Riverbend Journal

One of the things I plan to do more of when visiting the Philippines this Christmas is to buy more. During my last visit, before my wife had ever been to the United States, she would often veto my desires to purchase a particular object saying that it was too expensive. By her standards, she was right but by my standards, it was dirt cheap. Now that she has seen what the price of some of her native things go for at Pier 1 Imports or like places, I think she will be siding with me more often on this trip. In America, most prices are non-negotiable. You either pay it or you walk away. There are a few exceptions to this rule but not many in low volume purchases. In the Philippines, everything is negotiable. When shopping outside of the regular tourist haunts, very few objects have prices and for a very good reason. This allows the seller to adjust prices according to their perceived notion of the wealth of the buyer. If my native Filipina mother-in-law were to walk into a store, she would...

Going grocery shopping in the Philippines is about as unique of an experience as you can get. Being a westerner, I am used to going into large box like grocery stores full of foods of all kinds stacked neatly on shelves and categorized into aisles. It is the definition of order, which starkly contrasts to the controlled chaos of the Filipino markets. The Filipino market in Baguio is more of a district or several block area in town. Sidewalks crammed filled with smiling natives standing among a sea of baskets and containers holding a wide array of fruits and vegetables. Some look vaguely familiar to ones that I buy in the United States but most look like they were grown out back behind the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. My wife, mother-in-law and her sister, would walk through the sea of produce with nostrils flaring smelling various fruits for ripeness and pinching various things for firmness. I for the most part tried to hang back and act like I was not with them because the venders alway...

It sounded like a long rusty ring-shanked nail giving way to a crowbar and releasing a decades old grip from a well-seasoned piece of timber... only wetter. Despite being in the middle of a crowd of talking people one evening well past sunset at my parents farm, I heard the noise clearly somewhere in the dark behind me and I now turned to seek out the source. It didn't take me long to realize that the noise had been a magnificent specimen of a fart and that the farter had been none other than grandpa. As I stared into the darkness in disbelief at where he was standing about a half dozen paces away from everything, I suddenly hoped that nobody else had heard it mostly because this was mixed company, half family and half neighbors and friends. As I turned to rejoin the conversation taking place on all sides, people seemed to be so engrossed in their conversations that they hadn't heard what had just taken place or they were being polite by pretending to be engrossed in their resp...

My stomach nestled firmly high up in my throat near where my tonsils would have been had I not had them taken out as a kid. My testicles crawled up inside my body and had my bladder been full it would have emptied. I was floating in my small yellow kayak about fifty feet upstream of Monastery Falls where a boy had drowned fishing not five days before and I was terrified. The water bunched up from the normally wide expanse of the river and pounded its way through the two large granite rocks at the head of the falls not five feet apart. The river was up and the hole at the base of the upper seven-foot drop was a monster. It was one of those that would swallow me whole and spit me out a couple hours later like a stale burp. Random blobs of foam flew up from beyond the brink as the roar of the rapids approached. My instructor was standing near the top of the upper drop eyeing my approach and form that right now was desperately feeling like it belonged on a nice couch back in Iowa instead o...

Typhoon Harurot was the worst typhoon to hit the Philippines in the last five years and the outer bands of it as it departed for Hong Kong were still lashing out at us as I made my way to the airport. Huge rollers coming in from the South China Sea would hit the barrier wall separating the ocean from the van I was riding in not twenty feet away. The resulting twenty-foot wave carried on heavy winds would engulf the road, our van and all other traffic even just a few feet away, giving the illusion that we were just a bubble in a washing machine. Though we were underwater about once every ten seconds, are driver kept going and only turned the windshield wipers up to medium speed as if it were all a mere annoyance. Such is life on a typhoon prone island. I felt lucky to even be in Manila because the storm started lashing out in earnest just as we were leaving Sagada in the northern mountains of the Philippines for the long (through the night nonetheless) journey to the Manila airport. Onc...

With a quiet word spoken in a foreign language that I didn't understand, I was instantly awake and this time the cobwebs hadn't yet taken hold of my brain. Most likely this was because it wasn't yet two in the morning and I hadn't yet fallen into a deep sleep. We were getting up early to begin a long nighttime journey to our destination and as it would turn out it would be the first of several during my stay in the Philippines. With an enormous population crammed into such a small land area and with only a few roads shared not only by vehicles but by bicycles, pedestrians, chickens, dogs, carabao, waterfalls, mudslides and cavernous potholes, Filipinos often get up before they go to sleep to get to where they were going to avoid everyone else who also have the very same idea. In our case, we were headed to a beach on the South China Sea for a picnic lunch and to spend the day relaxing. We got loaded up into the van with our trusty hired driver and headed into the inky b...

