A story of two terraces
Some trees hang upside-down flowers at head’s height. To
walk under their boughs with uplifted chin, is to lean into knowing embrace.
There is a fragile band of space that separates mountain and
sky, for months it would mimic immutability, until the next landslide, the next
earthquake. In this harsh quasi-flatland, the Ifugao rice farmers eke, they
have learnt to hug the mountains just so, their homes are fortified tetris
leaning on rocky contours. Theirs is a deceptively easy gait, steady and
unassuming, but their walking feet have learnt to curl over rock and never let
go.
To challenge a mountain for space is to breed stoicism. They
work in pairs, with bandanas over their faces. Patiently they drill into the
mountain face to carve a road, with rudimentary tools. Rock dust spurts into
the air as a toxic mist. They take a break from their work to stare at me
through floating fragments, unreadable.
What space their claim is on loan. With alarming regularity,
gravel and car-sized boulders descend in entropic fury – road clearing can be a
lifetime occupation. Iron-corrugated towns sprout alongside mountain roads.
Theirs are curvilinear lives, their daily commute is one dimensional. Without
warning, school children running-leap onto passing jeepneys, their destination
is always just down the road.
Two thousand years ago, the Ifugao molded giant curvilinear
steps to trap water for rice cultivation, they transform formless mud and stone
into delicate lines that flow horizontally in equicontours. Ripening rice stand
to attention in flooded basins, their long, wind-skirted blades scatter green. Glutinous
rice is black-tipped to indicate royalty.
I pity the firstborn of rice farmers. Their lives have been
mapped out, to tend the rice terraces that they inherit. Such possessive pride
they have over their rice, they refuse to sell it for profit. The produce is
too meagre to entirely feed a family over a year. Only childless firstborns
have rice to spare.
There was Irene, fettered by three children, who has started
a tourist business with one such childless firstborn, Raymond. She fashions
tables by gluing empty gin bottles, her bricks are coke bottles stuffed with
gravel. Chickens descend apprehensively to feed on remnant rice husks scattered
over the ground. Fish grow in the cool waters of the terraces, they too feed on
husks.
My sisters and I hiked along the edge of the terraces,
balancing on stones a hand’s width. A familiar ache flared, where the tendons
that attach to my knee began to unravel. At the end, a waterfall unlike any I’ve
experienced, fed to bursting by rains. As I descend into fast-flowing waters at
its base, my feet barely maintain their grip. The sheer weight of water rushing
down is annihilating. I have never been afraid of a waterfall.
In their own zigzag ways, Yismuth terraces have atomically
straight edges. Theirs is a multi-directional beauty born from simplicity of
constituents, tetris with a single-shape
building block. Their crystalline rigidity is enforced by strict minimization
of energy, by laws which converge to finite possibilities.
Curvilinear beauty arises from multiple species of weakly-interacting
constituents, from dirt and gravel and rock of all sizes, from patient hands
and centuries of industry. With our patient hands, we’ve left behind giant
fingerprints on earth’s face. A beauty not completely disordered, it is infused
with practicality, with flexible laws that allow for semidivergent possibilities.
I wonder anew at biological life, at the curvilinear contours on my fingertips,
I ache to dive into them and wander around.
Complete divergence is as tasteless as
complete convergence, but biology and physics seem to me near opposite ends of
this spectrum, with enough wiggle for thoughtful appeal.