Typhoon

By

Tom Stern

To have and to hold, in sickness and in health. Catholic wedding vows.

Tacloban City, Philippines October 31, 2013. Nine days before the storm

Staff Surgeon Appolinario Jun Villanueva reached for the hand of his beautiful, slim girlfriend strolling Tacloban Beach beside him. But Filomena Chua broke away and ran to splash in the warm, glassy bay, a wild spirit calling out to him, Catch me if you can! How many years had he been chasing her! When he studied Medicine in Manila, she had also enrolled at the University of the Philippines, a seventeen year old hailing from Tacloban City, just as Jun did. She majored in City Planning but was too young for him at the beginning. Five years her senior, Jun remembered her from grade school, where Filomena carried a beaded lunch bag filled with rice cakes that she threw one by one at every boy who tried to make friends. When she blossomed into a winsome nineteen year old and drew his notice, she treated him as she had the schoolboysfor four years rejecting every approach he made to her. Finally he learned she had ended things with a Chinese-Filipino boyfriend from one of the oligarchic families of Manila. Jun had several girlfriends while waiting for her; but once

they were both back in Tacloban City, he schemed to see her whenever he could. Almost a year ago, she had taken him as her lover. But still she ran away. Oh, how he loved her! He ran to her and fell to one knee, Will you marry me? He held out a small box holding an engagement ring, a simple gold band with a tiny chip of diamond, the most he could afford on his salary of $400 per month earned by operating on the poor twelve hours a day. Startled, she reached slowly for the ring, hesitating as if she had many things on her mind. You dont have to do this because Im pregnant. I can take care of our baby without a husband. No, only because I love you and want to be with you forever. Minamahal kita. I give you all my love. Her eyes softened. Ill never take it off, you know. Never. Are you sure? Oh God, I am so happy, he said, embracing her. She kissed her ring and looked at him with a broad, loving smile. I hope it will never change.

*** More than three thousand miles from Tacloban City, in the vast area of open sea known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone, almost half way from the Philippines to Colombia in South America, a great stillness lay over the Pacific Ocean, the kind of stillness sailors fear rather than welcome. Just north of the Equator, a molecule of water, oblivious of its future, grew agitated by photons from the sun, vaporized, and rose into moist skies. There it joined uncountable particles almost identical to our molecule of water vapor that could be named A-1. A-1 did not know its infinitesimal mass changed the still air to the slightest hint of a spiral cloud, but surely it was A-1s arrival that ineluctably catalyzed the great rotation. Perhaps there might have been another trigger for cyclogenesis if not for A-1. Every other factor awaited arrival of this last needed molecue. The Cariolis Force that makes water circle down a drain was the seminal force, sine qua non creator of a great wind and thermal machine that could march its way across the world. Because Earth spins faster at the Equator but slower above or below, water always goes down the drain counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere. That is because the drain edge nearest the Equator is traveling one trillionth of a second faster than the opposite edge, setting up the faintest of spins, which according to the

laws of Physics forms liquids into mathematical spirals. South of the Equator, spirals spin the opposite direction, clockwise. Some said global warming created more energy for the atmospheric machine, with unusually warm seas. The late season formation of this typhoon allowed increasing barometric pressure from the North Pole that would deflect the storm on an unusual path to the islands of Leyte and Samar, normally well off the main storm track that directs typhoons to the Philippines up to twenty-five times a year. A-1 felt itself slowly revolving in a spiral eight hundred miles across. Once the spiral gained strength, pressure began mounting on its Eastern edge that began moving it for its long voyage to the Philippines. With every mile, the spiral sucked heat from the sea, becoming a giant beast growing fat on heat, until satellites took note of the tropical depression, named it Yolanda in the Philippines, or Haiyan by most meteorological warning centers. By its fifth day in existence, PAGASA, Philippine Atmospheric Geophysical and Atmospheric Services, government run, judged it had all the characteristics to be a killer storm. A Typhoon, from the Chinese words Tai meaning supreme, and Phoon, meaning wind. A Supreme Wind. *** The open Pacific Ocean, 3 days before landfall Day and night, A-1 moved toward the Philippines at twenty miles an hour. Blasted up and down, A-1 once again became a millionth of a drop of Pacific Ocean as part of torrential rains crashing into mountainous waves whipped into fury by mounting winds. Fish dived deeper to escape the commotion above, sea birds died of broken wings and drowning, some of their carcasses sailing in the air like leaves before an autumn wind. Finally, the great engine took A-1 back into the air, sucking A-1 into its fuel hungry maw.

*** One night before Typhoon Yolanda During a dinner break, Jun and Filomena watched the evening television news broadcast from Manila. Both tired from a long day of surgery, or in her case emergency meetings at City Hall to plan for Typhoon Yolanda, they chatted about when and how to marry, guest lists, honeymoon dreams, and their future together. Due to her condition, they decided their marriage would be soon.

