The flowers of Kafagway, and the immortal beauty of Baguio City

Kafagway is the Ibaloi name of Baguio City, according to the old poetry book of Luisa A. Igloria entitled Cartography: A Collection of Poems on Baguio. As she tells it, the Americans forced an Ibaloi clan to sell their land for a song so they could build Camp John Hay. Today, that family’s descendants are landless in a city that has become the favorite summer destination of Filipinos.
 
I am always willing to sit on a bus for up to seven, even wait in line for many hours in a crowded and dusty terminal in Cubao, just to go up to Baguio. The city is a kind of literary home to me. I have many happy memories there with my literary father Cirilo F. Bautista, which came streaming back when I went up to Baguio recently to attend the Panagbenga Festival.
 
At The Forest Lodge inside Camp John Hay where I stayed, I was happy to get reacquainted with a garden that is forever etched in my mind. The lodge is the sister hotel of The Manor, and the two buildings sit side by side on a hill surrounded by tall pine trees. They share space with the Filipino-American Friendship Garden, where you can find the flags of both countries on a level expanse overlooking a mountain range. In one corner, from where you can see the familiar Honeymoon Cottage, are statues of Abraham Lincoln and Manuel L. Quezon facing each other as if in perpetual conversation. All around them are blooming yellow cosmos.
 
I remember one weekend in 1996 when I was there with Sir Cirilo and my literary siblings from De La Salle University. The Manor was not yet there, and in its stead was a two-storey white building which, if I remember correctly, was the clubhouse of the American soldiers. In front of the white house was a garden of yellow dahlias – hundreds, even thousands of them blooming as if the Goddess of the Golden Sun herself was residing there! I liked that place because few people went there, being somewhat inaccessible and not as popular as Mines View Park or Burnham Park.
 
Baguio was special to Sir Cirilo because he spent ten years of his young life teaching literature at St. Louis University. He would tell us about the pine trees along Session Road, and how his students would sometimes disappear from his field of vision whenever the uninvited, but definitely welcome, fog would enter the classroom. In the 1990s, Sir Cirilo had a house in Baguio that was always open to us, his literary children, “as long as your poems pass my standard,” he would say, smiling. “Or else I will shoot you by the door,” he would add, laughing.
 
If someone asks what the essence of Baguio City is for me, I would say it’s the cool climate, the flowers, and the joyful memories with my literary family. Oh, and I might also add—strawberries! I was ecstatic to find two plates of red luscious strawberries in our spacious room during my recent trip, which my roommate and I devoured instantly.


 
At dawn, we set off for the festival of “Panagbenga,” a Kankana-ey word meaning the blossoming season of flowers. Now on its 18th year, the festival’s highlights are the two-day cultural and floral float parades on the last weekend of February.
 
For a flower lover like me, the floral float parade was a visual feast, a blast of colors that dazzled the eyes. A dozen violet hydrangeas on a giant flowerbox made of orange everlasting blooms. A giant flower made of yellow chrysanthemums. A giant butterfly made of vari-colored Malaysian mums. A giant violet bell-shaped flower made of statis. Giant strawberries made of red mums. The ramp of a Spanish galleon made of white stargazers. Sometimes, it was simply too much, but since this was the Panagbenga, the redundancy of flowers was a delight to behold.
 
Baguio’s old-timers often deplore how the pine trees are fast disappearing to accommodate subdivisions and architectural monstrosities. The next day, while absorbing the pure beauty of the rising sun over a pine forest (or what remained of it) from the wide windows of our hotel room, I remembered an old poem by Sir Cirilo dedicated to his wife entitled “Woods: For Rose Marie.”
 
Sir Cirilo and Ma’am Rose met in Baguio, and their love story is as colorful as the flowers. In this poem, Bautista’s poetic persona is contemplating how the woods naturally conjure an image of immortality. The poem opens with these two lines: “Perhaps the woods intended us to stay / And see its wisdom in another way.” And the last stanza sings: “Perhaps there was no use in our stealing / Its secret wisdom why it cannot die, / Nevertheless we laughed as best as we could / Because we are helpless while we are loved.”
 
Love, indeed, is another essence of Baguio. This city on the mountains is also a favorite honeymoon destination.
 
To love the flowers of Baguio City is to be loved in return by its immortal beauty. When we speak of immortality, perhaps we are really talking about Kafagway, for something or someone can only be deathless in the realm of the memory. The flowers of Kafagway are forever in bloom, in the constant state of panagbenga, in the secret and sacred gardens of our hearts. – YA, GMA News
 
 
J. I. E. Teodoro is a Palanca award-winning writer from San Jose de Buenavista, Antique. He has also won a National Book Award for the essay. Currently, he is an assistant professor of writing and literature at Miriam College in Quezon City.