Frank: A Personal Retrospection

By Herman Lagon

(This article was published 13 years ago with the author narrating his and his mentor’s ‘death-defying’ experience during the Typhoon Frank tragedy in Iloilo)

Dusk came and I really could not bear the fact that my principal was wet from the hip down while I was trying to dry myself in a balancing act with the filmy baluster just outside her room. By this time, both of us were cold, our teeth chattered, our bodies freezing in the dark.  So I devised a plan to look for the aluminum ladder that I earlier saw at the back door of the house. I said to myself, this can be a good contraption where she can sit on to dry herself for a while as we waited for the water to settle.

And so I swam anew in the eddy of black coffee. I tried to look for the stepladder using merely my sense of touch. And found I did. Happily, I swam to my principal’s room and showed the ladder to her. She climbed over it and sat on top of it as I continued my own balancing act in the baluster. By now I was just a hand stretch away from her.

When I thought that everything was all right, Jake went mad and barked up his lungs, seemingly showing his disagreement with the ladder idea. After almost 30 minutes of listening to the cacophony of Jake’s barks, Ma’am Au and I both surrendered and looked for another way to stay dry. My principal and I looked instead for a taller table. Good thing the dawdle lowering of the tide has allowed us to make use of the TESDA-made steel desk now turned 2-square-foot “bed” for my ever-inventive principal. I never thought that she would be staying in the same “flat” space in a fetal position for the rest of the night.

At one point, while blanketed by darkness, I thought I saw from the windows that the water level had fallen through the floor already. When I tried to get down from my baluster-small resting place to check, I plunged down face and chest first to the water as if I was diving for the Olympics. Only then did I realize that the water was still high and everything was just a figment of my imagination. I was soaked wet and I thought hypothermia crept on me trying to embrace me.

Motherly as she is, my principal, with her fading flashlight, looked for some dry towels in the upper portion of the half-submerged cabinet and gave it to me to at least ease the nippiness I was experiencing. She needed to distance herself from me since the possessive Jake is around “protecting” her. So she had to throw the towels to me like we were playing catch.

Our situation was so ironic yet full of meaning. As I thought that I was salvaging her one way or the other, Ma’am Au was saving my life, too. We were making ourselves afloat, hopeful, and sane symbiotically, like a mother hen and her foolish chick!

Communication was difficult and my principal’s phone was already low bat. So, at one time, we tried to look for the phone of Ma’am Au’s daughter-physician in the adjacent room wishing that it could still be used for SOS. Since the place was relatively elevated, we tried to look for the gadget as if we were catching a sly shrimp in a navel-deep fish pond. We failed (in fact, I only “caught” some pairs of stilettos) and went back to our original position.

Another moment, we received a swift call from Fr. Manny Uy, SJ, of Ateneo de Iloilo who was in the Jaro Cathedral helplessly waiting for the water to subside to rescue us. He quickly talked to Ma’am Au, seemingly giving her all the comforting words available just to enliven her spirit. When the phone was already given to me, all I heard was an intermittent voice that says “…thank you for being there Sir H…you must be ready for the possibility of getting up the roof for refuge if everything gets worse…” It was then so clear to me that I must have a ceiling-breaking Option 4 to think about—and I must do it clandestinely for Ma’am Au’s sake. This plan was not fleshed out though for the place is so dark that I had this difficulty in looking for a hammer and for the ceiling opening. Good thing the water was not rising anymore by then, letting me think to stick with Option 3, that is to kill time and just wait for the rescuers to save us.

After dusk, I tried to swim around inside the house to rummage for food. In the first “voyage” I found a tray full of food zings: tomatoes, peppers, gingers, potatoes, onions, garlic, carrots, and the like. This earned me a smile from Ma’am Au. My second voyage hours later yielded a Brojas bread that was floating just a few steps from my cozy baluster spot. Jake and I ate this one.

My third “food expedition” happened at 3 a.m. when Ma’am Au and I orally expressed our instinctive hunger. This time, my intention was to look for whatever I could in the kitchen, even if it took turning every piece of appliance upside down.

After 15 minutes of clueless search, I set my eyes on the floating refrigerator, thinking that there might still be something plastic-covered inside that can be munched on for an early morning delight just to fill our stomachs with much-needed carbohydrates and sugar.

