An excerpt from "The Wind in the Bamboo" about Mt. Pinatubo. When the volcano on Luzon island, the Philippines erupted in June 1991, the center of the world was destroyed for the Aeta indigenous people, and yet they survived. I arranged to climb to the crater in 2007:
A monstrous yellow 4x4 truck appeared in front of the Oasis right on time. We cut through the former base and surrounding villages, rumbling into the countryside in the morning mist, past the specter of a doomed airman statue at the Kamikaze Peace Memorial, past Philippines military bases with a “tank crossing” sign and into the village of Santa Juliana. The volcano climbing sign-in procedure was very casual. I just had to write my name in a notebook at the Guides Office. Trekking guides were assigned on a rotation basis. I was assigned Danailo, 42 years old and thin and tall and definitely not an Aeta. I insisted that the whole point of my doing the hike was to go up Mt. Pinatubo with an Aeta guide. “But how would an Aeta speak to you? The Aetas don’t speak English,” the office manager said. So I asked if I could hire another guide, an Aeta, in addition to Danailo and they let me pay a double fee to include that. “I will go and get an Aeta for you,” Danailo said as we stopped at an Aeta village. He went up the hill and came back with Jessie Reyes, a 43 year old father of seven. Jessie had a mustache and wore a long-sleeved shirt with “J. Reyes” printed on the front and cutoff jeans with some kind of ballpoint pen writing on them.
The 4x4 crunched as far up the lahar flow as it could. My guides and I got out to hike along the stream bed, as the water was still low enough for that route. I had brought along my hiking boots but Danailo told me to wear my Teva Valkyrie sandals with socks instead -- we would be going in and out of the lava gritty stream throughout. Jessie carried my daypack, which I, Girl Scout, had crammed full of totally unnecessary mountain wilderness survival gear. Jessie and Danailo put on official Pinatubo Guide/Porters green vests and carried nothing but some hard candies. They hiked bare-toed in flip flops. We were the first party setting off that morning.
It was a strange, haunting hike through stark gray canyons carved of lahar streaked with rushing streamlets. I balanced from rock to rock with my walking stick and Danailo took my hand when we had to ford the rougher water, which was calf-deep. Sometimes the water was mineral yellow or orange. The elevation was very gradual as we made our way into a fold in Pinatubo's scarred, diminished flank. Sulfuric yellow rocks were scattered among the many shades of gray. We spotted a few wild chickens and Jessie (who did speak English) said “It is plenty of wild pig, and tadpole and frog around here. But we see no fish and no deer since the eruption.”
The hills above us were mostly treeless from logging and the disaster. The canyon we followed narrowed and the stream bed got steeper. We climbed amid vines and wildflowers. Then it all opened up again and a metal staircase appeared, like Jacob’s ladder, bringing us up to the rim of the crater. It had taken us about two hours to hike there from where the 4X4 was parked.
We reached the overlook above the tarnish patina crater lake. A curved ledge of flat ground was covered with dome tents belonging to Filipino college-age campers on a holiday weekend. One of their guides gave my guides plates of the campers’ leftover spaghetti. Some of the students were bathing in the lake below. Visitors swimming and washing up in the eruption-formed lake had at first been considered very offensive by the Aetas, but by now it was so common that they had gotten used to it. They had reached the point where belief in the wrath of mountain gods gave way to the inevitability of commerce.
Some of the campers had littered, and my guides collected snack food wrappers to dispose of back at Santa Juliana. A camper walked past blasting some pop music from a portable CD player. The college girls told me what an “exhausting” hike up they’d had the night before. I could see how it would have been, with all the gear they had schlepped up.
Candy-colored paddleboats awaited Korean tourists on the shore below. Danailo told me that a Korean company had built a hot springs spa at the base of Mt. Pinatubo and had cut their own shortcut trail up to the crater lake for the use of spa patrons: “They paid a lot for that.” Jessie added that the Aetas “got nothing” from the Korean operation. The spa brochure instructed customers, “Caution: Do not give money to native.”
We walked down a staircase to the lake shore. The murky water had a froth on its surface where it lapped onto the ash grit beach. Green reeds managed to grow along a section of shoreline. Some floating rope marked off an area as safe for swimming. I threw a Sacagawea dollar, the American coin depicting the Shoshone guide with her baby on her back, into the lake past the swimming line as my offering to Apo Namlyari. The crater was a terribly beautiful place in a jagged ravaged Wagnerian way and also very sad as the site of such a human disaster. The Aetas’ paradise lost.
