Are you Baguio?
This question was posed two years back, on Baguio’s centennial. I ask it again.
The target of the question is inclusive. It’s not limited to those who’re from Baguio by birth, upbringing, education or residence. It’s also for anybody who has been up here for a conference, field trip, a romance or wedding, a vacation or a visit. It’s for those who have yet to see Baguio yet ache to finally make that trip to feel whole and complete.
It’s for whoever feels for and relates to Baguio.
If you feel you’re any of the above, then we have to tell you. We owe it to tell you as the issue has been stirred again.
It’s about pine, originally that green patch of about a thousand trees still standing beside the Baguio Convention Center. The patch is within the Government Center which the city’s founding fathers during the American colonial regime built to make Baguio the country’s Summer Capital at the turn of the last century.
The trees, balled when they were young to provide the Baguio ambience for the 1998 Anatoly Karpov-Viktor Korchnoi World Chess Championship, are now in danger of being lost.
Our very own Government Service Insurance System, which acquired much of the Government Center by the stroke of the pen of then President Marcos, was determined to convert the patch into a four-building, 13-story condotel complex in tandem with mall chain Shoemart.
The concrete, business enterprise would have been the latest addition to the continuing urban sprawl. It was dubbed “Baguio Air Residences”, which, ironically, would run counter to the city’s come-on as the place where you want (or used to want) to live in. It would add to urban congestion, the loss of the scent of green pine, breathing space and public elbow room.
We believe that, like you, GSIS can be Baguio, too. It can feel, or be made to feel enough, for it to scrap the condotel project and save its dignity and that of what remains of the natural landscape of a city it wants to be part of.
Recently, the new GSIS leadership announced it would leave the pine patch as is after talks with city mayor Mauricio Domogan. His Honor told them the city was, is and will be determined to preserve the patch as a counterpoint to the vanishing scent of the once City of Pines. Chances are, however, a change in administration may mean a change of heart.
GSIS did a class act of sorts when, in 2002, it bought for P42 million Juan Luna’s painting – Parisian Life – in an auction in Hongkong.
Criticized by its members for what they felt was an investment out of its bounds, the GSIS told all and sundry it doesn’t only insure government workers and property. It also insures national heritage like the painting of a national hero and patriot.
There’s no argument against that unimpeachable argument of reason that comes from the heart of GSIS. Makapasangit (It’s a tear-jerker), so to speak.
So is Baguio a national heritage. It’s history, founding and development by the American colonial government to become the country’s Summer Capital, Flower Garden City, Honeymoon Paradise, Hill Station and even its vanishing status as the City of Pines (and temperate mountain resort) make it such.
Think of fond memories and millions of Filipinos will think of Baguio. They’re not limited to those who were born or grew up here, walked its forests for mushrooms and wild strawberries, swam and fished its creeks, shined shoes and sold its papers, got a shiner from boyhood fistfights at Mt. Mary’s.
They, too, are Baguio who studied, courted, loved, married and honeymooned, raised kids or even parted ways here. They, too, pine for the vanishing scent of pine. They, too, are Baguio who left and returned or re-visited to take us who never left to task for their perception that we quietly watched as Baguio turned into a congested, smog-filled urban jungle like theirs in Metro-Manila or those they visited in India or anywhere in this Third World.
If you’re Baguio, write GSIS. In so doing, note that GSIS acquired the patch without shelling a single centavo as payment as it was transferred through a Presidential signature.
Meanwhile, join the snowballing plea for Shoemart to forego its plan to ball and transfer mature pine and alnus trees from its compound. It’s not for the certainty that the trees would surely die if replanted somewhere. It’s because the SM surroundings need to have those trees there where they grew up in, as a counterpoint to the urban sprawl. It’s about the need to keep what remains of the natural landscape against cement that seals us away from the grass and the soil.
Meanwhile, call and ask Nick Calinao and other folk and country radio hosts to now and then spin “The Rare Old Times”. It’s a dirge composed by Irish journeyman and poet Pete St. John who came home to his native Dublin only to mourn “as the gray, unyielding concrete makes a city of my town”.
Notwithstanding the changes, we all still believe Baguio is where you live.
Letting the trees be would give substance to SM’s rallying point. It’s “We got it all for you”, not “We got it all from you”.
By Ramon Dacawi
E-mail: mondaxbench@yahoo.com for comments.
Published in the Sun.Star Baguio newspaper on February 18, 2012.
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