Out There - Why And Why Not

Most people I know gush with envy every time somebody points out that I grew up in Bukidnon. "It's so beautiful up there!" they would chorus. Those who've actually been to the place are sometimes more effusive in their praise than the ones who've only heard or read about it.

Perhaps it's the magical snob appeal of everything that was once considered remote and primitive. When I was a little boy, my landlocked and mountainous province high up in the windswept plateaus of Central Mindanao evoked Darkest Africa. On periodic sallies to civilization up north, my siblings and I were mercilessly taunted by our Manila cousins about being "little Moros" or worse.

What out ignorant tormentors couldn't possibly comprehend was that Malaybalay was always in the summer-capital league of Baguio, although much smaller and far less cosmopolitan. But Malaybalay was nonetheless redeemed by its status as provincial capital and as the seat of the Bukidnon Normal School, the only other teacher-training institution in Mindanao.

If the place wasn't exactly fashionable and was, indeed, terra incognita to smart Manilans, it was at least steeped in middle-class pursuits and aspirations. Everybody seemed to be employed by the government or somehow related to the normal school and other educational institutions. There was no such thing as grinding poverty or vagrants roaming the streets. Traffic was limited to a total of six tartanillas or horse-drawn vehicles, the usual government cars and a handful of private jeeps. Everybody walked to office or to school, often trooping back home for lunch and a little siesta.

Ours was the folksy kind of place where everybody knew the village idiot and, of course, the jolly lone garbage collector who made his morning rounds with a lazy bull pulling a rickety cart. The native tribes and the farmers stayed far and away in the hills, coming down only to sell perfumed upland rice they carried on their backs and to gorge on panciteria food.

Malaybalay had only a few thousand people in those innocent years. It was a frontier town born only in this century, largely under the auspices of American soldiers and missionaries and their loyal disciples. Unlike older towns in Luzon and the Visayas, there was no defined local aristocracy as such, and no poisonous enmity among feudal clans.

Only one family, the Fortiches, was well-established, but even they were recent immigrants from Cebu and Northern Mindanao, and, in fairness, they never aspired for nor achieved warlord status in the Ilocos tradition. Apart from the Del Monte plantation which was set up in the late 1920s by the Americans, what were to become large estates and ranches were still to be carved out of vast forest reservations and open territory. But towards the turbulent 1970s and martial law, much of these politically incorrect landholdings were to be broken up or neutered by land reform.

In those early days when President Magsaysay's slogan about Mindanao being "The Land of Promise" was on every Filipino's lips, it was said that anybody who wanted land could apply for it or purchase as much as he wanted for the equivalent of a song. My father used to say of one very nice old lady that she had acquired what would eventually become prime downtown properties for "just few cans of sardines and a bolo." It was the same story all over Mindanao. There was no need to grab land or drive out the peasants. They sold cheap because they knew there was a lot more to sell.

Hindsight, of course, tells us that frontiers never stay frontiers for long. Sooner rather than later, they are doomed to be overrun by rapid population growth, urbanization, deforestation and deteriorating peace and order. The romance of the frontier can only turn into sad reminiscences of dreams betrayed and of greed getting the better of even the finest breed of people.

Malaybalay is no exception.

On a recent flying visit there with two very accomplished New Yorker friends -- one a Filipino and the other his American wife -- I was silently dismayed by the thinning forest cover and squatter shanties proliferating in some stretches of the otherwise well-paved and picturesque highway.

Although Malaybalay has lately become a city, I'm hardly impressed. All I can see is this helter-skelter overgrown town that looks more like Cabanatuan or Calamba than the quiet unpretentious oasis I knew as a child.

But my friends were a lot more forgiving. They kept gasping about the scenery and apparently meant every word. That's what friends are for. They look at your family, your hometown and everything you hold dear and, much to your astonishment, they tell you how lucky you've been all these years.

Still, I was in full denial until we had an unscheduled lunch at a hotel owned by the family of my Grade II teacher and then had coffee next door with my pleasantly surprised high school literature teacher. The verdict? The food was great and the conversation even better as only hard-boiled New Yorkers who have seen it all can tell the difference. How can anything else that's obviously amiss in this town ever get in the way of a good impression?