Danailo and Jessie and I sat for a while in a bamboo pavilion on the shore and ate some cashew butterscotch I’d bought on Guimaras. I showed Jessie the Malaysia “Negrito” photos, which fascinated as usual. I gave Danailo and Jessie postcards that showed Washington State’s Mt. Saint Helens volcano, before and after its 1980 eruption. When I had first moved to the Pacific Northwest, 15 years later, the lopped-off volcano was visible from our front window on clear days. I could also see it from an upstairs landing of our next house, keeping binoculars handy to observe the sporadic steam clouds which emanated from the crater. The guides were curious about Mt. Saint Helens. “How close was your volcano to your house?” they asked, and “How much warning did people have there?” When it was time to go, Jessie and Danailo very carefully, almost reverently, put the postcards in plastic bags in the pockets of their guide vests, because it was about to rain.
We left before the camping crowd started to descend. Dramatic thunder was resounding in the Twilight of the Gods landscape. A little rain sprinkled during the way down, which was actually good, because it would have been scorching hot around noon otherwise. We passed a long line of gear-laden young hikers just coming up when we reached the flats. One of the girls asked me, “Why are you alone?” as if oblivious to my two guides.
The 4x4 was not where it had been parked. The driver didn't want to get stuck in the stream if there was to be a downpour and had moved it lower. So we did some more hiking over the gray rocks, the yellow rocks, the brick-like aggregate rocks, the boulders, the tiny pumice pebbles, the sand, the dark dust, the light dust, all disgorged from the volcano. It was a very quiet place and we walked silently for the most part. I stopped to take a couple of photos and Jessie posed on the trail, removing his boonie hat so “the Malaysian Aetas” could see that he had hair like theirs.
Jessie’s hair was part of his identity, one of many answers to the question, who are these people, these “Negrito” people whom I had met in three countries? They know they are different. Their ethnic groups have their own names. Some of them speak their own languages. The other Asians around them know they are different. Outsiders (explorers, colonists, scientists, experts, tourists) decided they were different. Some even decided they were a unique “race.” They might have distinctive markers in their DNA or their skulls or blood. They have existed in the imaginations of others as demons, spirits, savages, “pygmies.” They look different, but not always, or to the same extent. In some ways, they act different, and in some ways they act like each other.
We drove back to the Guides Office in the sulphur yellow 4x4, with Jessie pointing out some Aeta villages high up in the hills, a Catholic school in one, a Presbyterian church in another. He told me that the Aetas in the area would trade charcoal and bananas for their rice. We passed some Aetas on the lahar plain, walking with their water buffalos. “It is only one day walk to the other side of the mountain, for Aetas,” Jessie said, “Some from my village marry Aetas from the Zambales side.” I changed into my hiking boots and Jessie was pleased to receive the Tevas. I gave both guides extra money, and gave Jessie my last gift tin of coffee from America and a safety whistle on red string as well. His smile as the 4x4 drove away was the last I would see of the “Negrito” people for some time.
A monstrous yellow 4x4 truck appeared in front of the Oasis right on time. We cut through the former base and surrounding villages, rumbling into the countryside in the morning mist, past the specter of a doomed airman statue at the Kamikaze Peace Memorial, past Philippines military bases with a “tank crossing” sign and into the village of Santa Juliana. The volcano climbing sign-in procedure was very casual. I just had to write my name in a notebook at the Guides Office. Trekking guides were assigned on a rotation basis. I was assigned Danailo, 42 years old and thin and tall and definitely not an Aeta. I insisted that the whole point of my doing the hike was to go up Mt. Pinatubo with an Aeta guide. “But how would an Aeta speak to you? The Aetas don’t speak English,” the office manager said. So I asked if I could hire another guide, an Aeta, in addition to Danailo and they let me pay a double fee to include that. “I will go and get an Aeta for you,” Danailo said as we stopped at an Aeta village. He went up the hill and came back with Jessie Reyes, a 43 year old father of seven. Jessie had a mustache and wore a long-sleeved shirt with “J. Reyes” printed on the front and cutoff jeans with some kind of ballpoint pen writing on them.
The 4x4 crunched as far up the lahar flow as it could. My guides and I got out to hike along the stream bed, as the water was still low enough for that route. I had brought along my hiking boots but Danailo told me to wear my Teva Valkyrie sandals with socks instead -- we would be going in and out of the lava gritty stream throughout. Jessie carried my daypack, which I, Girl Scout, had crammed full of totally unnecessary mountain wilderness survival gear. Jessie and Danailo put on official Pinatubo Guide/Porters green vests and carried nothing but some hard candies. They hiked bare-toed in flip flops. We were the first party setting off that morning.
It was a strange, haunting hike through stark gray canyons carved of lahar streaked with rushing streamlets. I balanced from rock to rock with my walking stick and Danailo took my hand when we had to ford the rougher water, which was calf-deep. Sometimes the water was mineral yellow or orange. The elevation was very gradual as we made our way into a fold in Pinatubo's scarred, diminished flank. Sulfuric yellow rocks were scattered among the many shades of gray. We spotted a few wild chickens and Jessie (who did speak English) said “It is plenty of wild pig, and tadpole and frog around here. But we see no fish and no deer since the eruption.”
