Some womenfolk are washing their laundry and one of them is spreading the linen on the gravel bed to the right of the cojoined channel.
This is the river of my childhood and if there are memories of rivers, certainly much belongs to this and to the other rivers that I knew, the Bongo and the Gadgadaoan.
The riverbed now is silted much, causing the channels to be at a level with the containing plains. Which to a point threatens precious farmland.
The rivers of my reckoning are a character in the drama of our locality. A colorful, predictably unpredictable character, too. It governs our season, our planting season precisely, our harvest season also. It clocks our activities, too.
The cycle starts when rain clouds gather on the skies and wind blows them against the peaks of the Mt. Simminublan, the gigantic mountain lording over the Dingras Valley and dragonflies fly low, hovering above the grassy fields. Then comes lightning and thunder and the wind will blow cold.
It would be raining soon. Rain, rain for hours such that the cat would not dare venture to the door, so our saying goes. Then, afterwards, when the rain has stopped, we could hear the roaring of the river less than a kilometer from our village. The headwaters had arrived.
It would be time for the freshwater fisherfolk to cast the tanggar, a large net with a sealed pouch at the tail end spread over a rapid to catch the bigger fishes. Or they could prime the asar, a sort of bamboo laticework spread over the channel. They would catch the river lobster, the dalag, paltat, gourami and tilapia.
Fish would not be the sole bounty of the flood. It would be also the bits and pieces if branches and boughs and even whole uprooted trees carried by the flood downstream. These would be lodged in with the silt and when the floodwaters would have already receded, it would be a happy time for the scavengers to find and gather them for firewood. Specially large trees of the timber varieties would be sawed and used for lumber purposes. Sometimes, when typhoons strike, carabaos and cows would be washed downstream and their bodies would be found freezing with the water.
When floodwaters come, the ground water level would be raised such as springs would emerge from the base of river bluffs, sustaining the flow of water in the channels. It would be rice planting time. Farmers would get busy sowing the seedling for the planting, they would plow the fields, gather together to fix the brush dam across the rivers, drawing water into their communal irrigation canals.
While the rice plant would be growing, the rivers would be alive with the thrill of children bathing. A watering hole called the ban-aw would emerge and it would be a favorite bathing ground. Women would go to the river to wash laundry, diggers of the karot tuber known to contain cyanide, would slice the tubers finely and put them in sacks and soak them on the river beds for weeks.
The floodplain of rivers tell stories of their own, too. With their lush vegetation of grass, these floodplains would be home to cows, carabaos, goats and horses. oftentimes, these animals would stay there all the time, and owners need only to visit them every now and then. There would be the liktub or enclosures fenced with barbed wires made by farmers for pasturing their own animals.
In some years, the rivers are scenes of shameless criminality, too. Most heinous is the ungab, or the partial slaughtering of an animals most specially the ruminants being kept on the floodplains . The perpetrators would smash the nape of a cow and when it would be paralyzed, they would dismember it, often taking the meaty parts like flesh from the legs, the gut, the large and small intestines and other vital organs. The remaining flesh would be found out, and often, it would be a forced butchering by the owner.
There would be cattle-rustling, too. When this is done, the owner would seek the help of the barangay officials and the whole community would go looking for the missing animal.
While watching the rice crop, farmers would put many kinds of trap for fish in the river. In the months of September to October, folks would place kunukon or rama in the river. A kunukon is a pile of stones in a deep part of the river channel. A rama also consists of stones but with branches of trees, most specially of the damortis and the salamagi trees. These water structures would serve as home for freshwater fishes. Tlhese would be dismantled for trapped fish when the water in the river recedes in the months of November or December.
There would be the sarep, a kind of shrimp catching bamboo basket which is shaped like a bell with a serreg and a sealable end. It is placed at the end of a long funnel shaped structure made of piled stones placed on a rapid. This stonework is called the armadero. This V-shaped structure would convey the shrimps and fishes going along with the flow of water in the rapid to a bamboo bagerber and they would be thrown by the force of the water into the entrance of the sarep which is funnel shaped, too. Fish could not swim back out of the entrance because of the continuing gush of water into the entrance. The owner puts the sarep in the afternoon and he would come back to harvest the trap at dawn.
The sarep always faces upstream but in rare case, it would be made to face downstream. This is specially true when the ipon or the gobi would be released from the estuaries of the Padsan River in Laoag and it is allowed to go upstream. Early fisherfolks in the river longingly tells of stories of how they were able to catch canfuls of the grown gobi in the months of December after the fish was allowed to go upstream instead of being caught in the estuaries.
Although more common in the ricefields, the palibtok is another fish trap. It has the same principle with the rama, but here, the owner would drain the water and harvest the trapped fish.
The kitang would be placed on the river, too. The kitang contains many barbed hooks for fishes. It is spread across a channel. The sigay, a fine gill net strung across a channel is also another favorite fish trap. And of course the fish bow or pana would be employed by children and teenagers who love to wear water googles and fish with drawn bows.
Not long after the pagay harvest is done, the Milky Way or the ariwanas in our language would reorient itself in the east-west direction and to the folk, it would be the signal of the ebbing of the water in the rivers. And true it is.
The flow of the rivers would weaken and be cut in places, and only the ban-aw or deep parts would remain. It would be a busy time harvesting the rama and the kunukon. It would be time to dismantle the armadero and catch the fat frogs which had come to live in them.
Then, slowly, the rivers would be dry. Tinder dry by January of the succeeding year. By summer, not even the pingnga or wild mint plant survives. The ledda would survive though, helped by its dense root system. The rivers would be a gravel and sand land, a land of the sun, a land owns by dryness.