PARADOXICAL

It's July 16 Again

I didn't notice it's July 16 again until a post in my newsfeed reminds me of it again. Sometimes, it's easy to forget that I survived a really terrifying earthquake once upon a time. I shouldn't. I should never.

I was able to visit Baguio again many, many years after that without being bothered by it. I was with friends. I thought I was already healed of the trauma. But when it was time for my second visit -- for a work-related team-building seminar -- I had difficulty sleeping in a hotel there because I was reminded of it, on top of another unrelated experience that I couldn't forget, also involving a hotel (a burning Venus Hotel near Burnham Park).

Today's remembrance is being made in gratitude that I was among those spared. The first photo is a shot of Hotel Nevada, one of several buildings I had to pass by as I walked back from school to my boarding house. I can't remember why I have such a photo in my possession. Senator Raul Roco's wife got trapped here. Note the strips of white bedsheets that occupants used to escape in haste and horror from the upper floors. And notice how the first and maybe second floors collapsed, trapping and crumpling cars parked in front. I think this is called a pancake type of collapse.

The second one is a postcard of Hyatt Terraces Baguio, one of those structures that collapsed into an unbelievable mess after that quake. In the aftermath, I, together with several companions, walked around the City of Pines to survey the damage like some DRRM inspectors doing some RDANA, and we eventually ended up here. There are incredible stories of survival from this site of total destruction.

The rest of Baguio City was like that, a war zone. It was like the end of the world. We transients and students were just so thankful to be alive, unhurt, and well provided for until we were able to find a bus or any kind of ride just to get out of the mountain resort town and be back alive and safe to our own home cities and provinces.

You don't survive a tragedy of such magnitude without being a different person. It's no small thing to be able to get on with life despite the fear.

But beyond the fear of having your life snuffed out any minute and the desire of always living life to the fullest as if it's your last few minutes, you tend to live life by the day knowing tomorrow is not assured; to be thankful for the smallest things; to prioritize what to you is most important at a given moment; and to be intensely aware of whether whatever you are doing, whether your motives and aspirations, will bring you to where you desire to be for eternity.

I must have become somewhat of a reclusive monk in this joyfully unrepentant 'city' of sin because of this quake. It can be hard, as my values are constantly at odds with those of the world, but being face to face with our own mortality is such a life-changing, because humbling, experience.

It is also a life of constant gratitude each time you rise up and realize that it is not your time yet, so you have to go finish that one task at hand because there is still another one coming up, and another... Then, as you get caught up in the ways of the world, you forget why you are doing what you are doing, until you are rudely awakened and reminded of who you are when it is July 16 once again.

(An early version of my memoir on that day can be read here: https://bayambangmunicipalnews.blogspot.com/2025/04/a-mini-memoir-july-16-1990-earthquake.html I lost a latter, more refined version after FB deleted my original account for no reason.)

posted by Resty Odon  # 3:15 PM