ELECTRICITY CAME to this small Mountain Province town of 12,000 people only in the 1980s—around the time that M— entered his awkward adolescence. Up until then, Sagada had been generally sheltered from the slings and arrows of outrageous modernity. For sure, the Americans who established the Episcopal mission in the town at the turn of the century, brought with them Christianity, English, and the American belief in the White Man’s Burden. But by and large, the Sagada Igorot were allowed to preserve the core of their native culture. As one local writer notes, “The Sagadans came slowly to the Anglican fold, taking piece by piece from the bundle of Christian civilization.” This allowed them to maintain a certain pride in their culture, unlike many other Filipino tribes whose cultures and senses of self were shattered by colonialism and evangelism.

	SAGADA SCENES. Little boys play near Sagada’s picture-pretty graveyard.

But after electricity came freezers, then cable TV, cellphones, the Internet. Between the coming of the freezers and cable TV began a rush of tourists. If the more adventurous of tourists had come in trickles in the 1970s, by the 1990s, they were coming in busloads. By the middle of that decade, there would be days in summer when Sumaging Cave became overrun by armies of tourists with no time to do anything more than trek in, then trek out. That tourism boom also saw the lives of M— and a growing number of other young Sagada men begin to revolve around the daily arrival of the buses from Baguio. Soon, M— and his ilk would be known as the “lost boys,” even if most of them were by then already in their early or mid-20s.

Nothing had prepared Sagadans, relatively isolated for so long, for the kind of onslaught brought by tourism. To a large degree, Sagadans have been able to fight off the industry’s worse ills: there are no nightclubs in Sagada, and no pedophiles are able to prey on the town’s innocents. But contrary to what is claimed by Sagada’s intelligentsia, that tourism has “integrated seamlessly with the town’s life and culture,” today’s tourism is creating upheavals — subtle as they may be — in Sagadan society.

For one, the sudden exposure to different ways of life has encouraged a mild backlash of xenophobia, with visitors from Manila being a main target. Rev. John Staunton, the Episcopal bishop who had founded the Mission of St. Mary the Virgin in Sagada in 1902, was, after all, a staunch imperialist who like Rudyard Kipling was convinced of the superiority of the white race. Consequently, most Sagadans today speak better English than Tagalog, and have a knee-jerk and deeply ingrained awe for the whites. At the same time, years of being treated as lesser Filipinos has also incited in many a Sagadan an instinctive distrust of the lowlander and a derision for Tagalogs.

But this is mild compared to the bigger threat posed by Sagada’s thriving marijuana trade. It is no secret among the country’s law-enforcement agencies and those that work the country’s courts that Sagada is a major hub in the global marijuana business, and has been one for quite some time now.

Any visitor has to stay only less than a day before someone offers him a bag of pollen or a sphere of rolled hash the size of a golf ball. In this small town of little means, many a structure that shoots above three stories was built with marijuana money. In fact, one of these aberrations in this place of charming little houses has been dubbed, behind its back, the “hash palace”. A good number of the town’s legal businesses — bakeries, trucking, cafés, grocery stores — started on capital put together from one or two big marijuana deals.

There’s just a tiny amount of marijuana grown in Sagada, with most of the supply that passes through here coming from the more remote towns of Kalinga. Marijuana transactions here range from the petty sale of a few grams to a newly arrived visitor, to the occasional “lucky” deal that can involve tens of kilos and millions of pesos. The deep loyalty that exists among Sagadans, where neighbors are often related, coupled with the intense distrust of the national justice system — or the entire national system in fact — allows dealers to operate freely. Of course there is also that local ethic of lauding anyone who can put one over another, especially if the other is the very system that has oppressed and discriminated against the mountain people for decades.

To be frank, up to today, there is really no hard evidence linking marijuana use to violent or destructive behavior. But the danger to Sagada lies elsewhere. Marijuana dealing in Sagada is inextricably linked to an entire lifestyle, a subculture that has, since the early 1980s, claimed batch after batch of “lost boys,” young men like M— who get fatally attracted to it.

