NAPO TO BABAG TALES CXV: Monotony is Sweet

IT DOES NOT MATTER IF I had been here two days ago. The opportunity of working out myself on my sweat room without walls is welcome anytime. I do not mind the monotony of it. Maybe I am sick or it could be you but, I am sure, it has to be you. The YOU that have had no time for moments like I loved doing all the time or, if you do have time, you may be dreaming of those faraway spectacular places where the purse makes a difference. And how did you fared after that? Or how many times can you do it in a year?

Yeah...yeah...yeah...blah...blah...blah. I have heard that before.

No matter. There is hope after all. You have not mastered your own self and you are there on the fringes of your daydreams. You should shift paradigms and dig down into your roots, past that veneer of Western-style education where you are taught conventional thoughts, and that corporate hum-drum which generates so much stress on your body, your thoughts, your emotions and on your spirituality. You can escape all that and reinvent yourself every weekend and learn to accept the mother of all monotony by being unconventional for just a day.

Try the Babag Mountain Range in Cebu City. IT IS just THERE!

Elevation does not matter, my friend. It is the effort and, conversely, there is so much freedom of movement and access, that effort seems to be just a footnote, to include your expenses. You can not spend so much just to climb over your fears. Ask some of our friends from Metro Manila and they will tell you how they have wished they were born in Cebu or were working here. You are so fortunate that this mountain range is right in your backyard yet you disregard it for somewhere else.

Explore your own backyard instead. Learn the game of Monotony.

Start with just a few friends. When I begun to reclaim my place in the outdoors in 2008, I hiked from Guadalupe to Napo to Mount Babag (752 meters) and back each Sunday of each month. FOR ONE YEAR! When I have gained enough stamina, I roamed confidently the Babag Mountain Range and beyond. Even beyond that very moderate monotony of one weekend day for it increased into four Sundays of each month. Anyway, when you start being adventurous, you develop good relations with local residents first for they know their places very well.

Fast rewind: A look at the past.

You know, I used to climb mountains in faraway places during the ‘90s. After Mount Apo (2963 meters), you have to cross international borders to feed more your ego of chasing dreams and higher elevations. For an ordinary laborer, that would be extravagant and unthinkable. Running a household and providing education to your children are more important. I admit, I started on the wrong foot but, at that time, climbing peaks were bohemian. It was years later that I am no mountaineer after all and no desire to be. It was just the wrong choice of words.

Remember this: Big mountains demand big pockets.

The word mountaineering has a special ring to it. It is associated with the legendary individuals who made their living off the forbidding peaks of the Himalayas, the Denali, the Karakorum, the Andes, the Alps, the Caucasus and the massifs of Antarctica. All above 4000 meters! All technical climbs requiring all fours, experience, more time, coils of ropes, gears and special equipment and they were all appropriately dressed. All can afford it because they were backed by big industries who loved to plaster their names on every inch of space of synthetic fabric and by paying clients.

Forget mountaineering. Be realistic. Just be an ordinary outdoorsman.

That is what I am doing now. It is September 4, 2016, just another long sequence of monotonic Sundays. Working out with my fellow outdoorsmen belonging to the Camp Red Bushcraft and Survival Guild. Another dirt time. We are above Camp Xi and are in a low ridge that goes up to the Babag Ridge but we do not have to walk all the way there. We stop whenever we find a good place to enhance our cooking skills and, of course, to indulge in a quiet feast. A real fire has just been started and soon we will have coffee. It is good to be just a lowly bushman.

Monotony is sweet but it will not be forever.

While access to places in and around the Babag Mountain Range are very much free, why go to places where entry fees and all other charges, invented or not, gave you so much stress instead of escape from it. I can always read people ranting in Facebook about these things and I could not understand why these same people keep on going back to these places and rant again? I rather choose monotony. However soon, I expect stupid foreign-sounding subdivision names claiming the foothills here and make access difficult for us. Possibilities like these are just around the corner. It happened in many places.

The great outdoors workout.

The mountains and all that is found in nature nurtures the mind and makes it sharp. It expands its curiosity into nooks where you had not been to yet. That could have been alright with you in your expensive treks but you are restrained by time. In the Babag Mountain Range, you are not and you could do it anytime you wished. I just discovered today a small waterfall and a surviving marang tree (English: Johey oak) which the oldest locals never even knew of its existence. A possible heirloom species. Then there is a cloud rat that has no fear of my presence. These are small discoveries yet it ensures my workout of mind and body is going perfectly.

