Many waters

In my head, I call it the storm. I see the letters from, whenever someone says it, whenever I do. I don’t give it a name, naming gives a thing power, and the Storm has too much.

I’ll tell you where I was when it happened, because everyone does – I was in the office, I was in school, I was in the john when I heard – saying it, again and again, because saying it means you’re alive. I was in my apartment, and there was water swallowing cars in murky brown muck. I’ll say I was a writer first, and because I was I was out the door with a camera before I understood that flood meant I was being flooded, and the water rising in the hallways was water rising in my hallways. The water whipped sideways. Everything outside was a blur, like photos shot through foggy lenses. The maintenance man was banging at doors – get ready, get ready, it could still get worse.

It did, but it was the sort of worse that I’m grateful for, as I’ve seen what the Storm can do when it decides. I know what it did to my parents, when the waters rose past the roof of the house they lived in for 20 years, and they raced up a ladder in the rampaging wet, over a fence, across a neighbor’s lawn, carrying two toddler grandchildren and very much afraid. I know my mother cried when she came home and found nothing left, caught her washing tubes of old lipstick in the bathroom with a house falling apart around her, because washing the lipstick meant she had something left. I know what it did to my father, and I do not mean the mud on the one shirt he had left. That first day, I saw him attempting to sweep water out of the house with a wet broom. I know he was afraid he couldn’t protect his wife and the babies, and I know that he ran when the man I hired to clean the house hauled a pile of old muddy papers to the trash. My father has been collecting everything I’ve written since I started in another paper, column after column, two copies every Sunday, one cut carefully, to be pasted on pages of construction paper and slipped into a clear book, the other folded into a square, on the off chance he loses the other. Mud and water do terrible things to paper, but my father won’t let go. He’s still trying to wipe off the mud.

And still I know I’m grateful, because my mother is around to wash tubes of lipstick, and my father is here to shake his head at his falling roof and at his grandkids who tell him unhappily they want to go home. I am grateful I am not the girl who was kneeling beside a white sheet wrapped around the shape of a man, the girl in the backpack and ponytail who found out her daddy didn’t make it out of the water. I’ll tell you their stories now, because that’s what we do, we tell stories, all of us, to pretend that telling them makes sense of them. I’ll tell you about the thin-faced man who could not find his wife and four children when he came home, who told reporters, like a man professing faith in God, that he felt no worry, because he knew they were alive. Their bodies were found the next day.

There was the mother, whose soldier-son died while saving civilians from the flood. They gave her son a commendation and a flag. She said she’ll trade all the commendations in the world to have her son back. There was the man, whose tragedy was recorded on national television, who rode the tin roof of his house in the raging flood with his babies in a bucket and his wife beside him. They rose and fell with the waves, and when they reached the pass under the San Mateo bridge, the waves rose, and two small children and a mother fell.

I’ll tell you how it is, in Pinagbuhatan, Pasig, where walking means slipping into water up to your waist, water that creeps under shirt and skin. This is how it looks in a street corner in Pinagbuhatan, as the sun sets in a purpling blue sky, and food comes in a truck filled with soldiers and matrons and 17-year-old college students. The street fills, in a sudden crazed rush. Water splashes into face and hair and the blue plastic basins they carry to hold babies and hopefully, the plastic bag of rice and noodles and the rare fresh egg. Once a day this happens, and if they’re lucky, they get to stand by the side of an old electric post and compare the hefts of their precious bags. There are whispers that this-or-that woman took two bags, and terrible looks are sent in her direction. These are women whose husbands are tricycle drivers now pushing makeshift boats made of wood and water bottles, who go home every night to fight off the rust dotting their motorcycles. The last flood, knee-high, years ago, took a month to ebb away. They don’t know how long it will take, and they certainly don’t know how they will live. But they will laugh, and play chess on a soggy board, and comb each other’s hair and count lice and hold their babies close, because it could have been worse.

The first time I made it home after the flood, I took a cab whose driver asked me how bad it was, and if a cab could get through. I said it was bad. He saw the trees dripping with ripped plastic bags, surreal Christmas trees, decorated by mad elves. The driver shook his head, and I asked how he was. They stayed on a roof last night, he said. Not even their own roof, because their house was swept away. Where will you go, I asked. He doesn’t know, only that he has to work today. He’ll face it tonight. He laughed. That’s what my father did too, that day I came home. He pulled me out and showed me our old Volkswagen, decades old, a fixture in the street my parents would never – and I suspect, could never sell. It sat exactly where it was while every car on the road flipped belly up. It hunched on its corner, unmoving in 20 meters of water, and sat there the next morning covered in grime. My Dad said it was one stubborn jackass, and patted it on the hood, laughing – proud of one fat little car who shoved a rusty middle finger at the sky and refused to budge.

I do not know who to blame for this, but tonight I will go hug my father and kiss my mother and buy lollipops and shoes for my niece and nephew, and shove my own middle finger at the political gentlemen who are happily stamping their names on food packs, and at one in particular who claimed someone else’s donations were his while cameras rolled. But that’s another column. Today, I’m giving my Dad something to cut out.

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