	A bus stranded in Sagada is headed nowhere. [photos by Isa Lorenzo 2006/Silver Lens Photo]

THE TRUTH is that these “lost boys” often start out as some of Sagada’s best and brightest, the unrecognized creative minds able to grasp that which is outside the traditional culture, eager to question. Early on they are labeled as “trouble” by old-school teachers for being mischievous or for playing hooky. By the time they are in their 20s, they are condemned to the never-never land of marijuana dealing where they are not coached to grow up. In another time, their boldness may have earned them a niche as tribal warriors. And because Sagada can be a homogenous group of shared values, a nightmare of conformity closes in and blocks off these young deviants, and they are forced into the archetypical role of the Bad Boy.

In the past, the elders of the dap-ay (the smallest Kankanaey socio political structure) may have been able to guide such young men to a safe path where they could see beyond their raging hormones. But with the withering away of the dap-ay’s essential roles, these men have been left to fend their way through the lush mirage, but truly arid landscape, of marijuana dealing—where the pull of easy money, the eternal party, all-the-women-one-wants, thrill and adventure is so strong, and so treacherous. Among the big men of the business, there is no “lost boy”; they do not touch their own merchandise. Most Sagadans distance themselves from the stuff as well.

In the eight years since I left Sagada, the batch of “lost boys” I had come to grow fond of has been replaced, twice over, by a new batch.

Only D— still haunts Sagada’s cafés, entertaining tourists, doing the same tricks, except that he is pushing 40. B— has been in and out of the Baguio City Jail, thanks to the bribe money his family has been able to scrounge together. J— has finally joined his hardworking wife in the United States. G— just recently came out of jail when an old flame, luckily, pulled strings to get him out. P— gets sick all the time and secretly fears that he contracted AIDS from one of his wild nights. Once in a while, O—‘s German girlfriend, now close to 50 and still pining for him, comes to visit him. And B—, always SAGADA the nastier brother, is said to have gone mad after a particularly noxious combination of ecstasy, shabu, and God knows whatever else.

As for M—, well, he’s run away with a well-known townmate’s wife, and has had to hide in a city far away.

This is a town that is said to have anitos — the spirits of the ancestors — still haunting it, protecting its villages, seeking revenge for injustices, punishing those who disrespect the town’s traditions, or just willfully playing with the lives of outsiders they fancy. Among those who practice occult in the town (for there is a group of mystics who seek occasional refuge there), Sagada is known as one of the country’s stronger “energy centers,” a chakra if you like, or a vent of energy straight from the cosmos. But one must be careful about tapping this energy, they say, lest one gets overwhelmed by its strength. Like me, many of the searchers who come, and stay, in Sagada, never find what they seek. Instead, they find something else: mostly the town becomes a stage for an upheaval in their lives, some cataclysm that changes their lives or leaves deep marks. For those on the run, whatever it is they are running from eventually catches up with them. Whether this is due to the anitos, or the nenergy, I still can’t say. M— stands hunched by the shed that overlooks Sagada’s town hall, looking constipated. It’s the rainy season, and today is the first of 10 days that the skies did not break open to let loose curtains and curtains of rain.

Like almost every day of the past 10 years, he is nursing a hangover. His eyes are not only bloodshot, they are also yellowish. Days like this, Sagada’s overstaying tourists swear, are terrible. The damp and cold seems to grow a mold that overpowers one’s brain chemicals, inducing bouts of anxiety and boredom.

An overwhelming feeling steals upon M— but he can’t put a finger on it. Sadness? Boredom? Disgust? He thinks of going down to the Yoghurt House to bum a smoke from G—, who like him has grown a paunch, and has long pushed past 30. G— is probably singing one of his dirty ditties, or going through the motions of one of his antics, but they have grown stale, and are not so funny in a middle-aged man. So M— remains where he is, standing, waiting for the last bus to arrive. The first five buses have come and gone on to Besao or Ankileng, but only a few college kids and farmers’ wives on the monthly-supply run have come out. So he stands and waits some more as the shadows begin to lengthen.

The author now lives and works in Manila, but will always feel deeply about Sagada and its "lost boys."