WHEN the Spanish conquistador, Commandante de Galvey, first laid eyes on that Benguet valley, he knelt in awe at the beauty surrounding him.

The sun began to peep shyly from behind blue mountains, turning them into golden ridges and smudging with pink and peach and lavender the morning sky, swiftly turning into a brilliant blue dome unmarred, save for a star, two stars, the crescent moon, all quickly fading.

The mists that shrouded the valley like a well-kept secret lifted suddenly, revealing lush swamps and pine stands, interspersed with newly-planted rice fields turned shimmering silver sheets by the morning sun. The cold morning air was soaked with the heady smell of pine.

Trinidad, the soldier on his knees muttered, remembering his wife. The fog lifting was so reminiscent of the time she first lifted her veil in the quiet, scented church, and flashed him a smile…

Growing up in the 1970s in Benguet’s La Trinidad Valley, and in Baguio City a few kilometers away, it was not difficult to imagine that this was how the valley got its name.

As a child, each day was a lesson in the bounty and majesty of nature: travel to school was a 15- to 20-minute journey through a road that coiled its way between mountains, fringed with pine trees, whose needles splintered the sun’s rays into shimmering droplets of light.

The mountains were tall and mysterious, and in the rainy season, a thick fog shrouded the way home and sent the jeepneys crawling through the mountain pass with only their headlights cutting a way through the white world. Summers burnt the mountain grass brown and the sky the brightest shade of blue. But it was in the cold season when the mountains burst aflame with color—dotted with golden sunflowers and white Benguet lilies.

Traveling downhill along Magsaysay Avenue, toward the intersection with Bokawkan Road where a hideous flyover now stands, Quezon Hill was a dappled yellow mountain of sunflowers abloom. And, at the stretch between Km. 4 and Bell church, the Balili River flowed, first gently, then it gushing suddenly down three cascades. In the stormy season, the waters here thundered.

Today that same portion of the river hardly exists. It struggles sluggishly, choked by silt, and trash, oil from the motor repair shops surrounding it, and yes, human excrement: Baguio City has only one sewerage system, and most city establishments tap their sewerage lines instead into the drainage system, which flows into the Balili River. Balili is now called the “toilet bowl of Baguio City,” and its waters, which swell during storms, no longer swirl clear, but are murky and smell so strongly of shit.

IF I had known as a child what I learned later through study that the biodiversity of the Cordillera ranges is not as rich as that of the lowlands (due mainly to the chemical excreted by the endemic Benguet pine that kills its undergrowth), I would not have believed it. Certainly, there were no jungles in my childhood, but everywhere I went, I was still filled with the bounty of nature. Right beside our elementary school sprawled the hospital grounds of the Notre Dame de Lourdes hospital, and into this secret garden my classmates and I would creep at lunch break, clutching our baons. (Slow-paced Baguio nursed a baon culture back then). There, we would eat and play amid the daisies, carnations, lazy-eyed susans, golden rods and chrysanthemums planted so carefully by the Belgian missionaries, careful to keep away from the bees. An abundance of bees and butterflies swarmed around us as we dug holes in the dark earth with barbecue sticks to search for bugs and earthworms, snails and spiders, that pollination and other secrets of nature were never difficult for us to understand; these concepts merely captured the realities around us.

And when we would tire of this spot, there were always many other places in the city: the terraces bordering what was once the St. Louis Girls’ High School and overlooking Assumption Road were not fenced then as they are now, and they always begged to be climbed. The grounds of the Baguio Cathedral were vast and laid with trees and grassy spots, and the site of the Porta Vaga mall today was then a wooded hill that beckoned to us. And there were other places, too: Burnham Park, Sunshine Park and Camp John Hay—although that was reserved for the truly adventurous among us, and for longer explorations on weekends.

MUCH of Baguio’s past natural beauty is alive only in my memory, and I am not an old woman.

Towering pine stands and grassy hills have been chased away by the city’s relentless drive towards “development,” that these can only be found in pockets—in the parks, and toward the now posh areas of South Drive, Baguio Country Club, John Hay, Mansion House.

