By Rex Catubig

 

I always fell asleep on my way to Dagupan during my semester break from college. Despite being cramped elbow to elbow on the wooden bench seat of the Pantranco bus, the wind surge from the open sides, the drone of the engine, and the rocking motion of the speeding vehicle would lull me off to slumberland once the bus hit the open highway.

From time to time, I would be roused from my doze when the bus would stop to pick up passengers and vendors of bottled soft drinks, peanuts, chicharon, and other munchies would also board and hawk their goodies in polyphonic chorus: “Mani, mani bagong luto, chicharon malutong; Psss, psss, Coca cola, Orange, 7 Up”. But as soon as they jumped off at some point along the highway, I would just as soon snooze back into my road trip reverie.

It’s a refreshing respite from the bustle of city life. As a woman writer succinctly wrote: “To live, one must drive away from life occasionally”. The seasonal year-end travel to one’s hometown reinvigorated the weary spirit and kept it poised for the fight or flight of fancy.

After the seemingly endless drive, I would then really awaken and realize that we were near Dagupan when the bus would turn left from the Urdaneta crossroad and head into the narrow interior asphalt highway, which after a short while, became a tunnel of bouffant-crowned mango trees, and cut through a diaphanous swath of wafting smoke whose piquant scent would caress my nose. “Manpapasob iray mangga pian ombunga ya“.

“Pasob” is the vernacular term for smudging–which is the practice of burning bonfires under the trees, whose dense smoke would rise and envelop the branches. This is an old folk convention to induce flowering of fruit-bearing trees, mangoes in this case.

This robust smell of burnt leaves and twigs would envelop my being; clinging to my clothes and leaving an after-scent that would linger on in my mind and trail me even as I get off in my destination, itself becoming a part of my baggage–of nostalgic memories.

Alas, there are no more picturesque mango trees that line and shade the highway. They had been cut,  casualties in the road widening project. While a few trunks had been left protruding from the shoulder of the concrete road, like some zombie torsos, they now pose a safety hazard, instead of memorializing the idyllic beauty of their past. The diaphanous smoke that once rolled out like a lacy veil onto the road is now but a gossamer image in one’s fading memory.

Years hence, I would come home from abroad for the holidays, coinciding with the season for burning of dry leaves, twigs, and fallen branches.  But the bonfires this time were not meant to induce flowering; rather, to dispose of detritus left by a typhoon’s temper tantrum. The once ritual of growth had become a ritual of death.

As the bonfires burned everywhere, the shroud of smoke and its woodsy scent wrapped itself around you, clinging to your consciousness, stoking fear that in one’s old age, one could end up like some burnt, smoked meat and charred bones.

Tragically, the romance of ethereal smoke’s fanciful memory had been overcome by the frightful prospect in the context of growing old. As one is confronted by the inescapable grip of death, bearing witness to the passing of families and contemporaries, the horrific smoke of cremation insinuates itself menacingly.  The smoky dreamscape had turned into a fiery nightmare.

In life’s roadmap, it’s indicated that as twilight draws near in one’s road journey, smoke blurs and obscures its sentimental origin, dissolves into a murky image, and leaves but a smudgy trace and evanescent scent of hazy, wispy memories.

The Platters, a popular singing group in the ‘50s, sang:

“When a lovely flame dies,

Smoke gets in your eyes”

And that’s when your melancholic heart sheds a silent sad tear.