It’s a death unlike any other. And everybody is still weeping.
Its death warrant: a resolution from the Sangguniang Bayan of Tago.
Its executioner: an exorcist who precedes the kill with an elaborate diwata ritual.
Its crime: causing the concrete road to heave and thus posing a grave threat to motorists.
After a century and a half of being Tago’s sentinel, the creepy acacia tree that stands high and mighty in “Siti†is cut down.
Unceremoniously, we bid adieu to a piece of Tago’s history!
Striking fear in the hearts of Tagon-ons, the acacia inspired stories more twisted than its trunk and limbs: tales of witches lying in wait on a fern perched high on a branch; of kapres leaning on it and smoking their humongous pipes; of sigbins lurking behind its gorged and exposed roots; of coffins circling it on the wings of a thousand fireflies; of white limousines coming out of it in a blinding flash of light; of its hanging vines turning into nooses and preying on humans; and of its roots clasping Yamashita treasures that give off a magnificent hue at the stroke of midnight in the last quarter of the lunar cycle.
But for all these yarns that turned the acacia into a hex---and therefore a danger zone---I only know of a single death: that of the 17-year old Froilan Prado who rammed himself against it in 2006 and whose motorcycle paint stuck to the trunk whose bark had been chipped off from the impact!
“(D)estructive to infra, hazard to traffic and power lines and encroaches on concrete pavement.â€Â
This was the exact text message (and probably the main “WHEREAS†contained in the SB resolution) that Vice Mayor Aloysius R. Espinoza sent me when I asked for the reason behind what seemed to me, and many other Tagon-ons, a heinous act of environmental murder. Now pray tell: what is a 9-meter strip of road compared to a century and a half old tree that has become part of Tago’s geography and its people’s sensibility? Apparently, public officials forgot that roads can be repaired any time by any fool like me, but only God can make a tree.
There lies a misplaced sense of priority somewhere because while the Department of Tourism promotes the identification and preservation of century old trees as a way of forging municipal identity, we cut ours in reckless abandon!
I will never forget my shock and disgust that afternoon when on my way home I saw Darik---the exorcist executioner---standing on the felled acacia tree whose overturned core struck me as the footprint of the kapre that must have fled in fright from his Latin incantation. And when I drove past the chopped trunks and branches some of which Darik smeared with a careless cross in dark and messy ink, the whirring sound of the chainsaw became an elegy. And suddenly it felt like I was at my parents’ funeral where I was weighed down by sorrow that came from the realization that I wouldn’t see them again.
Yes, it’s a death unlike any other. And I am still weeping.
Even. if. only. in. silence.
is that a fairy's tear? and is that a portal to a secret passage to the Yamashita treasures?
a kapre's footprint, perhaps?
](./images/smilies/eusa_wall.gif "Brick wall")
