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Awanen ti Marapait

Of sunflowers and children’s games

By RUDY D. LIPORADA

(EDs Note: “Awanen ti Marapait” in Ilocano roughly translates to mean, “There are no more sunflowers”. The author used to write for the now defunct weekly “Gold Ore”. A graduate of UP in Baguio and is now a businessman based in San Diego, California. He comes home to Baguio every two years with his family.)

Crouched behind a sunflower bush, I clutched a crooked stick. Though my gun was merely fashioned from sunflower roots, to me, it was a Caliber .45 with hammer, barrel, and trigger.

The sunflower foliage around me was so thick I could not even see my under-ten-year-old squad members. I was aware though that everyone was creeping, crouching to find where the enemies could be holed up in the bushes. When found, we had to point our guns at them and shout the fatal “Bang!” to snuff them off from a round of our war play. 

Suddenly, twigs snapped behind me. I turned. It was too late. An enemy (he must have been eleven, thus, older and wiser than me) was pointing his stick directly between my eyes. It had an extension, a shorter stick tied with a lanot (wild morning glory vine) on the barrel. He whispered harshly, “Bang! Natay kan (Bang! You are dead)”.  Pointing at the extension stick, he said, “Silencer datoy” (This is a silencer).

My enemy’s gun innovation was derived from a James Bond movie screening at the theater across the street. Incorporating it in our game, he had gone around the bushes and shot me without shouting bang loudly which would have given his position away to my comrades. He then went on to stealthily stalk all my squad members and shooting them one after another with his sunflower gun and silencer. That innovation would be only one of those innovative lessons I would learn about life on hills full of sunflowers.

Everything about the sunflower plant –­ from roots, stalks, leaves, and flowers – is called Marapait. The native term literally meant ‘like bitter’ - the taste of everything about that wild plant. The genus that we have or had in Baguio tower to over ten feet, stalks as thick as two inches in diameter. The leaves spread like open palms. The yellow sunflowers were like one-eyed pancakes with petals facing the sun from sunrise to dusk.

Those one-eyed flowers witnessed many of my childhood scenes from which, I believe, I derived virtues that helped shape me into what I have become.

I grew up in Strike and Spare Lanes on Mabini Street off Session Road in Baguio City. The City was then known as the Simla of the Philippines. At that time, fronting the bowling alley was the Aurora Theater which toppled during the 1990 Baguio earthquake. Beside the theater was the Baguio Hardware owned by the Calinaos, another bowling lane, and a line of small eateries.

On its side of the street, Strike and Spare Lanes was margined by two hills with clearings splattered with remnants of buildings bombed during the World War II. On a promontory, there was what used to be a towering fireplace.  Fronting the clearings were acres of what we used to call jungles, of sunflower.

After school and on weekends, there must have been as many as fifteen of us, boys and girls, along with the toddlers who were our saling-pusa (copy cats), assembled on those hills at any given time. I can still recall those closest to me: Henry, Pig-ol, Paling, Timbong, Boy, Nonoy, Baby, Lily, Ernie, Taba, and others. My brother, Ces, was one of those saling-pusa. 

During my last visit to the Philippines in 2004, I met Henry who became a barangay captain in one of the districts of Aurora Hill. I was not at all surprised. When we played “Follow the Leader”, he was always at the forefront. He was also the silencer innovator. Pig-ol whose real name is Richard, I heard is now in San Francisco, USA, a thriving businessman. Paling or Eugene Bambico, I was told, joined the US Navy. Timbong whose real name escapes me is a very successful engineer. I do not know what have become of the others but I am sure that they must occupy respectable niches worthy of society. My brother, from being a mere saling-pusa, became a United Nations consultant.

I would like to believe that into whatever vocations I and my playmates morphed into, those hills of Marapaits had bearings in our lives.

Depending on what movies were in town, the hills transformed into stages of battles. We became marines, with Marapait sticks as our carbines and torches, overwhelming the enemy in caves from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. When The Three Hundred Spartans came, we became Greeks slashing the Persians with Marapait swords and spears. It was only when we became The Knights of the Round Table that we had to import pot lids from our mothers’ kitchens. The lids became shields as we rode our horses, piggy backed on our stronger playmates, for the lance tournaments. 

In those skirmishes, we had our captains, generals, centurions, kings, and damsels in distress. We learned strategy and tactics, whom to follow and how to lead, to set rules and abide by them, to treat one like a pariah if one disregards the rules. We also learned power brokering — to make friends with those most influential in organizing games and avoid those with tantrums, who, wrongly, believed games could not be carried out without them.

Sometimes, real fights broke out with real fists or, violently, with Marapait sticks. I learned that big bullies never won, in principle, even if they quashed opponents physically.  I also learned that the smaller you are, the greater your victory when you stand up against giants, even if you have more lumps on your face.

Sometimes, we were literally wounded. Nicks or gushing wounds could, however, be cured with sunflower leaves. Get a leaf, pound it with a stone to pulp, spit on it, and apply it to the wound. Presto! You have a blood clotter.

Lashing sunflower sticks together with lanot also made the frames of balay-balays (playhouses) of varied shapes and multiple rooms. Marapait leaves and dried grass topped our ceilings and walls. In these houses, we acted out the ideal role of family members. The more responsible ones were the fathers and mothers. Erecting a house in itself was a family team effort.

During cowboy and Indian games, the houses became wigwams protected by the braves. Often the wigwams were literally torched when the cavalry won. After all, we could easily construct more houses the following play day.

And when the original King Kong came, lashed sticks became a giant cage for the tallest among us. He, of course, liberated himself, breaking his vine chains to chase us for our environmental sin of not leaving nature alone.

Then the rains would come and the hills would be too soggy. Not even movies on warfare in swamps would be enacted for we can not go home muddy.  But as soon as the sun radiates back, we, too, would be back.

When I entered high school, other kids took over the hills. Nonetheless, like those ahead of us, those of my age went back to the clearings to hold bonfires with dried Marapait sticks. The flames lapped towards the starry skies. In between songs a guitar plays, we swapped stories like how to kiss or say good-bye.

Then I entered college, worked for the Philippine Government, taught in Africa, and settled in America.

It was in Zambia, Africa where I saw another genus of sunflowers. They were more like giant daisies sprouting on mountainsides. In the US, I also learned that there are other sunflowers. They had no sticks one can fashion a gun or sword with; or construct playhouses.

The kids now from where I came from, however, I believe, could not care about all these. Beginning in the early 70’s, urban sprawl caught up with Baguio and eradicated the hills of Marapaits I had known. Strike and Spare Lanes had been swallowed up by larger buildings on its sides and across the street.

I know that the latter kids could have creatively enacted on those hills E.T. or even the hi-tech Star Wars but with the Marapaits gone, there is really no way to prove it. Who else and where else could the kids express Top Gun or the latest version of King Kong? And do the kids there know what they could be missing? They already have colored TV sets with Nintendo warp games and have arcades to enact their heroism in individualist mortal combats without regard to team honor of victory or defeat.

Sunflowers maybe bitter but I will forever treasure the sweet youth I enjoyed in their abundance. I will also keep the lessons I learned including the bitter truth that better things could vanish. #

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