“Hey, kid! Hey, kid! Hey, you up there! Can you give me a hand?”
I was a bit out of my element when I heard this. I was a third-grader who just transferred
from the Catholic school on one end of East Helena, Montana, to the public
school on the “other side of the creek.”
I didn’t know many kids in the public school. And I didn’t know the kid yelling up at me
from his house down in a kind of hole below the street I was walking on while
heading home after a day of school. The
kid below me was a fourth-grader. I knew
that much.
“I need a hand down here,” the kid yelled up at me.
I went down to help the kid open the door to his house. His name was Clay Whitaker.
We became friends from that day on.
Clay and I ran around together quite a lot throughout grade school
and into high school, but somewhat lost track of one another beyond that. The last I saw of Clay was somewhere in the
mid-1980s. He stopped by my house in
East Helena while on a visit from his work on fishing boats in Alaska. Clay became a Facebook friend some years
ago. He now lives in Boso-Boso, in the
Antipolo Province, just outside of Manila.
Yesterday, Desiree and I met Clay and his significant other,
Renelle, at Venice Grand Canal Mall. The
mall is a mere ten minutes from our tower in Manila. Clay and Renelle drove through two hours of
insane, junkyard, honking, and flying-at-you-from-all-directions traffic to
reach us.
After a lunch at Friday’s (the very same chain as that in the
U.S.), Desiree and I rode out to Boso-Boso in the car with Clay and Renelle to
see their “place in the jungle,” as Clay referred to it.
It took three hours to drive the twenty-some miles out into the
jungle. We dodged motorcycles, jeepney
rigs (some with passengers actually clinging to the roof), pedestrians with a
death wish, and one cagy traffic cop at a traffic circle to get there.
After visiting a bit, Clay drove us halfway back into Manila. We caught a taxi for the second half of the
return. Our taxi driver was very aggressive
in traffic—which added a whole new element to driving though Manila.
All in all, a great adventure.
Here are a few photographs from the day:
Venice Grand
Canal Mall
The Four of Us at
the Mall
The Province
Countryside near Boso-Boso
Clay and a Local Dog
that Adopted Him
—Mitchell Hegman
What is the name of the area/city/province where Clay's place is?
ReplyDeleteBoso-Boso is the nearest place (in Antipolo Province).
ReplyDeleteI see. My brother has a house in that area. In the old days people used to pilgrimate to Antipolo church and visit a nearby waterfall. The place, in the old days, was known for cashew nut trees. I have no clue what's happening in Manila these days. But I miss the food and the easy laughter of my fellow Filipinos. I don't miss the crawling traffic, congestion and pollution though. The beauty of the Philippines are outside Manila. Go to Mindanao or the Visayas where Mother Nature is at her best and where there are fantastic sugar fine wind sand beaches and where seafood are aplenty and reasonably priced.
ReplyDeleteI found the area where Clay lives to be very beautiful. Mostly, however, I have been struck by the good-nature and beauty of the people here!
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