President Aquino advised we evacuate the city, she reported. What do you think? Divine Word Hospital is four floors tall, new, and strong. Ill stay behind in case there are injuries, but, darling, you and the baby should go to high ground. Go? My city planning group coordinates with police and fire rescue. Ill not abandon ship. He loved the sparkle that came into her eyes whenever she spoke of her work. As expected. But if you get any flooding in that low office of yours, come to Divine Word. Typhoons are always over-rated. Dont worry. After they made love carefully, she kissed him, kissed her ring, and they went to sleep to the sounds of freshening winds. Reluctantly, at midnight they dressed to report for duty.

*** She stayed in the citys Command Center all night, while he worked at the hospital. Between cases sewing up people lacerated by flying tin roofs, he texted and called Filomena continuously, nervously. How goes it in the government? Well stay because all the police and firemen are on duty. As the long night wore on, Jun, a veteran of typhoons that regularly blew through Manila, felt a churning in his bowels because gusts had grown so intense no man could stand against them. With worsening tumult outside making travel risky, visits to the Emergency Room dwindled to a trickle. When he went outside, rain and wind slammed him into a tree. Limping back inside, Jun went to a fourth floor window for a panoramic view of Tacloban City. He watched nearby street lights topple, power lines rip loose, ramshackle houses shake in the wind, all deluged by horizontal rain of unprecedented intensity. Why doesnt everyone flee? he asked her. Unfortunately, too few decided to obey orders to evacuate. She had a melodious voice. Hearing it always made him happy. But why? Its terrible outside.

For some, fear that looters might steal what little they own keeps them hunkered down. Business shopkeepers fear the same. We keep reassuring them the government has the manpower to keep good order, but they apparently dont believe us. And the poor? Some of them have no money for a bus ride to higher ground. Some think the wind will be stronger in the mountains than on the coastal plain. Some are caring for aged parents who cannot be safely moved. Maybe as many reasons as there are people. Its getting much worse. Come here, darling. Its safe at the hospital. Just as he said his final words to Filomena, a tremendous gust blew his window out of its frame, so that it shattered into butcher knife fragments all over the hallway. Through dense rain that now soaked him, he saw Tacloban City go completely dark. When he tried to call or text her to warn her to hurry, all cell towers were down. God, let her come to me now, he prayed. In his heart he knew she was on her way.

*** A-1, in its infinitesimal but causal way, had become part of the most powerful typhoon in recorded history. Its strongest winds lay near its vortex. Like a Kansas tornado, its central snout of low pressure raised and lowered like a merry-go-round horse; but unlike a tornado, whose funnel may be a few hundred yards wide, when Yolanda touched her funnel to earth it measured forty miles across. The giant funnel came down in Taclobans San Pedro Bay, where A-1 spun once again into the sea, becoming part of a huge tidal wave that crashed ashore in Tacloban City, Suddenly an unimaginable wall of water surged through the city, a dark nightmare destroying low houses that had somehow survived steady hundred mile an hour winds. Just as the flood hit Tacloban City, the funnel touched down. It bore winds of two hundred miles an hour, the physics of wind being that double the speed equals double the square of the force. Fierce at 100 miles per hour, supercharged jets of Tacloban air at 200 miles per hour thus became eight times stronger. Little could stand against the wind. What buildings stood against the wind instantly collapsed in the tidal wave. Great cargo ships were lifted inland like driftwood. People screamed as they were swept away, unable to hold to any tree or post. Bodies of people, dogs, chickens, and all living things became mixed with a slurry of wood, rock and mud that surged forward through town, unstoppable. The main runway at Tacloban Airport disappeared under twelve feet of angry ocean.

A-1, implacable, slid into a girls face, went into her gasping mouth, down to her lungs. There, it was A-1 that snuffed out the last erg of respiration, causing the beings heart to stop. For a moment more her mind lived, she sent her man a thought, but in her death grip she held fast to the toddler beside her.

*** As dawn broke, Jun suffered true panic for the first time in his life. Below him, Tacloban City had disappeared. Shocked, he saw only a big freighter where Filomenas office once stood. Tacloban looked like photographs of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb dropped on it in 1945. Though typhoon winds and painful rain raged on, Jun took a break from emergency cases and waded out of Divine Word. Rubble blocked every street. What few people picked their way through the destruction seemed in a daze, weeping while they looked under thingswalls knocked flat, trees uprooted, automobiles turned upside down with contorted bodies still inside them. In some gruesome places, arms and legs protruded akimbo from deep mud. He struggled toward Filomenas office, reaching it after an hour of fighting his way through wreckage. Her building lay almost flat beside the beached freighter, its attic crawl space easily reachable. Inside, where they had fled in vain effort to escape the flood, lay three bodies swept into one corner where they piled in hideous postures. Gasping with fear he might have recognized Filomenas hand, Jun crawled to the bodies. Their faces were bruised and swollen. Wrong ring. No Filomena. Probably people hed met at her office parties. He crossed himself with a sad, brief prayer for these people, but with a grateful hope that God had spared Filomena. His heart pounding in his ears, Jun crawled outside the attic to search on for her. Irrationally, he hoped she had clambered aboard the freighter. He was about to climb its tall ladder when a policeman staggered to him, carrying a boy with his intestines dangling from a wide split in his belly. I know you. Youre a doctor. Do something! the policeman shouted above the winds dirge. The boy was alive, but with the unmistakable pallor of imminent death. He wanted to ignore the boy to continue searching for Filomena. Jun could have justified himself by saying there was no hope the boy could survive, but it would have been a lie. Instead, wondering guiltily if by obeying his duty he was sacrificing Filomena, Jun shoved handfuls of intestines back into the boys belly, took him in his arms, and struggled back to Divine Word.

