The Jal-o River

(The following was originally written for the Jal-O Agrarian Reform Community Development Plan which was issued on December 2003 although I wrote the article on May 30, 2003. I have it updated in view of the recent development on local history)

One cannot step on the same river twice.

-Heraclitus

The Municipality of Balete was approximately established in the year 1804 when it was ceded out of the Pueblo of Batang (now Batan). Earlier, it was part of the visitas of the Curate of Batang. By that time, historians referred to it not as Balete but as Jalo or the village near the river Jal-o.

The name “Jal-o” is derived from the Aklanon word, “Jae-o,” a variation of the word, “Hae-o.” Both mean “big pestle.” The river is named as such for two apparent reasons of which our forebears used to tell us. For a reason, the river is called Hae-o for the fact that viewed from a higher elevation, portion of it winding between the mouths of Panarga and Murao Creeks—tributaries of Jae-o—forms as natural dam, thus creating a semblance of a huge pestle lying across the deep crevice bounding the hills of the barangays of Oquendo on the western portion and Guanko on the eastern side. Another theory that came to us tells of the three waterfalls (from the Aeatubang Creeks and the river source) pouring volumes of waters in rhythmic intervals into the basin of the river as if there were three giants pounding their pestles in the silvery rocky mortar. An earthquake in the earlier time had altered the course of waters flowing from the Aeatubang creeks where the waterfalls would only occur during heavy rainfall. Yet, as the story goes, it was due to that fact that the river was eventually called Jae-o.

Unlike most rivers, Jae-o starts relatively on a lower ground and flow downhill, under the pull of the Earth’s gravity from its source somewhere in between the hilly portion of upper Oquendo, northwest of the Tulayon Forest of Ganzon, Jamindan, around six statute miles north of Mt. Naconlong in the Barangay of Mali-ao, Libacao. It flows through minor rapids—the Kipot, being the biggest—and is joined by several (eighteen at least) tributary creeks from Binitinan, Oquendo through the barangays of Guanko, Cortes, Morales and the Poblacion and meanders into the bends along other tributary creeks and brooks of Calizo and Aranas and the other barangays of the neighboring town of Batan where its estuaries lie meeting those waters flowing out of the Callojan and Tinago Rivers in the delta at Tinagong Dagat (Batan Bay).

Image of yesterday’s Jae-o was that of an active socio-economic highway, and yet at the same time of pristine life-giving water. Today, several legislative interventions have to be exerted to salvage what is left of the once ecologically balanced Jae-o River, the latest and so far the most prominent are the Senate Bill 2309 and House Bill 4907, proposing to make it a protected natural treasure.