"Classes suspen-ded." We all cheered the announcement, even if none of us were still in school. The mini-van crammed with two hydrangeas, three cacti, a dozen brooms, a dozen jars of jam and cookies, several kilos of garlic, assorted vegetables, five people and their luggage, sped down empty mountain roads. The rain stopped the minute we passed city limits.
"Look over there, it’s the storm," said Fred the driver, pointing to the sky, but all I could see was gray on gray. In the back, among the potted plants, Nestor was already snoring. Put a couch in the middle of the Battle of Waterloo, with cannonballs flying and infantry charging, and Nestor will fall asleep the second he makes contact with upholstery. I suspect narcolepsy.
The road was eerily traffic-free, as if everyone had scampered indoors and barricaded their windows. We stopped at a gas station and mini-mall in Pampanga, and all the fast food outlets were closed. It felt like the last scene in The Terminator, where Sarah Connor is driving to Mexico in a jeep, and we all know that terrible events are about to unfold.
Traffic was so light that we were in Makati in five hours. A light rain was falling. I got home, changed the kitty litter, showered and blogged.
Then I went to bed and lost consciousness for 10 hours. I never get any sleep when I’m in Baguio because I hang out with these lovely people who are stark raving bonkers. At our last dinner there was one ongoing nervous breakdown, one sudden breakup, and two simultaneous arguments featuring much raking up of the past. "Why do two negative integers multiplied together make a positive integer?!" howled someone I’d never seen before in my life. As chaos raged I sat spreading pâté on crackers and refilling glasses, thinking, "Who are these people? What are they doing in our cottage?" I was the quietest person in the room, which simply does not happen. (Well, the second quietest, because the quietest person in the room stared at wine corks for hours on end as if they were the Rosetta Stone, then periodically burst into a song by Sugar Ray, which was just bizarre.)
I woke up round noon and the eye of the storm was glaring at Manila.
The wind was screaming like a maniac awaiting electroshock therapy. The power was off. I could see the trees and lamp posts outside our building doing St. Vitus’ Dance in the gale-force lashing. My three cats were huddled under the table goggle-eyed, convinced that a monster was eating our house. I suddenly remembered the last big storm I was in. It was 1994 – I remember because I had also just come down a mountain, except that I did it on foot, and I returned to this same apartment a mass of bruises in all the colors of the rainbow. I didn’t dare step outside because there was sheet metal borne on the wind like flying guillotines.
I remember that it rained for days.
This time the storm suddenly ceased after two hours. It was as if nothing had happened, until you went out and saw the wreckage. No electricity, no telephone service – one typhoon and the capital is hurled back into the middle ages. Specifically, the 1980s, because when it occurred to me to put batteries in the radio, I found a retro-‘80s show. Nothing like Kajagoogoo to remind us of the transience of earthly existence.
I had to leave my apartment eventually to search for hot coffee. It was like being in Kabul or Beirut after a bombardment, only wet. The air was filled with the hum of generators and the stink of diesel. Billboards had been ripped off and flung onto the streets, crushing cars and buses; trees and electric posts had been snapped like toothpicks. I looked around at these scenes of apocalyptic (well, not really) devastation, then I did what any Manila-born and bred urbanite would do.
I went to the mall.
The mall is a safe and comfortable biosphere. With air conditioning! And cold Coke, and hot overpriced coffee! It was packed with refugees like myself, looking for an empty table to park their souls in. "I’m hearing it could take up to two weeks to get The Big Queasy back to just the normal screwed-up conditions," a friend texted me. If Manila is The Big Queasy, who is our Anderson Cooper equivalent? Will he appear, immaculate, elfin, and perfectly-coiffed, to berate city officials?
For the next several days reams of newsprint and gallons of spit will be devoted to proposals to outlaw billboards on the highways. There will be finger-pointing, recriminations, a carnival of clichés. Then a "timelier" issue will come along and everyone will forget the billboards of death. Nothing will happen.
Meanwhile, pundits will note how the privileged classes, for all their grumbling, emerged unscathed from this natural disaster, biding their time at luxury hotels while the already-suffering poor were mired deeper in misery. What an original observation. What a stunning insight. Still others will declare that God is punishing the Philippines for its sins by sending a killer typhoon. NO. We are not being chastised by wind, rain, and flying debris. YOU are, for having the gall to think that the universe would bother with one such as yourself. Life IS storms, chaos, and death by billboard.
The trick is not to take it personally.