Weathering the Water

Weathering the Water

           

            I haven’t been able to go home lately. It is now two months since I last saw my hometown, two whole months of weekends spent lazing around the boarding house rather than gossiping with my cousins at the kitchen table. Then it was because it’s tiring to travel home for four hours on a Saturday and then come back to the city on a lazy Sunday. Now, it’s because of habagat, and the rains it brings.

            Habagat is a word always at the tip of the tongue to us who live near the sea. More than anyone, we live our lives around the weather, always subject to the fickleness of the sea. This may also be the reason we are still people of the sea, because the sea often hinders other people from coming to us, hence minimal tourism, minimal progress. But progress makes for another story.

            I’ve always liked water, especially in the form of rain and the occasional torrent. It is true that rain prevented people to go outdoors and fulfill their work. But we have always found ways to push outdoor activities indoors. And instead of the sweaty shirts, we had countless trips to the comfort room.

            Rainy days usually meant no classes for us. Mahulos it blackboard (the blackboard is wet, we would jokingly say). In most cases, the blackboard or the chalkboard is really wet, thereby preventing the teacher from delivering her lesson well. The next logical thing to do would be to get wet in the rain and play until Mother beckons us to come home.

            Ironically though, my sisters and I would always wake up early in stormy weather. Our body clocks seemed to be especially tuned to the five o-clock weather forecast that would decide our fates for the day. And when Ka Ernie declared Signal No. 2, our play-oriented selves would rejoice with the selfishly happy thought of classes being suspended for the day. We would then climb back to bed not to sleep, but to exchange Johnny Johnny stories, each one more improbable than the previous. Later, we would rejoice some more because Mother allowed us not to take a bath. The weather was so cold it was okay not to. To us kids, this was heaven.

            Later, when our childish energies have quieted down, we’d settle in our comfortable banig, protected by our pillows and blankets from the gusty wind outside. We didn’t have windows before; what we had were only slats of dos por uno wood made to look like bars in a prison cell, except it didn’t feel like prison at all. At night, we covered these ‘windows’ with luna, and when the wind blew a little, the wooden stoppers would bounce lightly against one of the wooden slats, creating a rhythm of their own. When the wind blew as it did on a stormy night, the luna would billow accordingly, like Marilyn Monroe’s skirt being blown gracefully by the wind. In the best of times, this was like being lulled to sleep in a hammock, the rhythmic tap-tapping of the wooden stoppers on the wooden slats serving as the ends of the pendulum, the billowing luna representing the arc in between. Combined with a persistent rain however, it was enough to make us hush and listen to the wind whistling stronger than usual. And with the slapping of the waves on the rocks in our sea wall as the background, this, to us, was the sound of fear.

            And we have enough reason to, as anybody who lives near the sea knows. The sundering sea was only literally seven steps from our house, and should it choose to rise higher than usual, especially during the storm, we knew what would happen. One stormy night when I was only eight or nine years old, the typhoon was so strong we were forced to evacuate to my aunt’s house a few steps away from our own, but far enough from the sea spray. We spent the night in utter darkness because the wind was so strong candlelight wasn’t possible. Surrounded by cold cement walls and even colder cement floors, we slept, hoping the wind would ease even a little the next day. Overnight, the wind and rain combined to make our town look like the sunken city of Atlantis rising from the depths of the sea floor; when the sun came up the next morning, life would return to normal, after picking up the fallen coconuts in the yard.

            Habagat usually comes when it’s the fiesta month of July in our town. During this month, the sea would look so pale it was almost white, and as my mother would say, ‘nababalikad it mga balud’. It was our way of life, that’s why we’ve gotten used to it. The mention of typhoon is not so fearsome anymore. And besides, we never ran out of things to do.

            That was just for a night however, because typhoons are usually fast-moving weather beasts that would move on to the next town overnight. But the unnamed storm that rampaged Manila, causing a death toll of 60 as of August 10 was not an overnight thing. I can only imagine my former school mates in high school running out of their ingenuity for the several days and nights they were stranded in their apartments. Floods are no unusual occurrences in Manila, but still, it isn’t a thing to get used to, it’s nothing to think about especially if it isn’t there. Sure, the Manileños have prepared for a rainy day that would flood the streets, but the half-submerged capital a few days later was far from their minds.

But even in this disaster, the worst flood since 2009 according to experts, even city people like the Manileños learn how to live like people in the sea. And Filipino ingenuity rises to the occasion.

We are a nation that has been censured precisely because of our flair in imitation, very good impersonators and imitators that we are. But I say, in the worst of times, when we are finally stripped of our telephone, television, and internet lines, when we have nowhere to turn to but ourselves for originality, that’s when the Filipino inventiveness shows. Filipinos found a way to turn the much-debated RH Bill into something useful. Condoms were used to keep their gadgets dry. Household items like were used to ferry people in the flooded villages. One team of the Philippine Coast Guard used Styrofoam, slippers, nets and bamboo sticks to carry a 19-year-old Malabon resident who was injured. In this water world, anything that floats -- pails, plastic tubs, even banana trunks – became something to hold on to to survive. Smuggled goods are also being endorsed as donations to the flood victims. And amidst the growing number of videos and photos showing the extent of the disaster, UST photographer Paul Quiambao found beauty and strength in chaos.

Even in a submerged world, 2.44 million affected residents and all other people who have lived through a stormy night, there will always be a reason to smile, be it because of our congenital habit to smile whenever a camera happens to be around. But more than the presence of cameras, I believe we still smile because standing in your own two feet in a submerged world is reason enough. And looking for something to do, exchanging absurd stories, or smiling is never more appropriate than during these times; it keeps our teeth from chattering with fear.

            Ernest Hemingway writes, “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.” This is exactly why we smile; not because we are callous enough not to have known fear, but because we have been there, but we weren’t discouraged. And because we know the places where we are broken, we reinforce them the next time.

            The inevitability of water has caused some of the most dangerous natural disasters like the hurricanes, tsunamis, and tidal waves. When a deluge comes, possessions are destroyed and lives are ruined, leaving us to our own wits. But it is in this time when we are when we are stripped of our adornments, we bare our own selves, bare but still alive.