To build the city’s biggest mall, ironically named SM Pines, some 250 century-old pine trees had to be chopped down, and although Baguio people were opposed to this, both the city government and the DENR granted a cutting permit to the developer.

Speaking of trees, Christmases of my childhood were heralded, not by the Christmas decorations of malls and shops, but by the dressing and lighting up of two giant pine trees that faced each other from the top and bottom of Session Road. But in an act just as befuddled as his name, the former mayor Labo chopped off the century-old tree at Session’s top and replaced it, ridiculously, with a cement tree, signaling the beginning of the end for Baguio as I knew it.

Yes, there are still pine trees in the city today, but a close look will show them to be choked and struggling. The Benguet pine’s trunk is a deep mahogany brown, and its needles a brilliant emerald green, but tourists and visitors are apt to think that both trunk and needles are a shade darker: the trees that remain in the city’s center are blackened by soot, both at their trunks and in their undernourished branches.

In the past three decades, too, the city has carried out a bizarre obsession with construction—a house stands in almost every single parcel of Baguio land, many poorly constructed, many erected even in geologically hazardous areas like the sinking Crystal Cave lands. Overlapping land claims is the city’s main legal problem, so much so, that if the land areas contained in titles, tax declarations and other tenurial documents were merely added up, the total land area would exceed by more than tenfold the actual land area of Baguio. 

The mountains close to the city are beehives, with houses crowding each other out, and, in poorer communities where the houses are shabbier paint a truly ghastly sight. It is only with the merciful cover of darkness that the assault on the senses ceases.  As darkness falls, thousands of houses light up, and the lights twinkle in the mountainsides like fireflies, igniting the memory of the Baguio that once was.

"BURSTING AT THE SEAMS" is how both local journalists and city officials have often described Baguio’s overcrowding; although what the city government is actually doing to address this pressing problem remains a mystery.

In the years that it took for me to grow into an adult, the population has quadrupled and is still growing at double the country’s population growth rate. There were some 80,000 people in Baguio when I was growing up, today there are some 300,000, and in the next five years, if things do not change drastically, there will be close to 400,000—most of these squeezed together in the main parts of the city that was build by the turn-of-the century Americans for only 30,000.

And, if figures don’t mean anything to you, consider the press of the crowds at the market, along Magsaysay Road, or on the city’s main road, Session.

With all these people squeezed into this city, the resources, too, are strained to their limit. There is hardly any part of the city where water flows from the taps daily; water rationing has been a part of the lives of Baguio denizens for the past 15 years, and in the summer, taps are apt to be dry for weeks on end.

Both water delivery companies and developers vie with the Baguio water district and built their own pumps. Unregulated, water pumps are springing up all over the city, stressing the underground water sources. With squatter colonies invading Baguio’s few remaining watersheds, a severe water crisis is just around the corner.

Open dumping and the burning of garbage, on top of the city’s lack of a sewerage systems, have caused the incidence of amoebiasis, typhoid and other water-borne diseases—especially among children—to spiral.

Traffic jams—unheard of in my childhood—are everyday Baguio occurrences today. And, because most of the city’s vehicles are diesel-burning trucks, jeepneys and second-hand cars, air pollution is a growing problem (that the city government first reacted to with denial). The unique meteorological conditions in Baguio, where there are no sea breezes to sweep away bad air, only worsen this.

Enjoy it while it lasts, my prophetic older brother said of the pine-scented air in one of our early morning excursions to the top of a hill overlooking the city when I was near my teens. And he pointed out to me a growing cloud of haze that hung over the city —even then.

He was right. Today, the scent of pine has been replaced by the persistent odor of diesel. The city has lost much of its unique beauty. And with that loss has come the loss of its soul.

THE Baguio City of my youth was really a slow and reflective town where people knew each other and went about leisurely with their lives. Today, with the traffic and the crowds, time itself seems to have sped up. But as a child, there always seemed to be so much time, a one-hour lunch break was an eternity of time to play.

The slow pace of life, the cool climate and the gentleness of the terrain (compared to the harsher and steeper landscapes of the provinces further north and deeper into the Cordillera ranges) spawned, I believe, a quiet, unassuming and reflective people, who are by and large, peaceful.

