Ketsana Madness. Marikina? A river runs through it

MANILA – Now we're haunted by waters. Super Typhoon Ketsana (Ondoy to Pinoys) devastated the Philippines and left hundreds of people dead, hundreds of thousands discouraged, hundreds of millions of properties destroyed: Was this a view of the Millennium Deluge to come? Mud and madness.

On Friday, 01 October 2009, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo declared the whole Philippines a state of calamity (03 October, gmanews.tv). Reasons given: 1st, so local governments can access their calamity funds; 2nd, so the State can run after perfidious traders. I'd like to add to the list. 3rd, there is the threat of another Super Typhoon, Parma. 4th, the mass media – print, radio, TV, Internet, cellphone (yes, we Filipinos have turned the cellphone into a mass medium via text messages) – had whipped up people's appetite for bad news so much so that there was the beginning of panic buying and something had to be done to cut all the anarchy to size. We are all haunted by the bad waters of media too.

Now movie star Richard Gutierrez is himself haunted by waters. On 26 September, Saturday night, he went on a real-life rescue mission for movie star Cristine Reyes, his leading lady in the reel-life Patient X. Amidst others, her house was in grave danger of being swallowed by the raging river beside it, and family members were already on top of the roof of that house and fearing for their lives as the waters rose. Now Richard is being accused of having staged the rescue to help publicize that movie, that it was reel, not real. Damn if you do, damn if you don't.

There's too much detail for the Provident rescue to have been scripted by Writer X, helmed by Director X, and acted by Pinoy heart-throb Richard Gutierrez – no lights, no camera, only dark action. Cristine was being haunted by waters. Cristine's appeal for help was heard via GMA7 TV with a still image of her on the roof of their house in Provident Village. In panic in bad weather, Cristine sent so many text messages and multimedia messages to friends, a lady in waiting for disaster to happen. The waters were rising too fast for her comfort. She was also concerned that her mother didn't know how to swim. She called people, including Richard, who then learned that rescuers were on their way. But the rescuers didn't get there, for some reason, and then evening came. (I guess they decided that it was too much risk.) Richard said it came to the point where Cristine was already texting and saying goodbye, and asking to please pray for her family, as the waters kept rising. 'Talagang di ko kayang tanggapin na wala akong magagawa, at ganun-ganon na lang yon, di ba?' Richard told Showbiz Central (gmanews.tv). 'I just couldn't accept that I couldn't do anything, and that was all there was to it, wasn't it?'

With your small team, how do you rescue someone in floodwaters coming from a raging river, rains pouring, in pitch-black darkness, for endless hours up to an hour after midnight, with a rubber speedboat, while you hear many people crying for help, many people shouting, begging for food, cars afloat, cabinets and appliances afloat, the cables of Meralco getting in your way in every street corner, the current so strong you couldn't control the boat anymore at one point you have to jump off into the cold water, position yourself between boat and wall and kick against the wall because otherwise your boat would ram into it – add to that, as I saw for myself when I visited, that it was actually Villages, for there are 3 of them: St Joseph, San Isidro, and Holy Family; imagine Richard's confusion confounded when he realized that when the villages were flooded, he couldn't distinguish the streets from one another, even if it were daylight? With the Marikina River winding halfway around the Provident Villages, it took about 5 hours to get from here to there, in unyielding darkness. Cristine's multi-colored flashlight saved Richard time and her life.

You couldn't do it if you were made of lesser resolve. At times like this, you can love your friend only if you have enough faith to just do it. Richard said so much. (You can love your enemy only if you forget yourself.)

Ah, Marikina! The Eternal City of Shoes Philippines, gone in the blink of an eye! Everyone had been banking on Marikina shoes and slippers, including the Asian Development Bank, ADB, calling it 'Flood-Ready Marikina City' exactly 1 year ago (Cezar Tigno, October 2008, adb.org). Of course, it was flood-ready:

Before Marikina became one of the Asia-Pacific's most livable cities, it contended with floods that came when it rained. Find out how Marikina is now expertly managing floods.

Through Cezar Tigno, the ADB boasted:

Now, Marikina is ready as can be for any flood that comes its way. Besides a much improved drainage system, the city boasts of a clean, flowing river, a host of flood preparedness and management measures, and communities that care.

The only problem was that the September 2009 flood was really a deluge nobody could have been ready for. So now, ADB itself is haunted by waters.

I have been borrowing. For his highly original, captivating, autobiographical, long short story entitled 'A River Runs Through It' (River Runs Through It and Other Stories, 2001, 25th ed, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pages 1-104), American author Norman Maclean begins with family, religion and fly fishing and ends with these lines:

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

And so it seems was I last Tuesday, 29 September that I had to walk along the riverbanks of the Marikina River. I visited Marikina because my good friend Orlino 'Orli' Ochosa lives there. His family suffered the same fate as a great many families in Marikina and Cainta, also in the province of Rizal; Saturday or Sunday I called once and called twice his cellphone but no one answered ('out of reach or unattended'); after a struggle, the Ochosas emerged from the flood, and on 29 Saturday, he texted me:

I was long no-load, no-bat, no-signal. Well, my friend, in a whiff all was lost, except our lives and our faith. Let us not question existence, saan kadi? (Should we?)

My reply was:

You got what is important.

And his reply was:

What is essential, you mean. Not history, not knowledge on Jesus and the Grail, not dylanology or beatlemania, not gentle MADness or mild rockaddiction, not celtic arthur lore or merlin magic, not even Peanutsy humor or starwarshit. What is first gayam is what is essential, and we don't always see that, if we aren't the little prince. Thanks. ('Gayam' is 'truly' or 'really' in Ilocano.)