I woke up to the sounds of a hundred half starved dogs barking and one thousand roosters trying to do their best to wake me up. They succeeded but after spending 48 hours flying and driving half way around the world with no sleep, it took me a minute to realize where here was. Finally the cobwebs in my brain started to release their grip and I realized that here, was four stories down in a bunker of a room in Baguio City, Philippines. The partially renovated house where I was staying consisted of five stories tenaciously clinging to the side of an extremely steep ravine wall high up in the mountains of northern Philippines. The main level had just been completed on the roof of the existing structure (to raise it to the same level as the nearby road) along with an attic beneath a steeply pitched roof. Below the main level stood the gutted remains of the old main level, beneath that was my concrete bunker, and beneath that was yet another level that was rented out to another Filipino fa...

We had traveled to the famous Banaue rice terraces, over some of the worst roads I have been over in my lifetime. The driver who looked all of fourteen, didn't inspire a lot of confidence as he made his way between Baguio City and small village near the rice terraces over some of the most twisting mountain roads that left my stomach in roils. Dust choked the air until you almost needed a spoon to get it inside your lungs and once there, the rough bouncing of the jeepney bounced it right back out, never letting you hang onto even the slightest bit of it. The roaring of the straining engine soon quieted even the most avid chatterbox and I had spent lots of time on the ride, reflecting in my inner quiet and gazing in wonderment at the absolute beauty of northern Luzon. The Filipinos with me had no time for that because they were trying to punch out text messages while bracing on two or three sides of the jeepney at once to get enough stability to punch the tiny buttons of the cell pho...

Five members of the Cogswell family (including my 9th great, 10th great and 11th great grandfathers) were among the twenty prominent people who signed the petition drawn up by the Rev. John Wise on behalf of Goodwife Proctor, who stood accused of witchcraft. Mary Warren alleged that she had been threatened and abused by Goodwife proctor, and that she had seen apparitions of people who had long since been murdered by the wife of John Proctor. This evidence prevailed and the good woman was sentenced to death. She was burned at the stake and her husband John hung from the gallows as a wizard. The stories of witchcraft in old Salem, Massachusetts have been around for many years. The suffering and injustice that these people were put through has been made into movies and debated quite a bit. Thiry-one of the parishioners of Chebacco plus their minister John Wise signed the petition "judging them innocent of any crimes or evill" which John Proctor and his wife had been accused. Th...

The following is an account of my twelfth great grandfather's journey to the shores of America back in 1635. The Angel Gabriel and the Great Storm of 1635 August of 1635 had been a fair one for the small settlements, which were striving to establish themselves in New England. In the wheel of the year, haying would have just concluded, with the settlers mowing, drying, gathering and storing the hay for the upcoming winter during the hottest, most unforgiving part of summer. Crops would be nearing their peak, nearly ready for the September harvest time. However, for "...the whole of the second week of August the wind had blown from the direction of south-southwest with considerable force..." Suddenly, about midnight on 14 August, the wind changed to the dangerous direction of northeast and soon blew to hurricane strength. The winds blasted the crops in the fields and the small houses of the English settlers. On the shoreline, the winds and storm surge took the waters to ...

After my butt had been firmly pounded up into the vicinity of my lower neck by the bouncing of the jeepney over the last few hours, we arrived at the famous Sagada caves in northern Philippines. My then fiancé, her best friend, myself and a local Filipino holding a rusty lantern older than all four of our ages combined, headed down a steep path towards the entrance of the cave. As we entered into the throat, the warm breath of the cave flowed over us as we stopped and waited for the guide to bring the flame of life into the lantern. A small, feeble flame, debated whether to burn bright and decided to just stay small and feeble, guided us as we entered the bowels. Our walk down through the cave boulders quickly turned into something that I liken to trying to walk on greased marbles. I slipped but prevented myself from falling by pressing a nearby boulder only to discover that it wasn't algae and moisture making them that way but bat guano. Shit! After an eternity, we finally exited ...

April 21, 2000 It was completely socked in with clouds when I woke up but like they always seem to do, they had cleared off by the time we pushed off in the dories. We ate a breakfast of burritos and fruit before helping to get the nine people who are leaving today packed up and sent off ahead in two of the dories. The remaining seven of us took down the remainder of the camp and shoved off an hour later. We floated down to Whitmore Wash in time to see the last helicopter arrive and take the last three people away leaving behind the last of two families consisting of three adults and three children. Most of the nine people who left had been with our group since day one and it was a change in the group dynamics to not have them anymore. After so much time spent around a defined group of people, the three adults and three children were literally strangers among our group, especially the children who were joining an up until now, adult group. They hadn't shared in our experiences; ...