By Rex Catubig

 

THE seasonal high tide brought on by the lunar cycle aggravated by monsoon rains and storms has made Dagupan vulnerable to flooding, with Typhoon Crising and Emong and Dante, and who knows which other weather cohorts, on its heels setting record high inundation.

The rising water level has spawned a school of bottom feeders who thrive on dirty bashing, and spew irreverent sobriquets oozing with malice and sarcasm. DaguPond Seaty, Bangusville, Waterworld, are but a few of the vitriol they puke, spiked with venomous suffixes.

Flooding has become a horror tale in our water-besieged city. It is a magnitude 10 on the inconvenience scale and a vexation of Biblical proportion in the scale of Noah’s–because aside from wreaking havoc on properties, it makes simple everyday routines such as commuting or going to the market, a voyage in the manner of Poseidon adventure.

Yet, Dagupan is not an isolated case. It’s not alone in its aquatic misery. Much as the floodmongers tout it as the most flood cursed, other places have seen worse scenarios and suffer more than bashers could ever wickedly wish for the city.

I empathize with the flood casualties, especially those affected by the perceived insane elevation of the city’s road network. But I believe the inevitable. Everyone, at least that’s a water-tight presumption, is aware that Dagupan is swamp land and river country, and is below sea level. And grade school science has pumped into our brain the empirical evidence that water seeks its own level. So, it is not far-fetched that our beleaguered city is easy prey to inundation.

Unless, the city builds an embankment all around its perimeter so water will not rush in like a gush of fools, no canal system, no floodgates, no flood mitigation program will ever work. Unfortunately, the road elevation is the closest penance to flood salvation–short of getting Moses to part the floodwaters and command them back to the sea.

Looking at the height of the road elevation that has drawn the most flak, and the unconscionable pelting of hailstones, I wonder if it has occurred to the critics that even if the height of the road is cut in half, the city would still get flooded, granting the elevation is to blame.

For what does it matter if it were lower? Would flood waters recede in respectful deference?

Is that too much water for the brain to absorb?

And it is fallacious to contend that the widespread flooding is the consequence of the failure of governance. Because if that were the case, then there is a long trail of oversight that goes all the way back when the city was a fledgling town. Should the pioneer leaders be faulted and held accountable for not factoring the inevitability of inundation owing to its coastal location? And this holds water for all other leaders of places affected. Maybe they should have paid more attention to their science classes. Or installed seers in a prominent position.

But that is not my central thesis.  I am not a technocrat, nor an engineer nor a socmed sorcerer.

What fascinates me is what I saw in how the young deal with it. The very young whose DNA has not been tampered with, and contaminated with the paralyzing virus of arrogant ignorance and rigid mindset that even the psychic power of Uri Geller cannot bend.

Save for the apprehension with No Classes notice, how come the young do not seem bothered or feel aggravated?

During a connivance of rain and high tide, as the flood level peaked, I observed this boy holding a makeshift fishing pole about to engage in what in my mind was the apex of foolishness. Here I was getting alarmed at the water encroaching closer to my house, yet he seemed oblivious: Instead, he saw a pond teeming with fish. And he flung his fishing line into the floodwater. It was a strange sight,  but it became clear to me that it takes the mind and imagination of the young to turn around an adult nightmare and spin it into a child’s fancy dream.

Oh, to be a child again: “To see a world in a grain of sand. And a Heaven in a wild flower. Hold infinity in the palm of your hand. And Eternity in an hour”.

It may not change anything, but it will calm down our flood fears, assuage the stress from the ebb and flow of living in a coastal city, and ward off the attack of eunuch socmed sharks.

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