ARBOR DAY MEMORIAL

 

We observed Arbor Day today.

Early this morning, some of us from the local government unit went up to the foothill of Eumati at Sitio Arcangel Norte to plant trees. I scaled the heights of Eumati when I was a young man, but I had not been there since. Not even at Arcangel Norte. I decided to ditch the motorcycle, being unfamiliar with the terrain, and hitch a ride on the back of one of our 4x4 service pickups, together with the girls.

The road was long, winding, and mostly uphill, with the final ascent stretching more than 300 meters at a sustained incline of almost 45 degrees. Eumati leaned over us, inviting us to discover her again. But our roads diverged. We stopped at the entrance of Arcangel Norte Primary School, an old, solitary building with three classrooms, perched on a plateau facing the crest of Eumati. The school stood on an expanse bordered by a game farm on a rolling hill teeming with rambutan trees heavy with ripening fruits.

There, we planted varieties of endemic trees—narra, taghangin, and another whose name I failed to identify.

We planted them for us later to forget.

Yes. To forget.

We have been planting trees since the late 1990s. At one time, we aimed to plant a million trees across our vast territory. Balete has a total land area of 11,892.78 hectares. Its upland forest cover is pegged at only 2,054.30 hectares, while its mangrove forest covers 179.36 hectares. Our population, according to the 2024 CBMS data, is 30,310. One could imagine how thickly forested our land might have been had those million trees thrived.

But we forget.

We plant, then return to our quotidian worries, forgetting that we have planted trees.

Precisely why there is a need for an annual observance we call Arbor Day. We need it to remind us that we planted trees long before we planted trees today. Perhaps we should call it Memorial Arbor Day, an occasion to remember those trees we planted in the bare thickets of Eapos, at the foothills of Agtawagon, in the shade of Nasunogan, on the hidden hill near Kabuhian, in the heights of Anao, in the wilderness of Cortes, and in some other places I can now barely recall.

I wonder why, but today reminded me of the chocolate pig my daughter Aurea loved when she was just three. Something in them seemed to connect one to the other. I just can't figure out what.

 

Aurea at 4, guarding her sapling