La Union

I looked out of the open window below. The sight of the river sparkled. I was amused but terrified. The truck’s wheels on both sides rolled onto the board planks. It was these pieces of wood that connected us to the land ahead. The river was below. There was a risk of driving slightly to the left or right and missing the mark. But my uncle, a seasoned taxi driver in Baguio, pushed on the gas with confidence. I heard the dull thud of the wheels. I imagined the truck capsizing, and us falling to our tragic demise down into the river. I never knew what that river was called, but it was leading us further and further away from Baguio City, further and further away from that house on a hill in Irisan where my grandmother and grandfather had stayed behind.

I never really knew the mechanics of the Tabisola family lore. I knew that as a military kid who had grown up soaking up American cartoons and reruns of cherished music videos on MTV my understanding of life in the Philippines was turned on its head. As I sat in the passenger seat with my older brother and cousin, I was eager at the sights I was seeing. Before I had been far too consumed by the death scroll of our modern times, I was mostly outside playing with my friends. Tag. Manhunt. Kickball. Just enough time outside before I had to go home and catch a new episode of a show – back when episodes would follow the religious scheduling of “once-a-week” releases. On the way to La Union, I was in the thick of the jungle. I was feeling the sticky air scrape upon my skin, making its announcement that it was boiling outside. For the Tabisola family, this was a road trip outside of the mountainside city that they had built a life in. My grandpa was from this area. But so were some unspoken parts of the family. As a kid I didn’t know that shame was something that we hid as adults, but there must’ve been a reason that the morning we departed I was instructed to not tell my grandma where we were headed.

In the jungle, I felt that I was headed toward the whirlwind of both discovery and trouble.