I was four years out of Baguio when Ivan Labanye started writing these columns in 2018, but for some reason, a measure of nostalgia creeps from every page of Ivan’s writing. I have a feeling that anyone who’ve had the opportunity to call Baguio a home for at least a year will feel the same feeling when reading anything written about Baguio.
Ivan was just a year ahead of me. He came to UPB in 2007; I in 2008. And that is why his face is very familiar, in that small world that is UPB. It is a shame, though, that while Ivan was developing his writing voice and the activism that propels it, and still is very much felt in these essays from 2018 onwards, our paths never coincided. From 2008 to 2011, I was deep into my evangelical ministry, while my last two years in Baguio was an immersion to interpreting and organizing work with the Deaf community of Baguio.
As I read Ivan’s book, the only thing that I know, somehow connects us all those years is the ambulation. The streets that Ivan’s feet knows were the same streets I knew and still know. And with a funy turn of cosmic events, our ambulations brought us to Los Baños, where we both live now and where our meeting is finally ripe for the making.
Until I’m proven otherwise, I think it is safe to declare that Ivan Labanye is Baguio’s first millennial flaneur and Beckoning Baguio, the first book borne out of walking Baguio in the twenty-first century. I’m okay with making such grand claims and celebrating them even if I’m proven wrong later, because I think it is critical to demarcate time when talking about walking in a place made complex by history like Baguio. Also, with what I think is the most walkable city in the Philippines, I am compelled to express how much I find it surprising to not have come across a book about walking Baguio by a local until now.
I finished Ivan’s first book this September after buying it at MIBF and using it as my pampatulog book. I am tempted to conclude that it wasn’t the beginnings of insomnia that caused my unusually frequent sleepless nights in September, but this book. Ivan cautioned us in the foreword that this book is a collection of his columns from 2018 to 2020 in a local Baguio newspaper, an information I understand was necessary to divulge but one I personally didn’t need to know. Read without this foreknowledge, Ivan’s 49 essays would’ve looked like vignettes, a form chosen by some walkers writing prose. The scatteredness of subjects easily make this a walking book. Reading several essays before hitting the sack felt like taking a quick walk with long strides that made me traverse Harrison then Session then Magsaysay.
But the collation of essays into eight sections I take as a reflection of the tempered scatteredness of walking Baguio. Yeah, walking Baguio can feel scattered, but it mostly feels arranged. Due to the city’s smallness, familiarity to spaces become easy, and with that familiarity comes comfort. In other words, walking Baguio doesn’t feel as messy as say walking Manila.
But what I really loved about Ivan’s writing is the walkiness of each piece. Unlike a sitting in the park Tiempo-esque reading experience, I had to make frequent and unexpected turns with Ivan who cites this book then that before making a comment on a specific spot in Baguio and citing another book before coming to a dead end, usually Ivan’s signature witty syntehesis. I felt this most in “Too Calm for Snow” and “Tahimik na Tumatalak.”
Despite the columns being written only in a span of three years, Ivan chose to subtitle his book as “A Decade of Walking in a City of Pines” and why not? I don’t think he could’ve written these essays without a decade’s worth of intimate knowledge of Baguio gained only through pure love of the streets.
As I re-walk the ministry routes I walked in Baguio from 2008 to 2011, a project I started in January of this year, I would say that Beckoning Baguio has given me a familiar but entirely different perspective of the city I once and still call home, a perspective I’m hoping could bear new interpretations and reinterpretations of my life there.
References
Labanye, Ivan Emil A. Beckoning Baguio: A Decade of Walking in a City of Pines. University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2024.