Sulfur rain

Marga Deona

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Sulfur rain

AFP

First, the explosion. And then, matter that looked like manna from heaven, but stung like shards of glass.

From the living room the scent of freshly-sharpened pencils, unboxed wax crayons, and latex erasers melded with the swell of the ground wafting from outside.  Sprawled on the floor were stacks of books and unsullied notebooks waiting to be wrapped in clear plastic.  It was halfway past the month of June, and school had just begun. 

A tricycle stopped in front of the house, and out stepped two young men with their backpacks and duffel bags. One of them was my mother’s brother – my uncle Bong – and an unfamiliar  man his age. I got up from my pile of school supplies, ran up to my uncle, and gave him a hug. He proceeded to introduce me to his companion – his friend, he said, who I would call Tito Jun.

My mother peered from the kitchen, and motioned for the two young men to have late lunch. The visitors gladly obliged, and gleefully partook of what looked like a feast after a 15-hour trip from Naga left them famished. I sat with them, happy that my favorite uncle was staying a little longer this time around, as he would attend the community college nearby.

With my uncle’s arrival, that Saturday afternoon eclipsed a rather uneventful morning  that consisted of homework and tempering the tantrums of my younger brother. I was 5 then, rudely interrupting the conversation between the adults in the dining table. I took my uncle’s hand, excited to show him the coconut tree we planted on the day my brother was born. You should look how big it is now, I said. It is now even bigger than its “twin.”

As we made our way outside, some of the darkest rainclouds I’ve seen thus far inched over the sleepy town of Floridablanca, pregnant with the promise of rain. Gray ripples rapidly moved across the sky, growing denser by the minute. Soon, they formed a drapery of sorts across the horizon, cast upon the earth like a mournful widow’s veil.

We turned our attention to the growing coconut tree, admiring how it had grown bigger than expected, with its trunk heftier and its fronds that had started to rustle against the much-older santol tree a few feet away.  Our time outdoors was cut short by my mother, calling out to us to go back inside, as the rain was on its way.

The rain arrived not long after, and brought with it unwelcome company.

Shades of gray

We had just made our way back inside the house  as the rain started pouring.  A clap of thunder much louder than the usual escalated into a growling rumble. And then, from a distance, we heard the explosion of what seemed like a succession of firing cannons, followed by a collective crash of steel and concrete. Our house shook; our crockery rattled.

A siren wailed loudly, cutting through the cacophony of downpour and disaster. It was unlike the customary military siren that roused me from slumber every morning, as its shrillness posed an urgency neither the coup attempt from two years before nor the Gulf War drills had elicited.

My father, a fighter pilot who kept calm in the face of aerial combat and near-death crashes, frantically led all of us under our narra dining table. A part of our ceiling gave way, revealing the wooden lattices holding the roof together. We all huddled under the table – parents, children, household help, and visitors – our last recourse of sturdiness as the rest of the world shook.

Run for cover

The tremors did not last long, but the siren persisted. Soon after, a soldier bellowed via a megaphone from a distance. The voice grew more audible, as it called on all of us to evacuate to the base chapel. There were trucks and military jeeps roaming the streets, and all of our neighbors were scurrying out of their homes with bags in tow.

From the window it looked like what the Bible described as manna from heaven, except that it was not a blessing, but a blight. And then, from underneath the table I saw something permeating through the crack in the ceiling down to the floor. It wasn’t just rainwater – it was that, mixed with a sand-like consistency, which I would learn later on was volcanic ash.

Mount Pinatubo erupted, my mother muttered under her breath. We were living at the foot of the mountain ranges traversing the provinces of Pampanga and Zambales, with threats of an impending eruption happening since an earthquake shook our part of Luzon more than a year ago. 

Not wasting time, my parents packed our clothes, got all the available umbrellas and coats, and stormed out of the house. My uncle Bong carried me, and Tito Jun my brother, as my parents carried as much as they could – clothes, valuables, and a few canned goods.

Sanctuary

The chapel was 5 houses down the road, but it felt like the longest walk there was. The air was acrid, the vapor from the ash falling from the sky mercilessly ricocheting up my nose. I kept sneezing, and my mother ordered to my uncle to cover my face.

I was hoisted atop my uncle’s shoulders, with a heavy coat covering me. Drops from the sky hit my arms, stinging like needles freshly singed over a flame.

All roads led to the chapel that day, with flocks of families inching their way closer. They entered from front and both sides, squeezing themselves in between the wooden pews.

We settled on a spot close to the altar, where several others were already sprawled. Blankets and wonder cots littered the marbled floor, desecrating the sanctuary of the holiest of sacraments. It felt like sharing one big room with many others whose faces you couldn’t quite make out even with the combined powers of candlelight, of incandescent, and of neon.

I looked at my father’s watch. It was a few minutes past 3, but the skies were a few shades short of pitch-black. I turned to my mother, her hands clasped as she kneaded plastic beads crumpled with a crucifix, joining the rest of the town in repose. They all looked at the plaster saints atop carriages of wood and marble, illuminating the church swathed in shadows.

The exodus

My memories of being an evacuee are fragmented, but these fragments are crystal clear. The night went by so long – I was not sure if the darkness lingered for hours or days. During one of the many fitful sleeps I had, I woke up to battalion of trucks surrounding the chapel. All of us were asked to egress along with our belongings. I boarded one of the huge blue trucks with my family, not knowing if it was morning, noon, or night time, because the skies were still dark and the fog still thick.

The truck rattled and hummed as it drove towards the direction of our home – my father and several other pilots requested if they could retrieve some items from their homes. The soldiers manning the truck obliged. Where we were going, if we would still have a house and a yard and a car, I did not know. My mother said we were going to take a big plane out of the island of Luzon far, far away from the lethal cloud to a place called Palawan, where the seas sparkled like sapphire.

We stopped a couple of times before we reached our house. I gave it one last look, mentally tracing every detail – from the left, the wiry guava tree now looking like a ghastly apparition coated in snow, to the dilapidated roof over my room, to the crumbled wooden post of the garage toppling over my mother’s precious flower garden. 

Like looking at the dead for the first time, I steeled myself as I etched the vision of our house in my 5 year-old head. I told myself, this may be the last time I was seeing this house, or what’s left of it. And then my father went back up, along with some briefcases and a box, and then the truck made its way out of the base. Past the streets of my home town, the cars were smothered up to their wipers, the shrubs of the yards blighted by the gravel, and the roof of every house – all painted a deep blue, in customary Air Force fashion – crackling with the pitter-patter of the sulfur rain. That is, if the house still had a roof, or if the rest of the house was still standing, if at all. – Rappler.com

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Marga Deona

Marga leads digital and product management for Rappler’s multimedia expansion. Sometimes, she writes about the intersection of technology, culture, and business, as well as the occasional sports and music features.