Conquering Pinatubo

DUAL CITIZEN friends – in matters of state and age, that is – asked me how it was to climb Mount Pinatubo at 62, amazed at my feat last Saturday duly recorded in photos and uploaded on Facebook.

Swollen pride instantly took out the sore back, battered knees, and aching feet, to smugly beam: It was no different from climbing Mount Pinatubo at 51.

Aye, as it was in 2005, so it is in 2016 – 1.5-hour ride in 4X4s from Sta. Juliana to the jump-off point where starts the 1,5-hour trek; staff in hand, slippers on feet to step in and walk through rivulets and creeks where shoes needed stepping stones for crossing. This time though with the wife, her sister and two brothers, a sister in-law, two friends and two of our kids.

Aye, as it was in 2005, so it is in 2016 – the landscape changed as it remained constant: nature’s own paradox of the ephemeral as eternal.   

Indeed, the exactness of Saturday’s experience with that first climb 11 years ago, finding print as the last chapter of Pinatubo: Triumph of the Kapampangan Spirit, published by the San Fernando, Pampanga Heritage Foundation, Inc. in 2008.

 A SKYLINE of sand – golden hued in the early morning sun.
Majestic in enormity, yet ephemeral – shaped by every whisper of the wind, recast at each drop of heaven’s tears.
One cannot help but wax romantic, if not poetic, on the way to Mount Pinatubo: There is so much primeval beauty, there is nary a trace of the volcano’s fury.
Apparently appeased with so much sacrifice in human lives and worldly possessions in the holocaust of the 1991 eruptions, Apo Namalyari – Pinatubo’s deity to the native Aetas – rebirthed Paradise in his realm.
Mount Pinatubo mystically stands like a prized jewel enticing to be possessed, or – pardon the chauvinistic incorrectness – an entrancing maiden to be conquered.
Conquest – the promise of glory at the peak, of overpowering the once mighty wellspring of death and destruction – sets throngs upon throngs on treks to Pinatubo.

Driving out of the Sta. Juliana staging point in Capas, Tarlac on board four-wheel-drive contraptions resembling African safari vehicles, the trekker comes to an open, dusty plain stretching out to a horizon broken by emerald-topped jagged peaks. Precipitous peaks of sand carved by the rain and smoothened by the wind forming a scaled-down Grand Canyon in whitish gray.

Babbling brooks branch out to rivulets meandering through boulders at the canyon floor strewn with more rocks, pebbles and pumice stones in all sizes and shapes. The cool, clear waters a soothing relief to the stinging heat.

Here, by Pinatubo’s foot the means of transport all stop and park. On hallowed ground no tire shall tread? Might as well had this been pre-ordained, as riding ahead through boulders the size of houses is an impossibility.

On foot the climb starts. No ropes, no grappling hooks, no pickaxes and mountain boots needed. There are no steep cliffs to scale, no ragged ravines to rappel.
Water, plenty of water to fight the heat and a sturdy staff to balance oneself across the river rocks make the very basic climb requisites.

With neither sharp rises nor abrupt drops, the gradient ascends gradually, almost gently all the way: along the gurgling streamlets; onto the outcrops of rocks and boulders belched from the volcano’s belly; through the thicket of cogon grass and assorted shrubs that, like a verdant curtain, opens to a stairway hacked out of a sudden rise at the top of which lies the spectacle of Pinatubo’s very crater.

Behold, a lake serene in blue and green. What lies beneath such stillness? The pent-up rage of centuries expended, a marvelous quietude pervades.

In the beholder, certain calm, transcendence, a spiritual epiphany permeate, even renewed faith: in that feeling of closeness, nay, of oneness with one’s God.
Conquest? By nature’s majesty, we are ever conquered.