What lies beyond?

The Babag Mountain Range is the seed of where my great exploration of the whole backbone of the Island of Cebu which metamorphosed into the Cebu Highlands Trail. These often-ignored mountain range developed me into someone which, twenty years ago, I could not have even comprehended. When I stood on that ridge of Babag in 2008, I looked beyond the other side and saw my dreams unfolding before me. There was bigger country out there and there were more mountains and trails. And then there was me.

Post-euphoria remedy.

Why go to these spectacular places just to be seen in your social circles? I know how you feel when you open your Facebook account and you are reminded of a memory of your impressive trip of three years ago. Most of us go to places only once in our lifetime and, sometimes, twice but, I am quite convinced, you can do it many times as you would wish as long as it is realistic, achievable and cheap. Sometimes, it takes just common sense. Monotony is part of that.

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A WATERFRONT INTIMACY

GOLDEN RAYS DANCED on the waves off the waters of Cebu Harbor on an early November morning as the sun, full, soft and reddish-orange, greets the dew that adhered to a rusty hood of a parked antique cargo truck that mimics the sun's image on its tiny blob of liquid and slowly fades away as evaporation began to work, sucking its minute existence by tendrils of heat that reached across a vast expanse of ocean and empty space.

I love this scene just as the sun rises from its bosom and it had turned into an intimate ritual when the sun's still cool presence turns the damp atmosphere of the waterfront area into a sweet-smelling aroma of salt heated just enough to achieve a nice effect upon my senses. The breeze carries away the stale worries of yesterday and brought about with it a fresh promise of new optimism and joy.

Tide currents waltzed its way through eddies and troughs and crests, as foam and flotsam bobbed up and down riding its fluid back, a feast for a teeming life below darting here and there without aim yet so well directed in one route.

Far beyond the buoy's limit, a sail-masted banca glides by with such elan and grace ably steering through a passing ship's wake that announced its arrival with bursts from its bull horn shaking the early morning silence and serene stupor where, suddenly, as if on cue, the berthing area suddenly becomes a beehive of activity and aimless flurry that ends my short early-morning conversations with the sea and sun.

Disappointed, I went back to where I was the last time around hoping that these same interlude with the sun and the sea at break of day would repeat itself the next time I visit, unhindered and uninterrupted by some unwanted decibels and black puffs of acrid pollutants that robbed the cool late dawn air of its clear innocence.

Good Friday came. The buzz wagon didn't arrived that day. So did the buzzers.

Perfect!

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ZOMBIES

I WAS IN THE MIDDLE of shaving my jaw stubble in the morning of October 1994 when The Cranberries video was shown on MTV. The tune struck some chords in my emotions as my mind tossed me back to a quarry that had slipped. The razor sliced my skin as I stared into a face yet pain was nowhere. I felt like a zombie. Numbed of a failure that had never been mine.

I am talking about a killer that got away. A vicious serial soloist. Blending in the night with GI wires and scissors. A real zombie. Without remorse and feelings.

He begins to take shape in my consciousness after a robbery-homicide incident on a businessman in El Filibusterismo Street, Cebu City on August 24, 1994. The lone killer took 700,000 pesos all by himself, a huge sum of money of that day. Nobody knows the guy. A complete stranger. More like a ghost!

I am a former cop. An operative of a special unit under the Theft and Robbery Section. I helped follow up this case and got some leads until it led to an apartment at the back of the Holy Cross Church in Basak-Pardo. My unit and two full teams from the TRS laid a trap on the night of September 30, 1994. They all botched this up and let the quarry get away.

I was a couple of minutes late at the scene and I took pursuit among the dark alleys not knowing where the killer had gone to. I could only second-guess and it was raining hard. I was drenched as I pursue the search alone and went over the fence inside a public school. I went over another fence into a huge university campus and still came up with nothing.

When I came back to the scene, it was almost daylight. The things and the money that the killer accumulated thru his criminal activities were seized and confiscated. What I got was just a small ID picture of the man and a name. As if in consolation, I got a hint that the man was a suspect in a sensational crime in Luzon.

