LORENZO P. NIÑAL:
An argument over windmills almost spoiled our visit to Ilocos Norte last week. ME: They should call it wind turbines, not windmills. WIFE: It’s the same. ME: No, it should not be the same. WIFE: So you’re fixated with Don Quixote hahaha.
ME: I’m not romanticizing windmills, if that’s what you’re trying to say. WIFE: I didn’t say that. ME: A mill is a device that breaks solid materials, like corn, into smaller pieces by grinding. WIFE: That’s old-school windmill. ME: Tilting at windmills… WIFE: Don’t ask me to look that up. ME: … is an English idiom which means attacking imaginary enemies.
WIFE: Then you’re tilting at windmills right now because I’m not the enemy.
“Imagine how many thousands of households are powered by these windmills,” I said, changing topic because I realized she was right. We were standing in front of an insanely huge turbine in Bangui, Ilocos Norte, one of the 20 erected on the beaches of this fourth-class municipality. There are 50 more of these turbines in the neighboring municipality of Burgos, covering 600 hectares of forest lands in three barangays.
The Bangui turbines stand 70 meters high and spaced about 300 meters apart. It’s like standing next to a 23-storey building. It would take 10 people to hug this behemoth, 15 if they are as short as I am. In the grand scheme of things, we vertically-challenged people are just specks of dust, I thought. Windmills this big bring out the philosophical in man.
As tourists, I and my wife focused on this one turbine in front of us. They all look the same anyway, there’s no point in checking them out one by one. At the foot of the turbine we saw mangled bat carcasses, a warning to all flying creatures not to do a Quixote and just stay away from the 41-meter-long blades.
Bats colliding with turbines are common in windmill-powered countries. I wonder why bats are not scared of these giants, because the truth is these structures look scary by their sheer size alone.
Over there is the West Philippine Sea, or South China Sea, depending on where your politics lie. We let go of the turbine for a while and wade in the waters. “So this is West Philippine Sea,” my wife said, feeling the water on her feet.
“I think this is where it started,” I said. “What?” the wife asked. “This whole South China Sea issue, it started here in Ilocos,” I said.
“The Chinese might have thought we are building windmills of mass destruction aimed at their direction,” I said. “Oh my God, and they’re sending bats to spy on us,” she said.
Now, that’s scary, we left the windmills in a hurry.