o green world, o gray world

This country has so many kinds of beauty - the wild mountains of Mindanao with their waterfalls and coconut plantations, the endless, even rice terraces of Luzon, the underwater landscapes and white-sand beaches circling it all.   But I've spent most of my time far away from that beauty, firmly ensconced in the centers of cities.

I've taken dozens of interviews, all in big cities, most with people born in big cities, raised with smog in their lungs and a busy world outside their windows.  But I've also talked to transplants from the provinces, born in the far-flung rural regions of the nation who moved to the cities for a continued education, a better job, an upwardly mobile life.

There's a common thread in those interviews, the ones with the children of the countryside.  When they speak of their hometowns - with fondness, pity, regret, hope - they end with the same expression of longing.  "It's so beautiful," they say - they all say, in a room in a building on a block in an endless metropolis.  They describe their home island, or mountain, or beach, and say, "I wish you could visit - you should see it.  Just gorgeous."

It's hard to explain just how different these worlds seem - the rural, green, growing, stunningly beautiful and the harsh and dirty ultra-urban.  I've criss-crossed the States and seen a dozen cities and a hundred rural landscapes, but somehow I've never thought this hard about the contrast - maybe since I live somewhere between the two, in a city embraced by the mountains, with the city far smaller and less painful than the cities here, and the mountains - i confess it - less beautiful.

But here, with the distinction so pronounced, I find a strange question in my mind - is one world more real than the other?  It's irrational, I know, but as I travel on buses and boats and planes, crossing the imaginary lines between the two "worlds," they seem like they can't coexist - not equally.  Is the idyllically-beautiful country setting more authentic than the fume-filled, concrete-covered megalopolis?  Are the big business deals, momentous government decisions, the millions of intertwined lives in the cities more important than the isolated families out here?

And who suffers more - the fishermen in nipa huts, or the pedicab drivers in iron-and-plywood huts?

How can I possibly compare the two?  And yet, how can I not?