At this time exactly five years ago, I was plotting how to sneak back to our Taal Lake home. The volcano had just erupted days before, blanketing much of Southern Tagalog with volcanic ash and displacing thousands. But the threat had not subsided.
After the initial explosion on January 12, 2020, Phivolcs was predicting an even greater cataclysm with apocalyptic scenarios: a horizontal eruption smashing into dense communities, a major tsunami triggered by seismic tremors, or an epic event akin to what happened in 1754: a six-month eruption that rearranged the landscape and forced the relocation of Lipa from the lake’s shoreline to the balmy plateau where the city has nestled since.
These scenarios were haunting me even as I felt the need to return during a quiet interval. There were valuables I had to retrieve, like my son’s guitar, our favorite kitchen knives, ceramic mugs.
Looking back now, I could have lived without all those. I actually just wanted to return one last time, before we lost our home to one of nature’s most powerful forces.
So with the local government’s permission, I did return. The authorities gave me just 15 minutes.
As I gathered what I could, I kept looking nervously at the grey behemoth on the horizon that was ready to blow again. I had estimated that in the case of a so-called “base surge,” or a volcanic explosion with a moving ring-shaped cloud of ash near the water, I only had several minutes to flee uphill as the blast traveled the 11 kilometers across the lake from the crater to my house.
After packing my car, I did a last ocular, not knowing if I would see anything again. As I wandered around our lonely bamboo house, at the edge of a ghost community,
I remembered how my wife Ipat Luna, who grew up nearby, had stumbled upon this small property a decade before. The lot wasn’t even titled, and we didn’t have much savings. But still vivid for her were the childhood joys of summer in the same waters. It was where she learned to swim, where she bonded with her siblings and cousins, where she first heard stories of how her parents sought refuge during World War 2 on the same volcano that was now threatening to obliterate our home. Those lake summers were probably when Ipat first learned to appreciate nature enough to make defending it her career as a lawyer.
Driven by the glorious weight of that family history, she found a way for us to own, title, and occupy this space. With tongues in our cheeks, we called it Kapusod, a play of words with a nod to both my longtime employer and to Pusod the NGO that had employed Ipat. But what we tell people is that “kapusod” (navel) means we are all connected to Mother Nature.
Since then, we have sunk much of our resources here. But even more than that, we have invested our ideas and time, experimenting with ecological design and planting endangered native trees. We have used Kapusod as a classroom to teach human rights, environmental law, and the pre-colonial script called Baybayin. I proudly tell guests and students that Taal Lake is the Baybayin heartland, where early Spanish explorers found a literate island people who wrote poetry on bamboo.
We have been rewarded with a slew of our own memories. Ipat and I have hosted countless family and friendship reunions. From Kapusod we have launched numerous boat and kayak journeys to explore this marvelous world with its blend of fishing villages and uninhabited wilderness, the breathtaking cliffs of Mount Maculot and Napayong Island, and the constant brooding presence of our neighborhood volcano, the source of danger but also the fount of blessings of fertile soil and incomparable scenery.
It’s a place of joy and occasional drama, but also comfort. During the depths of the pandemic, we received strangers who had just lost loved ones and needed a place to grieve. Some even brought urns so they could stare out at our endless skies while holding what remained.
My father Rod Severino in his last years would arrive at Kapusod out of the blue in a wheelchair, pushed into our house by his driver and hoping that I would be there. We had celebrated Dad’s 80th birthday at the lake with his surviving siblings and many family members.
Ipat’s father Benjamin Luna Sr. would also surprise us with his visits, even when he already had trouble walking. Except for his college years at UP Diliman, Daddy had always lived around the lake, his large clan as deeply rooted in a place and province as any I’ve ever known.
Both of our fathers are gone now. But we have the memories of their joy.
I thought we were going to lose Kapusod too, as I took what I thought would be my last walk around our little sanctuary back in January 2020.
At the height of the danger from the volcano, one of our editors at GMA News asked me to write a personal essay. “My wife, son and I may lose everything,” I wrote in January 2020. “But that only means that at one stage in our lives, we had everything.”
We still do. We’re still here.