Aurora province: What our islands used to be

Nature keeps one of the best secrets in this country - the long, slim province of Aurora wedged between the longest Philippine mountain range and the world’s largest ocean. Access from Manila is only by sea, light plane or two northward land routes through Nueva Ecija. Smooth lowland travel on the Baler-Bongabon Highway becomes steep ascent up the Sierra Madres, on to the Caraballo Mountains of Nueva Vizcaya. Not for greenhorn drivers is the fall of evening on stretches with hairpin turns above the clouds and rocks from recent landslides. Again and again we stop on a breathtakingly narrow pass in mist, giving way to lumber trucks blinking like red-eyed drunks hauling off Northern Luzon’s remaining forest wealth. We survived to the welcome of another world - a brightly lit small hotel by the sea and a feast of charcoal-roasted blue marlin, fat river shrimps, mountain ferns and squash in succulent coconut cream. But the main trade-off for fearsome passage came at dawn - waking to roaring surf with the northeast monsoon blowing through the Pacific. Facing East, brewed coffee in hand, with brown bodies riding the whitecaps as though born from the breeze made it all worth it.

How clear it is on this coastline free of bottle caps and plastic debris: This is what our islands used to be. A Big City stranger could only wonder what it would take to keep this one little corner pristine in a country fast surrendering true wealth to “progress." Bahia de Baler - the centuries echoed with a Spanish lilt in our lodgings, hosted by an invisible Senator Edgardo Angara. No politics disturbed delighted discovery. “Baler has long sealed a pact with timelessness," he writes in the handsome scholarly book he produced, BALER, AURORA. Is this what makes a political dynasty between mountain and ocean? His younger sister Bellaflor is governor; their brother Arthur is Baler’s mayor; his only son, Juan Edgardo a.k.a. Sonny, took his aunt’s place representing Aurora’s lone congressional district; Mayor Arthur’s daughter Karen was recently elected to the provincial council. Human nature is still human nature, but a spotless coastline and a capital without a trace of graffiti or a street child’s shadow, new schools – elementary, nursing, science and tech - cast a somewhat different light on “dynasty." To hear Senator Miriam Santiago tell it, Aurora also belongs to a handful of provinces free of an old root of corruption in jueteng. Their departed patriarch Juan C. Angara smiles from the book pages - a medical nurse, dentist and public school teacher elected governor in the Commonwealth Era. As mayor of Baler when the Japanese invaded, he kept his seat at President Quezon’s order to protect civilians, sparing them the savagery rampant elsewhere, while secretly treating guerillas as an officer of the underground resistance. How striking that Juan Angara would not have been born at all had his ancestors not survived a tromba marina – that giant torrent of water we now call tsunami. By Ed Angara’s recounting, the whole town was drowning that midnight in 1735 when intrepid members of six families clambered up the roots of towering trees and swam to Point Baja, an ocean lookout now called Ermita Hill for the Franciscan hermitage that later stood there. When the waters receded, the Angaras and Lumasacs rebuilt their lives in their original home delta. The others moved inland. But that tromba marina is etched for all time where Baler’s resurrection began, Kinagunasan – the place of devastation. “Survivor families dictated Aurora’s politics for decades," says Congressman Sonny Angara. Nature and history weave fierce charm in this province with 70% mountains, 14% rolling flatlands and a 328-km. coastline full face to the Pacific. Of 230,000 upland hectares, 39,000 still held the vanishing prize of virgin dipterocarp forests at last count, with most of the Baler-Bongabon Highway running through Aurora National Park. This highway, too, was born of history, starting with the extreme reluctance of Baler’s most famous hometown boy, Manuel Luis Quezon, to develop a land route to the paradise of his youth. Fearing the entry of carpetbaggers, he held off on building a highway as long as he could, writes his historian grandson Manuel Quezon III. As President of the Philippine Commonwealth, he chose to sail to Baler on the presidential yacht, but eventually gave in to his First Lady who preferred land travel with the folk. It took 21 years but she got her highway. Eight years later, a widowed Doña Aurora would be ambushed with her elder daughter and son-in-law at the Bongabon end. That national trauma widely attributed to the Huk Commander Viernes owed a debt to the Sierra Madres - a pattern repeated in decades of war waged by communist NPA encamped in its forests. Quezon’s hesitation about opening Baler to the world still ripples in its small population today – just over 200,000 mostly migrant descendants. This was after all virgin country with only Dumagats and Ilongots when the Spanish explorer Juan de Salcedo arrived in Baler on horseback in 1573. From the retinue of soldiers, acolytes and servants in the first Spanish expedition sailing to Baler in 1609 came the seeds of future migration from neighboring provinces. In time and isolation, these pioneers wove a web of blood and affinity. Birth of Aurora's Star The first Quezon in Baler was born in Paco, Manila – Lucio, a retired Spanish mestizo sergeant in the Guardia Civil, who came to teach school in a frontier of empire. There he met and married a fellow-teacher, the Balereña Maria Molina. When their first son Manuel was born in 1878, they lived a stone’s throw from the home of his future wife, the fair Aurora. Standing before his childhood hut and her two-story home, where his presidential car is permanently parked, sparks a journey back to their lifetime. First schooled by his parents, aunt, and a Franciscan priest, young Manolo proved too bright not to go farther. Taken to San Juan de