Wrestling with the Wind (Part 1 of 3)

Pushed by boredom, illuminated by candle, wielding pen over paper, I write...

Milenyo (Xangsane to the rest of the world) was the strongest typhoon to hit Manila in 11 years, eh? I remember its predecessor, Rosing (Angela), punishing us with Signal no. 4 fury back in Bicol. My experience with Rosing all started with the late Ernie Baron showing us viewers of TV Patrol a satellite image of a menacing cloud spiral as large as the Philippines itself with winds of about 200 to 300 kph. He declared that this awful weather disturbance will hit Bicol head-on and possibly mess with the All Souls' Day rites of those places in its path, places which were under Storm Signal no. 3, bypassing the first two alert levels. Although used to annual storms, every Bicolano's heart sank. Still, the catastrophe was inevitable: within 24 hours and well throughout the night, the winds blew with destructive gusto and the rain inundated us in disease-laden floodwaters five feet deep. At around midnight, radio reports said that the typhoon just got stronger, and we were now under Signal no. 4. I barely knew the howler also hit Manila hard; because, we had no electricity for seven freakin' days!

In Bicol, tropical depressions, storms and typhoons were a yearly occurence that we practically grew up with them. My playmates and I had our childhood partly deprived due to uprooted fruit-bearing trees in our neighborhood. Later on, typhoons have ruined my planned swabe (smooth) moves, messing up my teenage love life big time (to the benefit of my main rival: he was stranded with the girl). Oftentimes, though, they are a welcome break from grade school grind up to college pressure, providing a source of excitement tempered by reaching out to those who have suffered.

Such regularity made me take such weather disturbances in stride. It also helped that I was still young and my parents took care of the logistics. Important tasks were ordered to older siblings, leaving me with ones like stay in the house, keep an eye on things, listen to the radio for news, do not disturb, and do not block the way. If there were floods, I'd also help in moving some of the things to the second floor. (There was one typhoon that flooded even the second floor. Feeling helpless, I slept that one out. Later I learned that the water never went higher during my slumber.) Even in my college dorm in Quezon City, we were taken care of by the maintenance staff. Better still, electricity, water, phone and even Internet concerns were capably handled.

My present life in Manila does not have much weather-related action in it. Newspaper columns in the wake of the Indian Ocean Tsunami, Katrina in New Orleans, and South Asian earthquakes has crowed on Manila's luck for not yet experiencing a natural disaster of similar scale (only man-made calamities). To my dismay, this lack of natural calamities and the general lack of interaction with nature have disabled my "nature-sense": I never had a clue of Milenyo's coming; because I never experienced the windy day that precedes a typhoon. What I experienced instead the night before the storm was gently-falling rain, the kind of rain that did not drive me into fits of melancholy. Oh, how deceitful the storm was for putting me under a false sense of complacency!

Sharing responsibility in the unit that we stay in generates new anxiety, much more when, in this instance, I was left home alone to fend the brunt of the typhoon. I was on my toes monitoring the leaks lest they turn out-of-control. I made sure the windows were shut, and for the windows with missing locks, I improvised with strings. I wrestled with the furious gust and rain just to close a window forced open by the wind. In some windows I won against the wind, in others I lost, with broken glass panels as proof of my failure.


Other parts of the series:
1 2 3