Going Home: a trip to Lacmaan

We came down the bus, our bulging backpacks straining on our thickly-sweatered backs, the Sagada-woven straps cutting through an inch of wool and synthetic clothing at the catch between our arms and tired shoulders. We waited for the bus konduktor to release our boxes of pasalubong from the dust-coated compartment under the passenger seats. There were two boxes secured tightly with straw, and a large can of assorted biscuits.

The konduktor closed the compartment, slapped the bus' wall thrice and caught the bus' stairs as the vehicle started rolling through the narrow road of rock and mud. The road sliced through the thickly-forested mountainside.

With vague curiousity, I watched the lonely vehicle driving blindly through the thick fog. It would be swallowed by it, I thought detachedly, as if I had not occupied the same vehicle for close to nine hours. I did not dally, however, and quickly I tossed my backpack a bit to loosen the straps on my shoulders. I started for the box of saltwater fish and lowland fruits. The thing weighed around three kilos, but I picked it up to help me balance the load on my back.

And then I raised my face to the cool, damp air that was heavily-scented with pinewood, and I welcomed the mild spray of vapor---like sea-spray when the waves hit the shore with such passion---on my cold white cheeks. Memories of childhood trips and two-week stays flooded my mind as I breathed the damp air. Images played like montage before my eyes: images of me and my playmates running through the narrow path that lined the watered payeo, of days spent catching tadpoles and small fish in clear rivers, of us singing silly folk songs in the vernacular that I could not understand, of sleeping soundly even as the fierce December wind howled in our small, Cordilleran village. The warm aroma of rice-coffee, the smell of pine kindling, the constricting air of soot in the dirty kitchen---even these came back, along with the realization that this is not a daydream. I never felt like this for the longest time, this disarming wave of emotions, of finally coming home. I could weep from this, I could weep from sheer exhilaration. I instead closed my eyes, damned the unsappy side of me, and drank the joy of at last being home.


*this was taken from the journal I kept the last time I was at Lacmaan. That was way back in 2004, when relatives from my mother's side called for a long-delayed reunion. there are some more things I wrote, but this one is the longest. oh, and I wasn't able to continue the day-keeping because so many things happened then and I did not find the journal until we were back in baguio. -