I enlarged the picture in a photo shop and it was with me breakfast, lunch and dinner. I stared into the eyes and it revealed nothing. The two earrings on the right ear were a dead giveaway, that is, if we bump into each other on a street corner which is close to impossible at that moment.

I begun to work alone and away from everyone. I gathered more information and I learned more of the man. He was involved in a multiple murder case in Cainta, Rizal on April 22, 1993. I got a real name this time.

I combed all the police blotter backwards in all the precincts of Cebu City from the date he escaped our police dragnet going back to the day of the “Cainta Massacre”. I got 40 to 60 cases that was similar to his M.O. but I got fifteen that was really his, including one after his escape. The tools of his trade were GI wires and scissors. He later used a small handgun.

      “Another head hangs lowly,
      Child is slowly taken.
      And the violence caused such silence.
      Who are we mistaken?...”

The lyrics sung by Dolores O’Riordan penetrated deep into my psyche. It produced an ember of anger within me and I promised myself that I will catch this serial killer on my own. I have to be a zombie myself to take on a zombie.

January 5, 1995. I was alone at TRS when a phone call from a security guard of a bank in General Maxilom Avenue came through. A document was faxed from another bank in Davao. The man intends to retrieve his savings left here!

With the document, I worked really hard to convince my superiors to track the man, which they did, but with reservations. Although I was given the privilege to choose people for my team, they gave me just a little support. Aside that, the prohibition of firearms will start on January 10 for the May ‘95 senatorial elections. I just have a few days to legally operate outside of where I am assigned. Just a very tiny window of success.

I chose just one man for my team to the surprise of my superiors. Got my mission order and faxed a copy, including the warrant and a request for exemption to the Commission on Elections and the devil be damned! We leave Cebu two days later for Davao via Cagayan de Oro without any idea where our quarry will be.

January 8. While riding in a bus, I see Mount Apo in the distance. Been there last April. I needed a sign. Appearing suddenly in slow spiral motion was a Philippine eagle. I always hold dear the sight of an eagle since the time I encountered one so close in the jungles of Leyte in 1992. A spark inside me burst alive. I knew in the instant that this hunt would turn out right in my favor.

January 9. The killer did not go to the bank in Davao as was indicated in the document. The banker mentions a name that led to another name and another and then another one until it led to a tattoo shop. The shop was closed. It was noon time. My two-man team was beefed up by a team of Davao’s Finest.

We went to the tattoo artist’s residence in Matina and waited. I saw near the subdivision guardhouse a man sitting in a tricycle and something glinted from his right ear. Two earrings! The man alighted and stood up to his full height. In my excitement, I left the unmarked police vehicle without any word to the others.

I stalked the man as he walked towards a small roadside store. I drew my gun. I was quick. I grabbed his short crop of hair from behind and yanked his face upward and slammed him hard to the storefront. He was pinned, unable to use his strength. I managed to inform him his rights during the scuffle.

Meanwhile, the six other cops inside the vehicle were confused at my sudden leaving. Then they saw me wrestling somebody and ran towards my direction. They arrived just in time to handcuff the killer which took some great difficulty.

From there, we whisked him to city hall where Mayor Rodrigo Duterte sat waiting. He congratulated me and the rest for the successful arrest. It was good publicity for Davao City. Good for investors. Finally, I got my redemption!

      “In your head, in your head,
       Zombie, zombie, zombie,
       Hey, hey, hey. What's in your head,
       In your head,
       Zombie, zombie, zombie?...

       ...they are dying...”

I returned to Cebu on January 14 without my quarry. I was placed off-limits to media interviews. I liked to shed a tear but I can’t. I was devoid of emotions. I was stunned by the sudden turn of events.

The serial killer was shot while attempting to grab a Davao cop’s gun when being escorted to Sasa wharf on January 11. Dead on arrival. He was my ticket to an instant promotion. With a cadaver, I could get less; at the most, a medal. Which I did.

My zest to serve in the force spiralled down even when my audacious mission caught the fancy of my fellow cops in both Davao and Cebu and in the media. Popular TV host Noli de Castro looked for me. He featured this story, nevertheless, in his TV program, Magandang Gabi Bayan. I was not interested with all this attention. I had already turned into a zombie.

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