The hills above us were mostly treeless from logging and the disaster. The canyon we followed narrowed and the stream bed got steeper. We climbed amid vines and wildflowers. Then it all opened up again and a metal staircase appeared, like Jacob’s ladder, bringing us up to the rim of the crater. It had taken us about two hours to hike there from where the 4X4 was parked.
We reached the overlook above the tarnish patina crater lake. A curved ledge of flat ground was covered with dome tents belonging to Filipino college-age campers on a holiday weekend. One of their guides gave my guides plates of the campers’ leftover spaghetti. Some of the students were bathing in the lake below. Visitors swimming and washing up in the eruption-formed lake had at first been considered very offensive by the Aetas, but by now it was so common that they had gotten used to it. They had reached the point where belief in the wrath of mountain gods gave way to the inevitability of commerce.
Some of the campers had littered, and my guides collected snack food wrappers to dispose of back at Santa Juliana. A camper walked past blasting some pop music from a portable CD player. The college girls told me what an “exhausting” hike up they’d had the night before. I could see how it would have been, with all the gear they had schlepped up.
Candy-colored paddleboats awaited Korean tourists on the shore below. Danailo told me that a Korean company had built a hot springs spa at the base of Mt. Pinatubo and had cut their own shortcut trail up to the crater lake for the use of spa patrons: “They paid a lot for that.” Jessie added that the Aetas “got nothing” from the Korean operation. The spa brochure instructed customers, “Caution: Do not give money to native.”
We walked down a staircase to the lake shore. The murky water had a froth on its surface where it lapped onto the ash grit beach. Green reeds managed to grow along a section of shoreline. Some floating rope marked off an area as safe for swimming. I threw a Sacagawea dollar, the American coin depicting the Shoshone guide with her baby on her back, into the lake past the swimming line as my offering to Apo Namlyari. The crater was a terribly beautiful place in a jagged ravaged Wagnerian way and also very sad as the site of such a human disaster. The Aetas’ paradise lost.
Danailo and Jessie and I sat for a while in a bamboo pavilion on the shore and ate some cashew butterscotch I’d bought on Guimaras. I showed Jessie the Malaysia “Negrito” photos, which fascinated as usual. I gave Danailo and Jessie postcards that showed Washington State’s Mt. Saint Helens volcano, before and after its 1980 eruption. When I had first moved to the Pacific Northwest, 15 years later, the lopped-off volcano was visible from our front window on clear days. I could also see it from an upstairs landing of our next house, keeping binoculars handy to observe the sporadic steam clouds which emanated from the crater. The guides were curious about Mt. Saint Helens. “How close was your volcano to your house?” they asked, and “How much warning did people have there?” When it was time to go, Jessie and Danailo very carefully, almost reverently, put the postcards in plastic bags in the pockets of their guide vests, because it was about to rain.
We left before the camping crowd started to descend. Dramatic thunder was resounding in the Twilight of the Gods landscape. A little rain sprinkled during the way down, which was actually good, because it would have been scorching hot around noon otherwise. We passed a long line of gear-laden young hikers just coming up when we reached the flats. One of the girls asked me, “Why are you alone?” as if oblivious to my two guides.
The 4x4 was not where it had been parked. The driver didn't want to get stuck in the stream if there was to be a downpour and had moved it lower. So we did some more hiking over the gray rocks, the yellow rocks, the brick-like aggregate rocks, the boulders, the tiny pumice pebbles, the sand, the dark dust, the light dust, all disgorged from the volcano. It was a very quiet place and we walked silently for the most part. I stopped to take a couple of photos and Jessie posed on the trail, removing his boonie hat so “the Malaysian Aetas” could see that he had hair like theirs.
Jessie’s hair was part of his identity, one of many answers to the question, who are these people, these “Negrito” people whom I had met in three countries? They know they are different. Their ethnic groups have their own names. Some of them speak their own languages. The other Asians around them know they are different. Outsiders (explorers, colonists, scientists, experts, tourists) decided they were different. Some even decided they were a unique “race.” They might have distinctive markers in their DNA or their skulls or blood. They have existed in the imaginations of others as demons, spirits, savages, “pygmies.” They look different, but not always, or to the same extent. In some ways, they act different, and in some ways they act like each other.
We drove back to the Guides Office in the sulphur yellow 4x4, with Jessie pointing out some Aeta villages high up in the hills, a Catholic school in one, a Presbyterian church in another. He told me that the Aetas in the area would trade charcoal and bananas for their rice. We passed some Aetas on the lahar plain, walking with their water buffalos. “It is only one day walk to the other side of the mountain, for Aetas,” Jessie said, “Some from my village marry Aetas from the Zambales side.” I changed into my hiking boots and Jessie was pleased to receive the Tevas. I gave both guides extra money, and gave Jessie my last gift tin of coffee from America and a safety whistle on red string as well. His smile as the 4x4 drove away was the last I would see of the “Negrito” people for some time.
