Wanderer

 

The journey home is the most difficult to take. I don’t recall a time since my puberty years that I’d ever stayed in one place longer than I needed to. In some ways, I lived a sheltered life, never venturing too far from the house or never really stepping out of my comfort zone until I was sent off to Baguio to experience the barriotic life.

There—in what was considered a “small town” community, I learned to be my own person. I had to face the reality that I needed to depend on myself for the littlest things. I was taught to do chores which I mostly hated: laundry, cooking, cleaning my room, and taking care of the house pets. It was also during that time that I literally learned to live away from home with very few creature comforts often under inclement weather. I subjected my body and mind to conditions that would make a normal city kid crazy. Surprisingly, I loved that idea of discomfort and working hard for every inch of ground I covered, every meal that got cooked under the rain and every moment of sleep we could cadge while wet, tired, and dirty and mosquito bite-riddled.

Being out in the wilderness taught me the value of earning my keep and the right to wear my Boy Scout Proficiency Badges. That would teach me a valuable lesson that whatever I had or wherever it is in life I got to, needed to be paid for in blood or its equivalent in tears and sweat. It was when I was wet and cold and in the mud that I developed the fortitude to handle greater challenges in life.

After my first taste of hiking and camping, going home would always be the difficult part. It always meant putting out the campfires, taking down the tents, breaking camp and packing up. In the years since Baguio, I’ve always had difficulty finding my way back to the house. I would stash all our issued gear at the Scout Office in school and hike a scenic route rather than go straight home. Part of me would always get left behind at the last camp just like part of me was left at the peak of Mt. Pulag back in 1981.

This was to be my life and how I am to this day—a wanderer!

It is said that you attract what you desire most and I always craved adventure. I’ve always been the kid who loved taking road trips with Papa, whether it was to the nearby grocery store or our periodic trips to Baguio to see the old folks. Papa loved taking long drives and sometimes, he would drive up to our house in Gen. Lim Street or Happy Glenn then drive back down on the same afternoon or evening. Even as a child, there was a hesitation to go home and sleep in the house I grew up in.

Becoming a professional photographer all but fed my wanderlust. Throughout my career, was I able to dot most of the islands in this archipelago, it also brought me to places and situations where I would be a lot of different things: a journalist, teacher, counselor, writer, director, publisher, actor, musician and many other things. Adventure to me was never limited to a place. It was also the myriad roles I played in my “life movie”.

Admittedly, I have become what I do. I have been so used to being on the road in my professional life that I am now having difficulty fixing my domestic life simply because, I am far from being domesticated. I am as far from home as I will ever be in this life and the road going back is as complicated as the path I took to be where I am now—even more confounded than it needs to be!

Age has mellowed me out some. I am finding difficulty in some things I used to do well as a young man, though I am still as defiant of my age as I was with my principles. I have earned the title, “incorrigible,” which I believe I truly deserve. I see no point in living differently now. What I am can no longer be dissociated with what I do—and that is a lot!

Maybe this is why I am having difficulty finding my way back. I have flown so far outside the wire and off reservation over the last few decades that even if I had a map to guide me, I still might never make it. I have lived a colorful, turbulent life that it seems impossible to go out, quietly.