The author’s father, radio-TV broadcaster Frankie Batacan, at DZAQ in the late 1960s.
This is the fourth day in a row that Maring’s unremitting rains have kept my whole family at home, and I’m not complaining. At this stage of my life, I’ve come to define contentment as the certainty that the people I love most are safe indoors in unholy weather such as this. I’m in my 40s, now, but I don’t think I’ve ever outgrown that unparalleled blend of relief and delight that inevitably follows news of the suspension of classes and work in the wake of a typhoon.
I spent most of my childhood and adolescence in a tiny apartment on West Point Street in Cubao, and my sister and I walked to school just two blocks away. Perhaps even more than most children our age, we were keenly attuned to the vagaries of the weather. Our father was a radio-TV broadcaster, and our lives revolved around his schedule. There was never any question of him staying home during a typhoon or other calamity; if anything, he was needed at work even more urgently during times of crisis and catastrophe. He would wake up before the crack of dawn, making phone calls, monitoring the news on the radio and television. And my mother, my sister and I would wake up almost at the same time, already in step with his newsman’s rhythms. Other days he would handle the late-night shift at work, and we would stay awake well past midnight as he disappeared into the dark and the rain beyond our apartment gates.
So while, like most school-aged children, we rejoiced at the prospect of staying home from school, our happiness was also dimmed by the knowledge that our father would have no choice but to brave the elements. We would have breakfast, torn between glee that we didn’t need to finish our Math homework and worry that Papa would be wet and cold, that he would have to work long hours until the crisis had passed.
From the moment we kissed him goodbye at the door, our vigil would begin. We would estimate the travel time – factoring in the weather, the time of day or night, the availability of public transport, and the road and traffic situation – from our street to wherever his workplace happened to be: to ABS-CBN before Martial Law, to GMA along EDSA, to a radio station in Sta. Mesa, to Fairview and Radio Veritas. Would he be able to find a tricycle to take him to EDSA? Would he be able to surmount the perpetual flood of black water on the corner of New York and Montreal Streets? Would there be buses plying the route to his office at that hour?
On tenterhooks, the three of us kept our eyes and ears glued to radio or TV – just one of hundreds of thousands of families for whom broadcast media was a lifeline. But in our case, of course, monitoring the news had a deeply personal aspect. With no pagers or mobile phones, no email or Twitter, the fastest way we could confirm that Papa had arrived safely at his destination was to hear his voice over the airwaves or to see his face on the television screen. To finally hear that cool, calm, soothing voice – so different from the hysterical ranting of most news anchors these days – was to feel a relief so profound that we could not speak for a few minutes.
We went about our day as most other families would, emptying our refrigerators of food that would spoil in the middle of a power outage, breaking out the canned goods when our fresh food had run out, entertaining ourselves with books or storytelling or music, or occasionally stepping out to play in the rain. But the radio would continue to play in the background, our father present even in his absence.
Then, later that day, or that night – or the following morning, if the crisis proved worse than we initially thought – the vigil would be repeated in reverse, as we waited for Papa to come home. And when he did, he usually had a little pasalubong for his brood: a bag of warm balut, or a package of freshly-cooked pancit canton from one of the nondescript little eateries near the corner of EDSA and New York Street. He had stopped somewhere, even with the wind howling and the rain beating down, because we had been in his thoughts every bit as much as he had been in ours.
I am reminded of these memories as the rain continues to inundate the metropolis. But my happiness that nobody in my family needs to be anywhere but home today, is dampened by the awareness that, for many people in this city, and in all other affected areas, the suspension of classes and work will bring little relief. For them, home has become a source of anxiety, a hazard, a trap: as floodwaters rise around them, as streets become impassable, and as escape, aid or rescue become increasingly difficult. And then there are those unfortunate ones who will never even make it home to their families.
Any nostalgia that I might feel for the rainy days of my childhood is tempered by the sobering thought that the Metro Manila of 2013 is a far more dangerous place than it was in my youth. Sure, there were floods and landslides back then, but I don’t recall seeing them on the same scale of impact and destructiveness that we are seeing them now. The denudation of our uplands, the obstruction of our waterways, reckless urbanization, climate change and – most of all – a political system that keeps its eye firmly on the next buck to be made and the next election to be won, rather than on the safety, liveability and sustainability of our cities, have all converged to make massive deathtraps of those cities.
If I were the sort of person to read signs in the weather, I might be tempted to think that these four days of near-continuous rain might be a lament for the state of affairs in this country. But in this season of storm, scandal, and tragedy, the rain is an impersonal player; it’s we humans who are the real calamity.
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