Experiencing the Typhoon with an I

Today I’m locked inside the house by the most forceful typhoon I’ve experienced so far. This being the third one, does not scare me as much as the first two. But the wind is very strong and it is pouring. It is a surprise that we still have electricity and even the cable TV is working.

This will be the typhoon with the letter I. My first one was Frank, which killed a thousand people in the Philippines but was just a rainy day in Baguio. Then we got caught in Helen when we were on the northern tip of the Luzon Island, attempting to go sightseeing around Pagudpud. But then we thought, what the hell happened to the letter G? There was supposed to be one with G between Frank and Helen. They couldn’t have missed it, in fact they love G here in the Philippines, they have it everywhere. The language is TaGaloG, the national breakfast is lonGGanisa, they have BaGuio, BenGuet, iGorots and Rufa Gutierrez. Then we realized that the president was Gloria M. Arroyo and perhaps some American meteorologist had named a typhoon Gloria and the Filipino authorities had decided to ignore that one. We never heard of it.

In any case, it seems these big storms are more problematic in the lowlands. Up here in the mountains it gets wet and cold but that’s all about it. It’s not necessarily a disaster. When we were on the way back to Baguio during the heaviest time of Helen, we had to pass a flooded road near Laoag. The river next to the highway had burst its banks and the road was indistinguishable apart from the line of trees between the river and the road. It was strange for me to see the land that sees 30 typhoons a year so unprepared.

When it got deeper and deeper and the water level reached the first step of the door of the bus and the traffic came to a standstill I said to myself “wow, I’m stranded in a typhoon, so cool.” But then, when the bus was trying to move a few centimeters forward I felt the river push the bus a few centimeters to the side, I thought maybe it was not that cool. I had been in some such river crossings in North India but I was usually on top of the bus and had felt I could just jump down if the river took the bus. Here though, we were all inside and even the doors were closed due to the heavy rain. I looked around me to see if people were getting anxious about the situation but saw that I was the only one making it into a big deal. I was just being the foreigner.

How do disasters happen? Do they come slowly and give you time to reflect whether it’s been a worthwhile lifetime or not? Or do they come when you least expect them? There we were in a bus, the size of a nutshell compared to the size of the swollen river, and we thought we are fully safe because there is the road, although we cannot see it, there is the 3 tons of the bus, although it’s slowly being pushed to the side, and there are all the other vehicles on the road, although they are also half swimming. When we hear a bus has been taken by the river during a storm, do the passengers there also feel the way we do till the last moment? Or when these accidents happen you know it from the very beginning that something’s going to happen?

Perhaps our bus was not being pushed to the side at all and the flood adventure lasted about half an hour and the rest of the 8 hour ride was uneventful apart from the little argument we had with Maya but that was because of the full moon energy.

Did you know there were more violent crimes during the full moons than at other times? Luckily all the accident we had was a bite on the arm and a slap on the head.

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It’s so flattering to receive a quick personal reply from God. Right after I wrote the above stuff, the house started to rock. It is a 3 storey concrete villa by the side of a steep hill. It’s hard to believe any wind would shake it like an earthquake. It was scary. Then Maya texted me asking if I want to go out! I couldn’t even imagine that it’d be possible to walk around without flying. But she said the main road and around the mall it must be full of people now (it’s Sunday). People just go on with their lives as usual, always experiencing that there is a greater power we cannot control.