Letran in Intramuros at age 9, he began as a room and mess boy earning his board and lodging. When that proved too tough for his age, he moved in with relatives in Paco, walking to and from school. He was earning the highest grades, but it wasn’t an easy life for a boy with weak lungs. Foreshadowing his future, his mother died of tuberculosis the year Manolo graduated BA summa cum laude from the University of Santo Tomas. But more trauma awaited a young colonial subject in a dying empire – revolution in his first year of law school. When the smoke cleared, he stolidly kept a promise to his father not to join the revolution, instead returning to finish Law at the Pontifical University. But witnessing Spain’s surrender to America in Manila and learning of the execution of his Spanish loyalist father and younger brother by the Katipunan in Baler, hot-blooded young Manolo now entered the fray with Aguinaldo’s army. Daring feats against bandits in Nueva Ecija saw him rise from private to lieutenant to major in a few months, becoming a member of Aguinaldo’s staff commanding a company under General Mascardo in Bataan. With the outbreak of Fil-American war, Mascardo sent Quezon to Malacañang for Aguinaldo’s instructions. There the young major realized in shock that the President of the First Republic was already America’s hostage in his own Palace. “Tapos na’ng lahat," he thought, arriving at a crucial decision. As the century turned, he surrendered to the Americans and spent six months in prison on false charges as an accomplice to murder. He needed Supreme Court permission to take the bar exams but placed fourth and soon began to practice in Tayabas. Winning all his cases earned him enough to invite his Aunt Zeneida, widowed by revolution, and her two daughters to live with him. To her mother’s alarm, a fated romance now began between her daughter Aurora and her nephew Manuel. They were secretly engaged when he sent her to the Philippine Normal School for college. Meanwhile the call of public service proved irresistible. Giving up handsome earnings in private practice, Quezon accepted the position of provincial fiscal in Mindoro, soon promoted to fiscal of larger Tayabas. A born leader’s rise to national prominence with the birth of electoral democracy was inevitable - governor of Tayabas by 1906, a member of the first Philippine Assembly by 1907, Philippine Resident Commissioner in the U.S. Congress by 1909, beginning a long diplomatic struggle for independence. Senate president by 1916, Quezon paused with his Aunt Zeneida’s death in 1918 and stole a march with her daughter in Hong Kong, with a civil wedding followed by a Catholic ritual. This man of destiny whom Claro Recto called the “Star of Baler," was elected President of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935. Now he would shine in full brilliance. Quezon fended off wealthy Filipinos arguing for annexation, lobbied hard but struck a realistic compromise with imperial America in the Tydings McDuffie Act promising Philippine independence at the price of military bases and preferential trade for its colonizer. Now a new President prepared home ground with an eye to equitable land distribution and a national Code of Ethics. But irony was this visionary’s middle name. He had bridged two colonial eras with undimmed eye, only to be stopped dead in his tracks by World War II, forced to head a government in exile. Dying of TB on American soil the year the Tydings-McDuffie Act became law in 1944, Quezon did not live to see his flag replace the Stars and Stripes. When stolen sovereignty was returned in July 1946, it was to a war-prostrate nation still mourning his loss. When his remains came home from first interment in Arlington Cemetery, signal honors that elude lesser mortals came straight from a nation’s heart. His native Tayabas was renamed Quezon province; a new national capital was named Quezon City. The sub-province Aurora, elevated to a province in 1979, is thus far the only one immortalizing a First Lady. And so, in Baler, you look up - to the sky for signs of rain in a six-month rainy season keeping it green and lush, then to two giants in bronze – Manuel, from Emmanuel, God with us, as sentry to the Museo de Baler, and Aurora, the dawn, towering before the provincial capitol with that gentle mien no metal can capture. Again you look up in a barangay named after their slain daughter Maria Aurora - to the giant tangled roots of a centuries old baliti tree reputed to be “the largest in Asia." Quezon chose not to graft his timeless family tree to Manila’s time-yoked, imperial-rooted tree. He also refrained from favoring Baler as President with that all but vanished delicadeza. In turn his widow refused her rightful pension from a war-impoverished nation. Today their legacy faces what anthropologist Jesus Peralta calls Aurora’s “Gordian Knot" - the bounty of Nature imperiled by the current version of progress. A logging boom from the ‘50s to the ‘70s claimed half its original forests. But despite Gloria Arroyo’s aggressive pursuit of mining and Angara membership in her political coalition, not a single mining permit has been granted for its copper, iron, manganese, chromite, nickel and gold. Instead, three main highways and several bridges were built in Arroyo’s term. Nor was there any quarry in sight en route to Baler despite abundant sand, cement, silica and more. Where “the rainforest meets the coral reef" are also over half of the Philippines’ 35 to 40 “true mangrove species." As the rest of the country succumbs to dynamite fishing and commercial piracy, blue marlin, tuna, bream and wrasse still spawn undisturbed in these waters. More species await discovery as unsustainable harvest and illegal sale of mangrove areas portend fresh conflict. Plans for an ideal international port in Casiguran Sound also hang fire. Meanwhile Aurora reminds the world of what these islands used to be - for how long is the challenge Manuel Quezon might well hurl from beyond the grave. - GMANews.TV