I was born in Camiling, but my siblings and I grew up in Tuguegarao, just one of the many instances of gender inequality at that time, although it worked in favor of my mother who is from Cagayan in the northern reaches of the archipelago. The summers I fondly remember might be so unfamiliar to the present generation. Resorts were few and pricey, and nobody really thought it a good idea to spend summer resort-hopping.
The trip alone called for very serious preparation on the part of my father who planned it like it was some crucial campaign. A driver had to be found for our sturdy Chevrolet that had a body as hardy as a tank’s and bumpers that really could bump and could take nasty bumps, nothing like the polymer jokes we have today that must be thrown away when an ill-humored mother-in-law throws her weight around, and throws her weight on them and leaves an irreparable dent!
The road was nowhere near paved and eateries along the way did not easily inspire confidence. That meant that there had to be food for the journey and some shady place along the way for a road-side lunch. One mentioned “Sta. Fe”—that pass through the Caraballo Mountain range—with a mix of awe and dread, for rocks could come tumbling down the mountainside unannounced with catastrophic consequences.
It was the neon lights of Manila that made quite an impression on a probinsiyano child. After all, in Tuguegaro, at that time, electricity was supplied by a privately held electric corporation and the incandescent bulbs that were standard lighting at that time provided hardly any brighter illumination than blazing charcoal embers! We stayed with relatives somewhere in Dos Castillas before making our way to Camiling.
The ancestral home in Camiling was ancestral in several respects. It was huge and built by wise people who knew exactly where air circulates, who knew that windows had to be large and who understood that hot air rises and cool air enters freely if there room is made for it to flow through below the window sills. Our house in Camiling —the very house where I was born—had a batalan that was a combination of a wash area, the place where the pump well was found, a sink beside it and, some distance off, the bathroom.
Every corner of that house told a story—or at least stories were told about many parts of it, including the tale it that it was such a large house that one-half of it was actually sold and physically moved somewhere else, to one of Camiling’s barrios. I was assured it was no tale because the remains of the separated half, my titos and titas swore, were still to be seen.
No one texted, spent time on Facebook or surfed the Internet in those days. The only world there was was the real world—and Camiling summers meant meals taken together and story sessions after dinners that lasted to near midnight. Of course, there were the obligatory stories of the ghosts of our ancestors slamming books or making them float on air, turning the hands of the grandfather clock whichever way they wanted them to go—but the house was by no means eerie. It had the air of history and family tradition, but it was home!
I was baptized at the Parish Church of St. Michael—the church at the center of the town that was gutted decades ago. At the center of the altar niche was a huge statute of St. Michael about to plunge his spear into a prostrate, terror-stricken devil. My paternal grand-aunt, who was step-mother to my dad, was devout woman, and we would visit the Church frequently. She never failed to kiss the statute of St. Michael piously, and then give the devil a good kick after. She regaled us with stories of how the sword of St. Michael shone resplendently over the Camiling sky to ward off the Japanese kamikaze pilots during the war.
Camiling was the town of the Kippings and the Romulos, the Bengzons and other notables, and my grand-aunt knew them well. She rubbed elbows with them. She once took the three of us brothers and sister to the Kipping Residence, there to see the mementos of Leonor Rivera.
Summers in Camiling made us realize that aside from those who loved us very dearly in Cagayan, there were those who loved us in the Central Plain as well—and we loved them too a lot. But my titos and titas, all but one, are gone now, and the place is no longer the same. My cousins, most of them, are abroad and we gather, quite sadly, often for funerals. Summers without cellphones, internet, laptops, Facebook? They were certainly fun. They are the summers that remain in one’s heart, deeply etched in the memory of the soul because they are the summers spent not in some rented haunt nor exotic resort that leaves you thousands of pesos poorer. They were summers full of the riches of family, and companionship and bonds deeper and more lasting than Facebook likes!