LAST week, a lot has changed in our little hometown, however, decent drivers is not among them.
This week, thankfully, there are more of those that did not change. In particular, place names.
This column, as of late, has been spending a lot of time revisiting Sinai C. Hamada’s short stories, which contain landscapes of Baguio as they were decades upon decades ago. The landscapes tug at the heart, so familiar and dear are they, even if the years have long rolled past the time when they were so masterfully described by Uncle Sinai, first cousin of my father Leandro, the two being sons of siblings Josefa and Jose, respectively, these two being among the children of Baguio forebears Mateo and Bayosa Cariño of Kafagway.
Kafagway as spelled by Uncle Sinai is both Cafagoay “which is Baguio today” in the story “The Woman who Became Alive” and Kafaguay, “to be named the City of Baguio a few years later” in “The Last Slave.” Spelt Kafaguay, Cafagoay, or the more “modern” Kafagway, the place is now the City of Baguio, by any name home, the place that we love, land of our hearts.
Uncle Sinai’s “The Pagan” is set in Loakan, which is still Loakan, that I find in this story and other writings as a place where there is gold. Just this week, I was visiting relatives there and we talked about gold being dug in Loakan.
Seminal “Tanabata’s Wife” is set in the Kisad Valley, arrived at via the Trinidad and Lucban valleys from the Mountain Trail. How often have we traversed these very trails now major thoroughfares, from Trinidad, to Lucban, to Kisad. They are still called Trinidad, Lucban, Kisad. Though Trinidad does not go by its Ibaloy name of Benget anymore.
Kisad is around the area once called Apdi, described in “Ruth and Napolia,” where Jackson Chiday tells me his own father’s father grew up with my own father’s father, Jackson being one of the aforementioned relatives visited in Loakan this week.
Uncle Sinai writes of his Auntie Kinja – also my father’s Auntie Kinja – and her family’s Balakbak, which the jeeps that now go there spell Balacbac. There is also her Sarok, spelt Sarok still, on the other side of the hill where my family currently lives in Camp Seven, from where this very column is writing.
Uncle Sinai further mentions Shalshal, no longer called so, an area around what is now Marcos Highway, near Atab, still Atab to many. Adagut, in whose shadow he writes that Balakbak rests, and I am wondering which mountain is this, Santo Tomas? Tuel and Chuyo hills, the latter taken away from his grandmother Bayosa to become a Baguio Stock Farm, the former I still have to locate exactly.
Lending new meaning to: location, location, location.