By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

(This is the last part of my  account of the trek to Secret Haven, Norzagaray, Bulacan, 10 October 2021).

SHE left us there, waiting for the driver to come back and tell us what to do. Then we saw Bryan, slipping through the mud at a faster speed, and JC slipping down after him. And then another, and then another.

We were told that their driver lost control in the ascent as he was avoiding a motorbike stuck on the road, driven by the driver’s son, without coordination on the radio. He managed to move his bike on the side but failed to inform his father of his friend whose bike was marooned in mud on the curve. As soon as the driver saw the marooned bike, he stopped but was unable to control the vehicle’s descent which was luckily stopped by a cluster of bamboo trees. Our driver decided to help them, so we thought of leaving him and started walking through the other route taken by Wennie and Chloe.

We walked up, carrying the weight of the rain on our clothes. My rubber shoes waddled in the mud but steadily took my feet up the slopes. I stepped on the mound at the center which was easier to step on. My head was splitting up from the force of the wind and the raindrops, and my body wanted to slump, but I implored God:

“Give me strength. I have reasons to live. If I have to crawl to the top, I will.”

At that point, Leo told me to move to the side as our vehicle was approaching from below and needed a clear path going up. Emma was shouting at me from behind to move, as she rolled herself on the side, clutching at some straws in the mud to avoid the approaching vehicle. Ashang was telling her:

“Mom, are you okay? Please tell me you are okay.”

Emma stood up, and started walking again as the vehicle passed. When we saw that we were on safer ground, we boarded the toratora, in the unstoppable beating of the rain. Mingming was worried about her mother and Chloe and asked two young men on the road if they met a woman with a child. The men told her they did, which calmed her nerves. In what seemed to me the longest ride of my lifetime, I finally saw the colored streamers, indicating to me that we are almost at the meeting ground. We were, indeed, in the meeting ground, passing by a shed, where Wennie and Chloe sat. We parked. JC was trembling from the shock, and the others could not believe we survived. It was still raining and very dark, but the darkness hid us and allowed Ashang, Emma and myself to strip without being noticed. I was happy I forgot to bring to the campsite the bag that contained a dress, shorts and a blouse and some other things which I intended to use in the river. Even forgetting had its blessings. We were dry, at least, except for our hair. The men managed to give us instant coffee. Leo’s dog cuddled in the corner in the front seat, letting loose a muffled, mournful cry. It was a cry of gratitude. Hard to believe, two kilometers of deep clay mud, and we survived!

As we relived the experience, Emma was telling me, it could have been us, stuck in the bamboo trees, had we not taken the alternate route. JC said, maybe God really wanted us to ride the other vehicle because he thought if we rode in the toratora where he was, we could have loosened our grip on the bars and our bodies could have flown immediately into the air, strung in the sharp tips of cut bamboo poles.

The drive home was very quick and smooth with Lean at the wheel. As we did not have time to cook, we bought grilled chicken along the way, rice and instant soup to settle our stomachs starting to revolt from hunger. We expected JC to have arrived earlier, but it appeared that he took Mingming, Wennie and Chloe to their house, with Chewy. There was Nico in the garage, washing his clothes, opening the gate, clueless as to what happened. I immediately took a bath, inspecting the reality of my existence. Yes, my body ached, even in the soothing calm of the water. But it’s over, that experience was history. It happened so fast it did not seem to have happened at all. A taste of heaven, a taste of death.

I googled Secret Haven, where according to JC, we could have literally landed in “heaven”, and found several documentaries on it. One video had a very appropriate caption: “Let go, and Let God.”

Share your Comments or Reactions

comments

Powered by Facebook Comments