, garbled as the morning fog, carrying the night dew with it through the soil, it has the color of clouds that drizzle for days.

So I’m happy to perform this task, to drink the fresh jungle water, to live in the proximity of venerable trees, and to be in communion with the origins of this source. On my way up with those containers, on the steep footpath hewn with shovel and machete through slippery soil and the thick vegetation, I thank God for this crust of rock that allows us to drink every day.

This is my jungle prayer, step by step, jazz-prose like Kerouac in Dharma Bums: Thank you for the rain; thank you for the storm; thank you for the fern. Thank you for the beetles, the stones, and sand, gravel and mud. Thank you for the red ants, the worms and butterflies, and for all that rejuvenates the earth.

Thank you for the earth, the air, the sky, the here and now, the present moment, the piercing sun, the running nirvana clouds, the gliding eagle disappearing through them. With every breath I take, despite the hardships, these things give me hope.