Floods

Someone told me that the rains last week were the worst she had ever experienced. “Ondoy” might have been more ferocious and left Metro Manila in shambles, but at least it just came and went. The rains lingered too long. Having them slushing on your roof without pause for several days can give you the sensation of being cooped up.

“Nakakaaburido,” she said. Thankfully, there was TV and the Internet. But which merely drove home the terrors of the outside world, whole portions of Metro Manila, Bulacan and Pampanga being underwater. Earlier in the week, she had been caught in a flood past midnight after she managed to coax a taxi driver to drive her to her home near Welcome Rotunda. The taxi had braved the rising waters, the hood emitting smoke as the cab pushed forward. She must have recited all the prayers she knew, she said, which thankfully were answered. She gave the driver a huge tip after he deposited her at her door.

But the experience had unnerved her. And made her allergic to the sound of rain, which refused to cease, droning day and night, night and day.

I’ve heard similar stories told, and similar sentiments expressed, about the flood these past days. My reaction has been to realize that I’ve been on this earth quite a bit and could recall worse rains, worse floods and worse devastations. One leaped to mind in particular, which also reminded me that it was exactly 40 years ago when it happened. Or when  it ended. If you are 40 now, you would just have been born then.

That was the truly diluvian July-August floods of 1972. It lasted a Biblical 40 days and 40 nights, or thereabouts, one-and-a-half months of near-continuous rain, much of it torrential, coming down in buckets, broken only by brief respites of a few hours. If you can feel cooped up by three days of unrelenting rain, if you can feel worn down by skies that remain dark and grey, if you can become allergic to the sound of rain you get nervous at the first patter of it, imagine how it feels to have all that for weeks on end. Without Internet, without TV, often without newspaper (the delivery boys couldn’t deliver), with only radio to give you a window to the apocalypse.

Those floods landed 88th on the list of the world’s deadliest. The Ormoc landslides of course ranked higher at 70, but that is in terms of deaths, the 1972 floods having “only” 653 compared to Ormoc’s 1,144. For sheer scale of devastation, however, the 1972 floods were a class by themselves. It was the product of several storms battering the country one after the other, which broke the dams and turned the entire Central Luzon into a huge lake, ruining the rice crop for that season and sparking an outbreak of cholera and typhoid fever. Almost 90 percent of Metro Manila was underwater, the banca replacing the jeepney as the main means of transportation in many parts of it. Indeed, well after the rains.

We were renting a small place in Sta. Mesa then which was prone to flooding. For weeks on end, we subsisted on tuyo and sardines, there being nothing to buy in the palengke, and no way to get there anyway. Money was scarce, I couldn’t get to Asia-Philippines Leader in Aduana to submit my weekly contribution, which helped keep our proletarian bodies and souls together. You appreciate the wonders of the virtual revolution, quite apart from the real one, in the recollection of it. To submit an article then, you had to physically go to the newspaper or magazine office—after writing the final draft on a manual typewriter (with the aid of Snopake to correct errors)—determined like the US Postal Service to get it there through hell and high water. Alas, sometimes the high water foiled the determination.

But in the scheme of things, even those floods were not the worst this country has seen. The very worst was the one that would come soon after. It would be more vicious, more cataclysmic, more long-lasting. That was the flood Ferdinand Marcos would unleash upon the nation.

The July-August floods sent a flood of youth, mainly students, to Central Luzon where they glimpsed for the first time the true state of their nation, the true plight of their countrymen. The experience of doing relief work turned many of them into activists; some of whom would end up in the hills. It gave Marcos all the excuse he needed for what he wanted to do. Citing the devastation of the floods and the need to rebuild the country, citing the rapid spread of revolution along with cholera and typhoid, citing anarchy and chaos and drift, forgetting much of it was his doing:

He declared martial law.

That would be 40 years too next month, on Sept. 21. The July-August floods lasted only 40 days and 40 nights, martial law lasted 14 years of day and night. Overnight, Filipinos were reduced to mushrooms, kept in the dark and shat upon: The world turned gray, things were said in whispers which sounded like the slush of rain. A long groan emanated from the bowels of the earth. You had no newspapers, no TV and no radio, or none that mattered. You knew nothing about what was going on in the country, you heard only the manufactured cheer of the noontime shows. You might as well have been underwater.

Some floods you rejoice to see recede from view, some others you do not. It will be 40 years next month since Marcos plunged the country into the worst flood it has ever known and much of it is receding from memory, if it hasn’t done so already. Forty years are a long time, more than the lifetime of some people, and this is a country that is at pains to remember yesterday. Between now and Sept. 21 would be a good time to dredge up the past.

The deluge of recollection of martial law is one flood I don’t mind overrunning the country.