To the operating room, stat, he shouted when he rushed the boy into the hospital. Flooded, another doctor said. Nurse, bring me instruments. Ill operate on this desk if necessary. No instruments. All used already. Finally finding an extra-large needle, Jun closed the boy with autopsy stitches, a crude repair with four big loops of heavy nylon thread instead of the normal forty neat sutures he would use to close such a wound. Without medicines, without intravenous fluids, with patients sprawled everywhere on cardboard mats, he could do no more for the boy. Satisfied he had done his best, Jun figured the boy would make it. Emergency had become a madhouse of husbands carrying wives or children, of children dragging mothers, of haggard singles crawling in on fractured legs with bones spiking out of torn flesh. For hours Jun did what he could, his mind always dominated by worries about Filomena, until near exhaustion at sundown, he took a flashlight into Tacloban City to search for her.

*** Jun went to his home, thinking she might have gone there. But it no longer existed, his lot scoured clean of any sign of human life. Needing to intensify his search, he asked teams of men to search for her. Perhaps she was injured, waiting for him, or wandering in a daze. Three horrible, fruitless days passed. Every moment he could be away from the hospital, Jun looked for her. A daring Anderson Cooper from CNN flew in to report the devastation, and perhaps 10,000 deaths. Jun talked with the crew, who said they had never seen such devastation, unless from the tsunami in Aceh a few years back. Jun talked with one man walking past corpses, frantically searching for his 3 daughters. His wife had died in his arms. All alone, a naked child squatted beside his dead mother. Now the stench of death enveloped Tacloban City. Bodies lay everywhere, buzzing with flies. On the third evening he made his way to higher ground, where Filomena might have escaped to refuge in a cave. High ground may have escaped the tidal wave, but the wind destroyed every house and tree. While he raced from camp to camp, each populated by starving, thirsty, grieving people, one of his search crews caught up with him.

Doc, maybe you should come with us. His heart surged with hope. You found her? Is she okay? Just come, Doc. Only one block from Divine Word, men were pulling a collapsed building away from several bodies. Without a word, the searchers led Jun to two corpses, a woman and a child. Sea crabs were eating the womans eyeballs, her purple face crushed beyond recognition, so surely this could not be his beautiful Filomena. While Jun tried to breathe, an ant crawled leisurely into the orifice that had once been her nose. He knelt closer to see her muddy hand. The glint of a tiny diamond ring made his heart sink with a hollow pain that knocked him to his knees, unable to breathe. Filomena held the childs hand in a death grip. She had been trying to come to Jun while helping the child, an act of kindness that cost her life. Oh, no! he howled. The sounds of his violent sobs and wails were carried away into cold space, joining the chorus of mourning whimpers rising from the rotting city. He howled until he fell into the mud beside her, exhausted, without any ability to make more tears. After he tore his hair and gnashed his teeth, bottomless emptiness replaced his lamentations.

*** While Jun cleaned her body in a stagnant puddle--for there was no clean water to be found-- A-1 evaporated from Filomenas lungs before Jun slid her into a black body bag. Freed again, the molecule escaped upward into the last arm of Yolandas great spiral to continue her voyage. The small land mass of the Philippines was hardly enough to disrupt the organized fury of the typhoon, but after Yolanda crossed another thousand miles of open sea, she broke herself to pieces on the cold continent of Asia. A1 fell as part of torrential rains upon Vietnam, became part of the current of the mighty Mekong River, and flowed once again into the ocean, where eons and great currents would eventually carry A-1 back to the birthplace of typhoons.

***

Going through the motions of being alive, Jun watched American military airplanes unload food and water for the starving people of Tacloban City. The strongest typhoon in history would never be forgotten, though the city would be rebuilt, perhaps to a better state than before, through the generosity of donations from the entire world coming to help a competent government. But life would never be the same without Filomena. Overwhelmed with sadness, Jun leaned against a twisted lamp post to weep his heart out again. The End

(A Synthesis Based on True Stories reported by Yolanda Ortega Stern, President of One World Institute during her large relief mission to the calamity area, November and December, 2013. Copyright Tom Stern.) CONTACT: YolandaOStern@aol.com, http://TheOneWorldInstitute.org