The Ibaloi people, the original inhabitants of Kafagway—that turn-of-the-century rancheria of about 20 houses on which Baguio City now stands—are known, even until now, to be reticent and peace-loving. Even the early Ilocano and Kankanaey settlers to the city adopted this quiet nature. Living amid bounty and beauty, the Baguio people seemed to know their humble place in this awesome universe.

BUT perhaps it is this very timidity of its people that has caused the city its undoing.

The Ibalois are known to be the most accommodating among the Cordilleran tribes, and the least willing to go to war over their land and resources (unlike tribes along Chico river who stopped their river from being dammed in the 1980s) .

This openness was good in some ways: it allowed the blending of American heritage, Cordillera and Ilocano cultures into a distinct Baguio culture. But in other ways, timidity spelled disaster for the Ibaloi—their history is fraught with displacement:

American mining companies established a the turn of the 20th century brought roads and jobs, but when Benguet Corporation closed down in the 1990s, the Ibaloi and Kankanaey miners were the first to lose their jobs and their lands were left scarred. The Ibalois of Bokod sacrificed their rice fields to the rising waters of the Ambuklao Dam to help light the nation, but this caused them to scatter to hostile “homesteads” in Palawan, where they were assaulted by the heat, the unfamiliar lowland jungle and malaria mosquitos, or in Nueva Viscaya, where they lived in fear of their more war-like neighbors.

Baguio City itself has ceased to be the home of the Ibaloi people. The only city in the Cordillera region, it has drawn in the past 50 years, migrants from all Cordilleran provinces, and the lowland provinces of Pangasinan and La Union, forcing the solitude-seeking Ibalois out of its center. As a friend of mine from Mountain Province observed, “sa gilid-gilid na lang ng Baguio and mga Ibaloi.”

Now that Baguio has lost its original caretakers, who will be concerned over stewarding the land city’s development?

The Baguio Ibalois were completely dispossessed of their lands in the city well before the 1970s, however. But at least the city was developing in a way that was not as rapid—or unruly—as today.

Like today, the different Cordilleran tribes, often warring in their own home provinces, existed side-by-side in the Baguio of the 1970s. But unlike today where they choose to live apart in clusters and keep their home traditions, most Baguio residents then—whether Ibaloi, Kankanaey, Ilocano or even Baguio-Chinese—were molded into that distinct Benguet cowboy culture with commonly certain values like hard work, simplicity and peacefulness.

The slow pace of life now only bred a reflective culture, but fashioned a closely-knit community.

There was always much time to connect with each other: Early mornings were for the city’s older men, dapper in their 1950s suits and bowler hats, impeccably groomed with pomade and shoe shine, who would take their place at the Star Café, Session Café (long burned down), or Dainty Restaurant, those quaint Tsinoy restaurants that once lined Session Road—to discuss the happenings in and the fate of their community over Benguet coffee or Lipton tea, served in thick glasses.

(With the loss of their old spaces, the old men have taken to holding their morning sessions at McDonald’s Session Road, looking out-of-place as they drink coffee from styrofoam cups.)

Bonding for the younger men happened at night. Bundled against the cold with leather jackets, denims, scarves, mufflers and bonnets, the younger men met at folk houses like Fireplace or Cosy Nook, where folk and country music were staples. (There was only one disco at the Hyatt Terraces Baguio, and this was patronized mainly by tourists). The women in cardigans and knitted shawls made fellowship as they stitched, knitted or croqueted and waited for their children to come out of school (for Baguio of old was never a yaya culture).

The days back then strolled at the leisurely pace, and at 6:00 p.m., even came to a complete stop. A siren would go off, and everyone would stop to listen to Bach’s “Yesu Joy of Man’s Desiring,” followed by the Angelus—all played on a loud speaker from the Baguio Cathedral and over the city’s only radio station.

Cars would stop in the middle of the road, children would stop their play, cash registers would stop clinking, office workers would stop walking home, the entire city would grind to a halt.

