< DOLORES:
Her name
means
'pain.'
I finally found the time to join a close friend in oneof his rare visits to his family farm. As yesterday’s downpour seemed headed as a full-blown storm, today’s blue-sky-sunny-weather was a generous gift from nature.
Two vehicles, one driven by his older brother and the other, by a brother-in-law, snaked their way down to the zigzag, the scenic mountain highway Kennon Road, then up a rough road that wound deeper into the lush greens and, apparently, last remaining virgin forests at the foothills of a towering Benguet mountain.
View of the lowlland ricefields from The Secret Farm
The farm was way off the road, so we had no choice but to leave the vehicles off gaping abyss by the narrow roadsides.
A welcome party was there to meet us: The caretaker kin himself, a brown dog, and an old Ibaloi woman farmer who -- amazingly like a waking dream – was carrying upon her back a kayabang, the iconic native basket of her vanishing tribe, that is now more in use in museums than in real life.
This mirage of a woman with a kayabang hammered in a very subtle message that we were very lucky to be suddenly in Ivadoy/Ibaloi country, a rather strange step back in time, having just driven out of
cosmopolitan tourist town of Baguio a few minutes ago.
It was the melding of worlds upon worlds-- the past, the present. Dolores, as the Ibaloi woman said her name was, dawned on me like a golden tongue of wisdom, with her very name meaning ‘pain’ -- the Spanish word that, in its plural form, throbs with many more memories of the punitive expeditions against the Ibalois in the mid 1700s.
Better than any theme park
With a few packs of junk food on our backs and the caretaker and the Ibaloi woman as our guides, we hit a bushy footpath dotted from time to time with red, wild flowers.
The footpath was sometimes dark, then emerald green under the bursting sunlight. Thick, wild undergrowths
interspersed with springs, runoff rainwater, little brooks and puddles.
Some spots were muddy and wet, characteristics of virgin forest beds that are not penetrated by the sun's rays
because of the dense growth of trees which, strangely, didn’t include the ubiquitous Benguet pine.
That must have been a kilometer of manmade footpath before a panoramic view of a meandering river came in sight. It was the Agno River, I would learn later, emptying into the vast rice fields of the lowlands. There was nary a house or any inhabitants.
Further up, rock boulders larger than houses loomed over us. But suffice it to say that Dolores, the old Ibaloi woman, walking with us into the
deep greens on her way back to her mountain abode, was a comforting sort of nostalgia in our midst, except that she was a living nostalgia and I couldn’t quite believe it with my own my eyes.
Agno River
Our own “Country Club”
After another kilometer under the late morning sun, we got a glimpse of a bamboo hut starkly alone in the middle of the lilting greens of forests and farms. My friend, my walking buddy, bandied to his two young nephews, “That’s our own country club.”
The "Club" hut
Further up was the nearest neighbor, the only other hut, where Dolores lives.
In a gurgling, flowing spring, we washed our muddied sandals and took some walking sticks to navigate our way into steeper descents.
Finally, into the cool embrace 
of the bamboo hut, the boys immediately retired to the fishponds to catch tilapia for lunch. The fishponds, two in all, were aerated by natural spring water, coaxed through PVC pipes, for regular oxygen.
Fishing for lunch
There were also some koi species swimming with the viewers’ eyes, while red dragonflies echoed their colors circling in flight.
This, indeed, was a farm.
The little hut with a few basic necessities had the
bounties of grains, a few heads of newly harvested
Etag, dried meat
pumpkins, chops of dried meat dangling by an earthen stove, stacks of firewood, a clay jar that cools water the traditional way, chickens fumbling about for food chaffs outside
, flowering fruit trees, medicinal herbs within reach, and stretches of planted flats, corn rows and vines that we’d have to see some other time for they were quite far.
Farm adventure
Later, our farm adventure led us to a pictorial mode by a larger natural spring where we drank more fresh water. There were even big pipes leading downhill into
the lowland towns, their length indeterminable from end to
end. The many ravines by the spring were lush with wild growths, darkly mysterious in some spots. My walking buddy promised he’ll take me some other time to the river boundaries which he
thinks is an enchanted
area because of its eerily relaxing peace.
At high noon, while somebody was cooking rice by the stove where the pieces of etag, a kind of preserved meat, were dangling above the fireplace – we took to grilling the fishes that we caught from the ponds.
As a lacto-vegetarian, I was tormented seeing the fishes squirm to their last hurrah over glowing charcoals, and I swore I’d never eat anything that has a face ever again (hoping I’d succeed this time, he-he-heh).
Storytelling time
After lunch, as the blue-sky sunny day wore on, the conversations centered upon how the Ibalois lost their land.
A visiting literary kin from Shakespeare Country, a new graduate of Literature from Oxford University, hearing all the stories, requested to get a hand on the family tree which goes back to as far as the 12th century. He was scheduled to go with his mom to China in a few days’ time to scout for a post-graduate university.
In the midst of Old Daddy’s bedside memoirs and Old Mommy’s ‘ambushes’ by her apos over “something” from the Baguio market, the conversations segued to my friend’s many researches about the Ibaloi, particularly about Otto Scheerer’s accounts on the Ibaloi’s penchant for retreat and suicide when unduly vexed to extremes by the conquering colonial forces.
On Baguio’s past
Scheerer’s account of the long forgotten "Tonglo Massacre" --the near decimation of the Ibalois by the punitive expeditions of the Spanish guardia civil in 1759-- must have been a low point in Ibaloi history, said a sister. Very few of the tribal folk, within a span of only three generations into the Scheerer interview after the genocide, could fairly remember the bitter incident of Tonglo, a major but vanished Ibaloi settlement in Benguet, where 35 rancherias were burned down to ashes, where women and children were killed, massacred.
A German anthropologist who lived in pre-American Baguio days, Scheerer augmented his narrative,“On Baguio’s Past,” with Spanish friar accounts.
When the Tonglo Massacre occurred, the Spanish friars were severely collecting tributes or taxes from the natives, having established a fairly reputable worship service among a sizeable number of the Ibalois, including those settled in old Chuyo, that piece of family ancestral land occupied by the Bureau of Animal Industry since the time of the Commonwealth Government.
The sister from London, the first ever indigenous woman to have addressed the United Nations General Assembly, said that the Ibalois -- their ancestors -- probably blocked the Tonglo Massacre from their memory, a behavioral pattern similarly observed among the other indigenous peoples worldwide.
Walk back
The walk back to where we began the trek had something for us -- my friend and his brother found some gleaming stones on the footpath. Having touched such a stone for the first time, I took a piece of gold ore home as a fitting souvenir, my own “golden coin,” an unexpected gift from nature.
When we left the farm at about 3:30 pm, the sun was still sunny, the weather gods had been good to us. Back on the zigzag road to the clouds, the rains suddenly fell in torrents, then it stopped and onwards to the ascending stretches of the road, it caught up with us again, cascading gently down the mountainsides like swishing sprays.
Drenched and cleansed, the zigzag road to Baguio, the city in mist, was not only a refreshing sight, the aquifers of the highlands were singing, in fact!
Text & Photos
by Chi Balmaceda Gutierrez
August 24, 2007
Baguio City
Philippines
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