Sunstar Essay: Rain beginning in November

Saturday, November 5, 2011

MY EXPERIENCE of November through the years is rain, and not necessarily of water blasts during typhoons but rain, simple rain. In normal times, the wettest months in Cebu begin in November, up to January in the next year. The dry months come in late February up to April just before heat draws near in May.

Although as children we didn’t know at first what to do with the opening month when there was no chance to play outside and stay dry, I also found the November rain a break in hop-and-skip play and a lot of fuss; it was time to stay home and listen to the rhythm of the rainfall.

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Simple rain would perhaps be memorable to a child, like in the nursery rhyme “Rain rain, go away, Come again another day. Little Johnny wants to play.” And the rhythm makes him sleep.

When rain doesn’t come in November, natives in Bontoc have a pagan ritual asking God for rain to water the rice terraces and the mountains. Bontoc natives do the rain dance, or Manerwap, imploring god Kabunian to “open the sky and allow raindrops to water” the terraces.

Old members of the community do the rain dance for two days and two nights, beating gongs to ask for rain after the dry spell. Years and years later, in Manila this year, Archbishop Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales led a prayer asking God also for rain for the dried fields in Luzon in August this year: "Oratio Imperate Ad Petendam Pluviam" or the Obligatory Prayer to Request for Rain.

In the native neighborhood, the tribal music is played with bongo drums and rain sticks. The rain stick is a dried cactus whose hollow part is filled with small pebbles which makes the sound. Some rural kids use the sound of beads, seeds, rice to produce the rhythmic beat.

November rain is what I remember through the years to put me to sleep. There was hardly any concern about floods during the rain.

I came across the mention of an e-book written by strangers in our land—the early American teachers who came to teach children in the beginning of the American Period. A Woman’s Impression of the Philippines by one Mary Helen Fee, who was a teacher assigned here in the country, was published in America in 1910 and was found in the library collection of the University of Michigan.

From the eyes of author Mary Helen, I can see the movement of the rain storm as though from a child’s eyes even as it’s really a view of one who’s a stranger in the country.

“Typhoons have various ways of asserting themselves, but there is one predominating form of which this particular typhoon happens to be an example. The beginning of all things is usually a casual remark dropped by a caller that the first typhoon signal is up.

“Then the weather thickens, and a fine drizzling rain sets in. It stops by and by, and you have no sort of opinion of typhoons. Then the rain begins again with a steady downpour, which makes you wonder if there will be any left for next year. Again it stops, almost leads you to think it intends to clear.

“Then a little vagrant sigh of wind wafts back the deluge. A few minutes later nature sighs again with more tears. Each gust is stronger than the one before it, and at the end of eight or ten hours the blasts are terrific, and the rain is driven like spikes before them. It may keep this up twelve hours or fifty-six. It may increase to an absolute hurricane, levelling all before it with great loss of life, or it may content itself with an exhibition of what it could do if it really desired.”

Super typhoon Ruping in 1990, the country’s most disastrous typhoon since 1947, left almost a thousand people dead and a damage on property worth P10.846 B in the Visayas and Mindanao. It’s said Ruping smashed ships and sank them in Cordova island, leveling all houses there.

Now with warnings about a wet weather turning flood in November, we ask what to do with too much rain.

(ecuizon@gmail.com)