There you have a list of who, what Orli loves: history (he has written scholarly books and articles on Philippine history), Jesus, the Holy Grail, Bob Dylan, Beatles, MAD, mild rock, Celtic King Arthur, Merlin, Peanuts, Star Wars among others. So in the Marikina Deluge, I knew he lost all of those things, all his copies of books of his own making and irreplaceable collections as well as of autographed ones. I also knew he didn't lose all his books – the ones that he lent me that I keep forgetting to return. Thank God for friends who forget.

My text reply was from The Little Prince:

What is essential is invisible to the eye.

And what did Cristine Reyes say about it herself? Dolly Ann Carvajal quotes her (29 September, showbizandstyle.inquirer.net) (my translation from Tagalog):

I have realized that material things have no value. It's just our relationship with God that matters in the end. This is my second life. So I will do everything to be a better person. Now that I'm safe, I will go to my relatives to give help.

A river runs through the heart if you let it.

As for me, with my family unscathed and not anywhere near Metro Manila, I wanted to see the devastation for myself. What for? The media had already come up with untold stories in untold number of ways, and repeatedly too. In our apartment, the newspapers don't live here anymore, but I could watch TV; I could read the news online and even watch YouTube videos comfortably in my Core i7 desktop PC with a 19-inch LCD Hanns-G monitor. Not me. Once a writer, always a writer. I told those who asked what I was going to write about; after the mass media's 'What happened?' I would write about 'What happens now?' Everybody's talking about today; I like to talk about tomorrow. You can fault the government for failing to forecast the flashfloods, but may I remind you that in the great civilization called the US of A, with all their head-wired hardware and sophisticated software, were they able to forecast the devastation that Hurricane Katrina would bring to New Orleans? Man proposes, God disposes.

People talk, dogs wag their tails. ''Some people call it stupid,' Richard Gutierrez said of his rescue of his Rapunzel, not unlike his exploits in his TV series Zorro (an adaptation from the Spanish original). 'Some people call it an act of heroism, but it's just a matter of helping out.' (The story made it to the New York Times – 'Filipino Actor Saves Real-Life Damsel in Distress,' nytimes.com.)

Risking one's life is a matter of helping out, yes. It is stupid, of course! It is also a Christian thing to do. You have to do it yourself. How could Jesus be Christ if he weren't stupid he did it himself? And because he lost, we won.

If it be fishermen, help the fishermen. 'Many of us probably would be better fishermen,' wrote Norman Maclean, 'if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to become perfect.'

If it be the imperfect villagers made more imperfect by tragedy, help the villagers. 'And all of us can help in our little way,' Richard Gutierrez said. 'So I hope everyone can help.' And yes, he said, 'I really want to salute all the rescuers because their job is not easy. They risk their own lives' (Mario Bautista, telebisyon.net).

And I can help with my kind of writing, quite different, not quite diffident, not quite dissident. If only as Maclean wrote of himself, as 'the author of something beautiful' being a fly fisherman who is special:

The cast is so soft and slow that it can be followed like an ash settling from a fireplace chimney. One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful, even if is only a floating ash.

What's special about help? Maclean said (through his father):

Help is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly. So it is, that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don't know what part to give or maybe we don't like to give any part of ourselves.

Last Tuesday, I walked from the bridge across the Marikina River from SM Marikina down to the Riverbanks Mall and up to the gate of the 3 Provident Villages armed with the curiosity of a cat and my daughter Ela's new, slim Exilim Casio 10-MP camera, a belated (13 June) Happy Birthday gift from Tito Lyle and Tita Becks Hannah from Phoenix, Arizona; my own last year's (17 September) birthday gift from them was Maclean's book that I specifically requested. Thank God for the gifts of relatives and in-laws.

My zoom shot (here Photoshopped in ink outline) shows the river on the side of SM Marikina with the trunks of trees still with the debris (the whites) up to higher than a man's height left by the raging waters. There is an angel of a dove hovering over the waters that I did not notice when I was angling for another shot; my electronic files in my Marikina folder tell me it was my 4th shot of the scene in as many angles. I did not put it there; God did – and when he did, there I was, waiting, even if I wasn't aware of it. (If you can't see it, you're hopeless.)

They also serve who only stand and wait. 'What is more obvious than sunshine and shadow,' Paul Maclean said to Norman Maclean more as a statement than a question. I say shadow is more obvious. In adversity, we don't see hope at once; it is only later when we realize that the wings of hope may be all that we have left, aside from home, but we can rest assured that God is the wind beneath our wings.

I have 94 images of Marikina in mud the day of my walk-about, but I did not see madness in the mouths, in the eyes or in the behavior of the villagers along the 2-km route I took. Outside their dark homes (as Meralco power had yet to be restored), I saw the residents were willingly cleaning up what they could, and it would take them days. I knew they were also being forced to clean up their lives, and it would take them years. They'll just have to survive with their body and thrive with their faith.

Yesterday, my wife and I were watching TV and suddenly the camera zoomed in on Inquirer columnist Conrado De Quiros who began by saying government people just weren't there (where they were needed). My wife's remote whisked him out of there; thank God for remote control. That was madness – his, not theirs. There were so many people displaced, distraught, dislocated, disabled, disastered (up to 1 million all over the country) – and you expect for all of them that government rescue workers would be there when they needed them, which was immediately? He was equating Help with Government. He didn't realize that it was time not for offense but defense, that he too could have been asking first for volunteers, for donations, for help of some kind or other from the people themselves. It is high time to accept that only the Wings of Hope can be in all places all at the same time. In the meantime, what we all can do is open our eyes, even in deep-black darkness, then look outside ourselves.