Perhaps this was the secret of Baguio’s charm in the olden days. After the July 1990 earthquake, an obsessive rush to rebuilt the devastated city ensued, led to what old residents say was its rabid development.  It was also in this hurry that the angelus tradition was lost.

For yes, Baguio City was once soulful: That Baguio people of old chose to stop for a few minutes every single day to reflect or pray must be the reason why Baguio was such a soulful city then. And consequently, a humane one.

I HAVE never taken a look at the income distribution patterns of Baguio residents through the years, and while there must have been inequalities back then, they were not as glaring as they are today, or they were even then in other cities of the world.

At the private school I went to for elementary, my classmates were a cab driver’s daughter, market vendors’ children, and the daughter of the wealthy Japanese-Ibaloi business family, the Hamadas, who earned their millions from running the city’s only newspaper for decades. Still, at inter-school matches, we were often beaten by the kids at Lucban Elementary School, Baguio Central School, or any of the other public schools in the city. Baguio then was imbued with a general spirit of equality, where life wasn’t too hard if one was willing to work hard.

There have always been old Igorot men and women begging in the city streets, but, as most Baguio people know, they are not landless back home or homeless even in the city. Everyone back then, it seemed, had a home and a decent means to make a living, that the student prostitution that makes Baguio universities famous today was truly uncharacteristic back then.

But as I grew, so did the number of families living on the street (mostly Badjao families or families from other parts of war-torn Mindanao) and the ranks of crazy people left to fend for themselves.

Working children have always been a part of the Cordilleran life, and even back then there were kids who sold newspapers in the morning, sold vegetables at the market at night, or worked as shoe-shine boys. But more often than not, they were able to finish school and to eat three square meals a day.

That Baguio was less stratified then is most clearly seen in the changing use of its public spaces, which were once open to both rich and poor.

Now, as the city commercializes rapidly, public spaces are the first to draw the lines between the haves and have-nots, with Camp John Hay one site now snatched away from the humble.

As children, my classmates and I would often spend weekends at John Hay’s White Trail, going in and out of the camp with ease. Lowly government employees and school teachers took their families on picnics on the John Hay grounds, and young lovers found secluded places to smooch.

Today, only high-end tourists (John Hay Manor charges some P3,000. a night for a single or double room) and government officials frequent the camp’s golf course, and even the picnic tables are for rent.

Jobs have not been able to keep pace with the rapidly growing numbers of people, so the numbers of hawkers, vendors and people in Baguio’s informal sector have swollen. But there is only so much one can sell in a limited economy. So the army of undernourished children has also swollen, and so too that of out-of-school youths, tambays, drunks and petty thieves.

Baguio, I swear, used to be a safe place when I was a child. Sure, there were youthful gangs like the Pantranco and Bangkahan gangs who fought their petty marijuana wars back then, but they generally kept to themselves and kept the women and children out of their conflicts.

Today, petty crimes are in an all-time high (however the city police would like to deny this), and they spare no one. This year alone, my daughter and I, who live alone in Baguio, have endured three near-break ins into our sparsely-furnished apartment found in the poorer quarters of the city.

Shabu use in Baguio has grown over the years, and a recent study even claimed that the majority of students to flock to this university town have tried it.

Worse, violent crimes now exist in this city. One early evening early this year, a man was shot in the head at Burnham Park, in full view of parkgoers. Weeks after, the body of another dead man was found at that same park. And that same month, another body was found behind a popular university. A few weeks back, two women tourists were hogtied to flammable mattresses and burned to death in their condotel close to

Teacher’s Camp—the worse crime so far that has happened in the city’s recent history. The safe and sane city of my childhood is truly gone.

Bursting at the seams, with its social fabric ripped apart and its charm quickly fading, there seems to be hope only for the city’s rabid developers.

Recently, I glimpsed a market study that read: “Immigration to Baguio makes the population zoom up, and based on survey, the current mortality rate is around 1,800 per annum, which increases by 10% to 20% yearly. This and the lack of burial sites gave ____Development Corporation the idea of a memorial park in the scenic spot of Loakan…”

Indeed.  If the developers had their way, Baguio would soon be a beautiful and reflective city for the dead.