A RIVER CALLED JAE-0

One cannot step on the same river twice.

-Heraclitus

The Municipality of Balete was approximately established in the

year 1826 when it was ceded out of the Pueblo of Batang (now Batan).
Earlier, it was part of the visitas of the Curate of Batang whose patron
was the Immaculate Conception. By that time, historians referred to it
not as Balete but as Jalo or the village near the river Jal-o.

The name “Jal-o” is derived from the Aklanon word, “Jae-o,” a

variation of the word, “Hae-o.” Both mean “big pestle.” The river is
named as such for two apparent reasons of which our forebears used
to tell us. For a reason, the river is called Hae-o for the fact that viewed
from a higher elevation, portion of it winding between the mouths of
Panarga and Murao Creeks—tributaries of Jae-o—forms as natural dam,
thus creating a semblance of a huge pestle lying across the deep
crevice bounding the hills of the barangays of Oquendo on the western
portion and Guanko on the eastern side. Another theory that came to
us tells of the three waterfalls (from the Aeatubang Creeks and the
river source) pouring volumes of waters in rhythmic intervals into the
basin of the river as if there were three giants pounding their pestles in
the silvery rocky mortar. An earthquake in the earlier time had altered
the course of waters flowing from the Aeatubang creeks where the
waterfalls would only occur during heavy rainfall. Yet, as the story
goes, it was due to that fact that the river was eventually called Jae-o.

Unlike most rivers, Jae-o starts relatively on a lower ground and

flow downhill, under the pull of the Earth’s gravity from its source
somewhere in between the hilly portion of upper Oquendo, northwest
of the Tulayon Forest of Ganzon, Jamindan, around six statute miles
north of Mt. Naconlong in the Barangay of Mali-ao, Libacao. It flows
through minor rapids—the Kipot, being the biggest—and is joined by
several (eighteen at least) tributary creeks from Binitinan, Oquendo
through the barangays of Guanko, Cortes, Morales and the Poblacion
and meanders into the bends along other tributary creeks and brooks
of Calizo and Aranas and the other barangays of the neighboring town
of Batan where its estuaries lie meeting those waters flowing out of the
Callojan and Tinago Rivers in the delta at Tinagong Dagat (Batan Bay).

Image of yesterday’s Jae-o was that of an active socio-economic

highway, and yet at the same time of pristine life-giving water. Today,
several legislative interventions have to be exerted to salvage what is
left of the once ecologically balanced Jae-o River, the latest and so far
the most prominent are the Senate Bill 2309 and House Bill 4907,
proposing to make it a protected natural treasure. Ħ
Al F. de la Cruz, May 30, 2003