Hardwood floor

Recently I attended the inauguration of a school gymnasium. There is much to admire in it. The playing hall is immense, with a high roof. The cantilevered support eliminates the need for pillars. (I have always admired these large wide halls that have no pillars to block the view.) With bleachers on three sides and a stage at one end, the hall has a normal seating capacity of 3,000. For assemblies, commencement exercises and the like, an additional 1,000 can be accommodated by covering the hard wood floor and putting chairs on it.

Much of the equipment (like goals, clock, scoreboard) has been imported from the United States.

What I admired most was the hardwood floor of the basketball court. It was made of maple – gleaming bright yellow. It reminded me of some of the mansions I had visited or stayed in the United States, with the walls of the rooms paneled in dark oak or bright-colored maple. The maple lumber for the floor of this school gymnasium had to be imported from Ohio – at great cost and with much trouble – an indication of the desire of the authorities of that school to give their students the best possible facilities.

While thus admiring and approving the installation of that splendid flooring for a basketball court, I also felt a deep sadness. Why is it that when we need to have hardwood, we have to import it at great cost and with almost infinite trouble?

The answer is obvious. Because hardwood is no longer available in the Philippines.

And yet, until only a few decades ago, this country was famous for its lumber – some of the hardest and most beautiful in the world. The basketball courts in the better gymnasia had excellent floors of molave or yakal. Many of us grew up in homes where the floors were elegant with alternating wide panels of white molave and red narra or purplish-red tindalo.

At home we had a round table that could seat 12 persons. It had a diameter of two meters (seven feet) and it was one solid piece of narra. I have seen old houses demolished that had posts made of whole trunks of hardwood trees.

Lumber was easily available whenever needed. And the reason was: the forests had been conserved. They were harvested, not destroyed. A tree was felled and soon a new tree grew up in its place. The individual trees might be removed for lumber, but the forest remained.

Now the forests are gone, except in a few and very remote areas.

When one travels through various countries (Japan, Germany, the United States, etc.) one sees and admires vast forests carefully preserved. In the Philippines which had some of the best forests in the world, we now see almost none. A few families with forest concessions have become enormously rich, the country has become exceedingly poor.

This wholesale deforestation has occurred in the past half century since we became an independent republic.

Under the Spaniards and the Americans, our forests were conserved. Under Filipino administrators, our forests have disappeared.

What does that tell us about ourselves?