So, like a famished but adrenalin-rushed Ethiopian, I turned the ref to its upright position and placed a heavy narra-chair on top of it for it not to float and move. I then slowly opened the ref and, as if hearing the heavenly voices of the angels, I saw in front of me a bar of giant Toblerone still cold and dirt-free! Only then that I have learned the whole refrigerator was sealed from its magnetized door and remained unspoiled. Everything inside was still intact, in fact, it was still cold and frosty. The lower part, upon opening, was immediately swamped by the inflowing water, but the dry upper portion of the tall ref was still filled with meat and milk products plus some pastries.

I said to myself, “this is heaven sent, miraculous even.” Sharing an alp of Toblerone to Ma’am Au and eating the huge remaining part of it while drinking cold fresh milk, I said to myself, this is a quirk of fate. In the middle of the storm, at the vortex of fretfulness, in the core of the flash flood, we were munching butterscotch and my ever-craved-for Toblerone. We were drinking like royalties.

This morsel of exuberance plus the hours-long, irreplaceable chitchats sustained us (and kept our sanity perhaps) until we were rescued by Jesuit brother Errol and two other school co-employees Sirs Rod Rod and Boy at 6 a.m. of Sunday when the tide has already gone down knee-deep.

It was so interesting to note that despite the gloomy backdrop of the muddy flood, amid the heroic rescue attempts that our Jesuit friends and relatives have tried from 4 p.m. of Saturday up to the early morning of Sunday, we felt so light and in high spirits as we greeted the morning sun, walking in the still rushing waters of Brgy. Cuartero, Jaro towards SM Jaro where a number of our friends and co-workers waited for us in tears.

We said to ourselves, we have been working together (she as my mentor and me as the often stubborn apprentice) in school for seven years now but our 16-hour Typhoon Frank experience seemed to bind us more. For me, it was a thought-provoking, awe-inspiring but slackening marathon conversation. It was a substitute-less bonding of sort, so calming, so transcendental. For me, it was a wish-come-true—like my other wishes that is to have a similar chat with my idols philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, physicist Albert Einstein, socialist Che Guevara, and revolutionary musician Bob Marley.

Frank, in all its cruelty, served as an umbilical cord linking us (Ma’am Au and I) like mother and son. It made me feel a part of her and her to me. That is perhaps the closest that I can describe the peculiar attachment that I have now with her after our death-defying experience.

It all turned my perspective in life 180 degrees. Right before my eyes, I saw how material possessions can easily vanish in a blink of an eye. I saw how long-kept books, highly invested in computers, newly-constructed shanties, and even precious lives peter out. But, amid these, I also saw the triumph of the will of the human heart.

After the Typhoon, our school conducted some series of sharing-processing activities to students and teachers, and eventually spearheaded a Panay-wide relief operation (Task Force Frank). Here, I realized that all of us have our own taste of heroics, rants, and comics. Stories of great courage and a sense of sacrifice abound like spring water. Indeed, Frank was frank. He taught us about life the hard way. He taught us to let go and to let God.

Frank, the 6^th Typhoon that hit the Philippines in the year 2008, hit us hard last June, the 6^th month of the year, at 6 p.m. of Saturday, the 6^th day of the week. It was so demonic of him to just frantically turn away from the normal low pressure route, fool the weather experts and surprise Region 6 with its devastating blow killing almost a thousand Filipinos, capsizing 120 vessels of different sizes, and damaging P50 billion worth of property and business opportunities.

But then again, callous as it may seem, I thank Frank in a sense for waking us all up. Yes, the damage has been done and it was so faith-challenging. But the message has been sent forth more clearly. Let go. Let God.

Looking back, I have realized that, despite the wild heroics, I never meant to put my life at risk. It just happened. It was plain instinct. A distress call was made, and I had to respond. But I have to admit, I responded more crazily because it concerned the person that I call my second mom.

They say I was a hero. I always impulsively tell them, of course, I was not. I offered nothing to Ma’am Au except my annoying presence. Only that I was then at the right time and at the right place. It was not me at all who did the good and the right things. It was Him, no more, no less.

***

The author, Dr. Herman Lagon, is now the Principal of Ateneo de Iloilo-SMCS, the position that was previously served by his mentor from Brgy. Cuartero, Mrs. Aurora de la Cruz. The latter is now retired but the mentoring goes on as both continue to communicate with each other via Messenger. Their death-defying, God-graced Frank experience will forever remind them how fleeting yet providential life is.