Memories of a Great Flood

Part of being Filipino, it seems, is learning to live with nature's outbursts.

I had my first taste of a great flood when I was in kinder grade, when my family just moved from Pandacan, Manila, to my father's hometown, Bayambang, Pangasinan, and it proved to be the worst in the history of our town, to date. It was July of 1976 when Typhoon Didang, a typhoon of unusual ferocity, hit Luzon. Of course, the heart of the town's Poblacion area was not spared. A dam up north swelled, forcing authorities to open its spillways, or so we residents heard the news. Our town is situated along the Agno River which easily overflowed during heavy rains because of heavy siltation, something ultimately blamed on the several open-pit mining upriver in the Cordilleras.

I remember how the inundation of coffee-colored water slowly swallowed the streets. It was getting late in the afternoon and the rain went on unabated. There must have been no announcement of planned evacuations because the whole town slept through the storm. It was at dawn, I think, when alarm bells started ringing in our ears. Upon waking up, everyone must have been flabbergasted to see the first floor of every single dwelling place swimming in floodwaters. We had slept through the night upstairs without knowing that all our earthly belongings downstairs had been marinating in coffee-and-cream-colored water.

Not long after, my family of six (father, mother, me, brother, sister, and grandmother) decided to move next door to our neighbor, the Macams, because it was impossible to cook breakfast as our kitchen was downstairs. Besides, even our rooms upstairs were starting to drip. We jumped our way to the Macams over the concrete partition that separated the terrace we shared which overlooked the town. We were graciously accommodated by our neighboring family in their second-floor sala (living room). While the adults conversed in hushed tones, there was nothing much for us children to do but to stare at the darkness.

I would learn later on in life the reason behind the hushed tones. The father, Tio Andring, was nowhere to be found when he was supposed to be home. It turned out that he had been trapped in the faraway barrio of Darawey, I guess on some farming business. For hours, his wife and children -- Ate Au, Ate Lalaine, my kinder grade classmate and close pal Joel, and Mary Joy -- had been waiting for him to come home, but it turned out that there was no way of going home except braving the muddy roads by walking. And walk and walk he did until he finally reached his doorstop in the accessoria part of the public market, where dozens of fellow residents kept businesses downstairs and retired upstairs past working hours. As his wife Tia Angeling welcomed him back, her face broke in tears dammed up for hours in utter helplessness, with their children likewise sobbing one by one, as if on cue.

It was almost sunrise when help from the municipal government finally came by way of a farm tractor which pulled a cart big enough to rescue one family at a time. The tractor, I would learn from my mother much later, was owned by then vice-mayor, Teofilo Medrano of M.H. Del Pilar in the hilly part of town.

We returned to our place in haste to collect a few clothes and some provisions (rice, Milo, etc.), then dashed downstairs for the front door, weaving through the murky waters. My mother then was pregnant with her fourth child, my brother Ronnie, and I could see her bloated tummy bobbing from the flood. Our large aparador, which kept all of my mother's fine kitchenware, was also floating while heavily steeped in grime. There must have been a power outage at the time because nobody got grounded, or worse, on the way out – we must have left all the appliances plugged. Somebody (my older cousin Rudy or Rene, which the vice-mayor brought with him) had to carry me on his back, too, for it was impossible for me to get out of the house without drowning, as the flood was already neck-high out in the streets. After everyone else made it to the waiting cart, my father locked the house.

We were hauled off to a safe elevation in Del Pilar, and were welcomed by a family we didn’t even know. The family, I would learn later, was a relative of Tio Andring, a market vendor named Doray de Vera Ramos. I remember our host preparing a huge meal of scrambled eggs with lots of onions. We children spent the whole day doing almost nothing, but the adults had to wash themselves thoroughly with Safeguard using water pumped manually from what they called artesian well. For the first time, I knew how it was to be homeless, an "evacuee" suddenly displaced by what they called a “natural disaster.”

The children of our host family must have entertained us well, for I can distinctly remember spending the time in the yard picking aratiles fruits with them. When night fell, we transferred to another house, that of our relatives uphill who must have learned about us. We had dinner in their place and, because the weather was somewhat chilly, we were served steaming coffee. We sipped it like it was the most delicious and nourishing thing in the world. The only source of safe drinking water must have been the artesian well, for we had to make do with its funny aftertaste.

