Baguio in my mind

When I was asked to write "Something About Baguio" i realized that to write about my memories of Baguio would almost be like writing the story of my life.

One of my very earliest childhood memories was of myself on my first trip to Baguio. I have a vague recollection of being awakened early in the morning because "today is the day we leave for Baguio!"

A trip to Baguio when I was five years old more than eighty years ago was not something to be taken lightly. There were days of frenzied packing and wrapping and bundling of the many provisions necessary for the two months’ stay which marked the Baguio hegiras of my childhood.

In the early years of my singularly happy childhood, my father, as Dean of the College of Education, was always given the task of heading the UP summer school and we were always the first to get to Baguio and the last to leave. The trip to Baguio was an exciting safari for the whole family.

On the first trip I remember we used the family cars–an old Buick open on all sides, no glass windows in those days when air-conditioning was still to be invented. Following in the rear was our utility vehicle which was a rickety sample of the original Model T first invented by Henry Ford. Remember this was more than eighty years ago!

Ordinarily, a trip to Baguio in those days would take eight or nine hours with many stops to fill the steaming radiators with water and for the children to reverse the process behind any convenient tree or bush. There were other stops for other pur-poses like eating our homemade sandwiches (there were no restaurants on the way), blowing up flat tires, or replacing fan belts.

I have a vague recollection of a particularly long trip when in a small Tarlac town there were more serious engine troubles. It was beginning to get dark and we were still hours away from the famous zigzag. We were all tired, hungry and sleepy. Then an old man who was part of the group of bystanders who had gathered around while our car was being repaired, invited us to spend the night in his house which was beside the road. It was a very old house of bamboo and nipa. There was no electricity and we ate a supper of hastily reheated left-over adobo and rice by the light of oil lamps. Mats were spread on the bamboo floor of the small living room and old colored sinamay mosquito nets were strung from the arms of all the available chairs. But we slept soundly all night and woke up early in the morning with the scent of fried rice and more adobo thrice fried.

Those were the days of the traditional Filipino hospitality when people would not hesitate to open their homes to total strangers without thought of any recompense. And the invitation would be accepted without a qualm for personal safety or cost. Offers of money would have been considered insulting! But again this was more than eighty years ago.

Upon reaching the much anticipated zigzag, our hastily repaired old cars would labor up the narrow road kilometer by kilometer–this literally because every kilometer was marked by an outpost where every car had to stop while the man in charge would call by telephone to the operator of the next outpost to find out if there was any car coming down; if there was then the cars going up would have to wait for it before starting out for the next outpost. Three hours on the zigzag was then considered "good time".

After this ordeal, actually arriving in Baguio was a magic mo-ment. There was the first rush of cold air laden with the fresh scent of pine. "Smell that air! Just smell it!" our mother, who was probably the first Baguio booster, would urge us. And my brothers and I would just sit there on the back seat of our old Buick, all rumpled and bone tired from our long trip, breathing in and out, taking in that magic pine scented air.

Then there would be the towering pine trees–"Christmas trees! Christmas trees!" we would chant as we rode through roads spilling over with many colored flowers and even hanging from the light posts.

"Home" for two months of every year of our early childhood was one of the cottages on University Hill where summer classes were held in the UP Mess Hall of sacred memory. These were "government cottages" which were rented out to government officials in those days of the American regime when almost all the government officialdom used to be moved to the "summer capital" to spare them from the intense tropical heat of the "low lands". These bungalows, all painted white with green roofs, dotted the pine-covered hills of what was known as "government center". They were far from luxurious, but every one was fully furnished. Uniformed boys would come around with blankets and sheets that were changed weekly, along with a load of freshly chopped fire wood for the open fireplaces–all furnished by the government. It must have been a monumental project of logistics but we took all those services for granted.

Memories of those childhood summers in Baguio come to my mind like old snapshots–I see myself five years old, squat-ting on the bare ground of the backyard of our cottage digging in the red Baguio earth holes with a sharpened stick for beetles, and dropping them one by one into an empty cracker box. I hear the shouts and laughter of my brothers in their make-shift sleds made out of old packing cases, sliding down the hill behind our house on slopes made slippery by dried pine needles.

I see my mother and father playing tennis in a court in nearby Teachers’ Camp. My mother is wearing her "American dress" which was considered the fashionable outfit for active sports in Baguio then, an ankle length pleated white cotton skirt and a matching "middy blouse" with a nautical blue collar. She is young and pretty and every time she hits the ball she would laugh out loud and so would my father. I would be sitting on a wooden bench until the game was over. Then they would come to fetch me. They would have their arms around each other’s waists and they would be laughing. Because I was cold from waiting, my father would put his sweater around my shoulder and I could smell the faint fragrance of his pipe tobacco.

Many years later, in a fit of nostalgia for those long ago summers I spent in Baguio when I was growing up, I wrote: "There were no moons like Baguio moons. And moonlight in Baguio had a way of filtering through pine branches, shining through white clouds, casting an enchanted glow that made ordinary things look extraordinary and ordinary people somehow extraordinary, too."

And because that was so, one always took the long way home in Baguio, walking slowly through the light and shadow of moonlit streets, shivering with the cold night air and feeling like crying out with sheer joy at being alive.

The orchestra at "Burnham" would play "Goodnight, Sweetheart" promptly at eight, but it was almost ten before the last lingering "good nights" would be said at each doorstep. Because that was the way things were in Baguio then.

Other evenings, the popular girls –and all girls were popular in Baguio–would be invited to the Cadet Hops. That meant long gowns (and a bit of rouge if one dared) to complement the formal uniforms. Uniforms then meant gay times and they made thin, gangling boys look like grown men. But cadets were not really soldiers, and anyway the time for soldiers was still years away. And who would have thought of war on those gay nights in Baguio.

There were bonfire nights, too– sitting on the ground under the stars. There are no stars like Baguio stars, hanging low and luminous in the clear sky. "Those are not stars, they are planets," somebody was bound to say. But who cared to learn the difference, close to the flickering fire for warmth, singing old songs, laughing, always laughing because just to be young and alive was like wine in the blood.

That was the way it was in Baguio then.

And if it sounds like Camelot, it is perhaps because it was–"One brief shining moment" that remains forever in the memory.

From Filipinos and Americans: A Love -Hate Relationship (A History of Baguio and the Baguio Country Club) by Virginia Benitez Licuanan