Evacuation always meant the twin curses of hunger and epidemic, so it was running true to form when my family was not spared. The next day, I fell ill with diarrhea probably from eating too much aratiles or drinking contaminated water.

***

My most vivid recollection upon returning home was the sight of my mother washing what remained of her china and glasses, most of which, she said, were her wedding presents she would hate to part with. The other flats in our neighborhood remained standing when the flood receded, so we still had a lot to thank for. Either out of fear or in thanksgiving, or both, we started to pray the rosary nightly as a family, something we did not always do.

One or two days later, the whole town would hear a faint whirring sound emanating from the town plaza. A chopper, it turned out, was being sent by the national government, and as soon as the word got out, people scampered to the town square. When they got back, they were wearing a big grin on their faces while hugging boxes of red Chinese apples, blankets, and assorted "relief goods."

Soon, we would learn that the Estacion (train station) of our beloved memories would cease operation, as the bridge connecting Bautista town was washed away. The bridge would never be built again, and the train station would soon go down the path of obsolescence. The other bridge, Calvo Bridge, also sustained considerable damage, but we are lucky today that it remains standing.

This experience must have traumatized us residents so much that, within the next two years, we transferred our homes one by one to the topmost part of the hilly barangay of Cadre Site, in the outskirts of town.

Eventually, I would learn that a similar 'great flood' story was behind the founding of Bayambang town from being the town formerly called Malunguey.

***

In my life, all sorts of storms would come and go, but as they say, there is nothing like the first time; the succeeding ones became somewhat routine.

Another typhoon strikes, then a massive brownout, and just like that, we are back once again to Stone Age.

This year, we are back to Stone Age right in the middle of the Age of Cloud Computing. Our lives once again take a sudden turn to something drastic, as we come face to face with… utter nothingness: no internet connection, no TV, no radio, and if we forgot to charge, no cell phones too. Often, even the landline is dead.

This basically means no news, unless we have transistor radio, an idea which we have discarded a long time ago -- bad move. But even transistor radio would require some batteries. In case we are lucky to have two bars remaining on our cell phone screen, we are afraid to text or call for fear of turning the thing to 'low-batt' mode, or worse. Needless to say, the loss of contact with friends and loved ones frays the nerves and frazzles the mind.

The long downtime, ironically enough, can not be remedied with the usual distractions because there is no Facebook, Twitter, or blog to turn to. Not even the books and the magazines gathering dust in the corner can help, unless we bring them out in the daylight. But who does that in the middle of a destructive storm?

With the lights out at home, we walk into darkened rooms and grope our way through the corridors. We trip, we bump into each other. Flashlights and candles do come in handy, if they are available at all. We find ways to kill time by lying idle and talking in fearful tones. We just can not fall asleep.

Apart from the darkness, there is the eerie silence. Gone is the usual white noise in the neighborhood, especially the uncharitable karaoke singing in the dead of the night. Nothing of the usual nightly news and soaps blaring nonstop either.

Hi-tech means nothing if there is no electricity -- we already know that. Nevertheless, we count ourselves among the ‘lucky’ ones when we finally discover, some three days after, that scores have died, and centuries-old trees have fallen down, smashing cars below, and the overall damage has been widespread.

On top of that, though, we feel perversely thankful as well that the rains irrigated the parched farmlands and filled up once again the potentially destructive dams that had dried up in the summer, ensuring food and electricity once again for the rest of the year. ...The yearly drama between life and death and doomsday destruction.

News reports of typhoons and flooding in the Philippines are always treated negatively and necessarily so. Lives and properties are lost tragically in an instant, and the loud lamentations are justified. But those of us who survive quickly learn to live with “natural disasters” by keeping a safe distance from their furious path. We quickly learn that calamities of any kind, be it natural or unnatural, can be outwitted and won over to our side if we act smart in advance, during, and in the aftermath of a calamity. We can even welcome it as something that affords us the chance to have much-needed pause from the ceaseless toil of the day-to-day, like nature's enforced retreat and recollection. 

But nothing, it seems, can prepare us for the inherent element of unpredictability, and so we are endlessly grateful for the second lease on life we are given each time we survive an onslaught.