“There has not been a single incident involving aircraft colliding with pigs, cows or even dogs and chicken that feed on abundant grass, insects and assorted flora and fauna all around the perimeter fence.

Airports are instructive places. They are superior learning tools. I found this out when I was about 10, still in short pants, shod every day in yellow Dragon tsinelas that refused to wear down even after two years, snot often clogging my nostrils but loving every minute of it. This was the 1960s when The Beatles were all the rage and I spun a 45 of their “Hey Jude” most days on a red Japanese phonograph that functions as an AM radio as well. I did not understand what rock was then, but I loved the songs coming off the airwaves every morning when the newscasts were interspersed by stories about some war to the country’s northwest. Directly overhead, at around noon Saturdays as we dried newly harvested palay by the side of the road, we would often see military planes practicing dog fighting high up the skies over Hilongos in Leyte where I grew up. Later, in high school, I would learn of their names as Corsairs and their adversaries as MIGs, often squaring off over the Mekong and dropping napalm along the Ho Chi Minh trail. Their aerial dances were mesmerizing displays of deadly combat and it was all we prepubescent provincial boys could do to crane our collective necks and not break them at this noontime display of destructive power.

On one occasion, word got around that an aircraft of some sort was at the local airport. Ostensibly a wounded bird, likely military and therefore extremely appealing to local boys whose aircraft sightings were limited to a few private helicopters flown for political figures seeking national positions and to the DC-3 owned by flag carrier Philippine Air Lines that flew in from Cebu City once or twice a week for the then princely price of P45 one way, I think. I would remember hearing an aircraft flying overhead while Mrs. Bandalan taught us music and dance and ducks wiggling and waggling down by the river quack, quack, quack and thought no more of it till later in the afternoon when someone’s father claimed to have come from the airport and saw a huge aircraft with unspecified damage to its wings or fuselage. Tales like that around my circle at the time were the equivalent of saying Mohammed has come down the mountain, and this was not PR. Everyone of my friends wanted to go to the airport at once and confirm the sighting but none actually managed to get there, in part because everyone was told the 1,000-meter hard-surface runway had been secured by armed, no nonsense, fierce-looking perimeter guards. Frankly, I could not imagine how that happens when everyone knows that the Hilongos Airport has some of the most porous of perimeters such that carabaos and all sorts of domesticated animals have been known to nonchalantly cross the runway just as pilots attempted to land. Fortunately, there has not been a single incident involving aircraft colliding with pigs, cows or even dogs and chicken that feed on abundant grass, insects and assorted flora and fauna all around the perimeter fence. I never got to see that damaged aircraft, too, even though my friends and I stood for hours at a time and for days on end after the rumored forced stopover at the top of the grandstand that faced directly the local airport some distance away.

Some years later I would go to the airport not to pick red ripe mansanitas that grew abundantly on airport grounds along with the calachuchi that we would offer to the Virgin each summer at the Flores de Mayo when we would wash down our youthful sins with floral offerings, but to earn some money. By then I learned that all of P20 could buy me the world. I learned, too, that some of my friends actually had that kind of money in their pockets but would not brag about it and I was truly impressed. I would like to earn that kind of money, at the suggestion of a friend, by shining shoes and learned the trade from a neighbor’s son who actually shined shoes for a living. Soon after, I harangued an uncle to build me a shoeshine box and asked my father to buy me all three shoe wax colors, brown, white and black, plus the brushes, jobos and the all-important cotton pads to buff someone’s footwear to kingdom come. Dad, who had not forgotten that I cut the tongue of his two-tone black-over-white leather shoes for my slingshot a while back, for which he made me kneel for an hour with my arms outstretched, the mutilated pair slung across each wrist, obliged, probably wanting to discover if he finally knocked some sense into my thick skull.

And so, my elder brother and I went after dirty shoes one fine morning in December, I think, when traffic at the municipal airport was heavier than usual. Dad would take us there in his bicycle, the better to see if we had the industry to earn real money instead of picking it off his pockets as we usually did. I remember thinking the things I would do with P20 as we biked the distance to the airport and freezing my ass cold as I lighted from the bike and walked the short distance to where grown men in assorted footwear milled around a smallish lounge waiting for the aircraft to arrive from Cebu. This was when I realized that I was not built to ask complete strangers if they wanted their shoes cleaned, that I was too timid to do that, that the fantastic amount of money I was going to earn that day would never be mine and that I was a fool for thinking it would happen. I don’t remember looking at Dad for some help because I would not even look his way knowing he was merely out there behind me looking to help if I only asked. But I did not. Neither did my brother.

As an adult, I have been to many airports in Asia, the US and some parts of Europe and the Middle East. They’re great places for discovering where you want to go and what to do when you get there. I once stood on the apron of the Hilongos Airport as a boy and wondered what the world beyond the runway was like. Beyond the missionary Protestant pilots that take of and land there and the occasional student pilot that wanders every now and then, the Hilongos patch of rural sky has not changed much with the passing of the years. I hope it stays that way for the next boy who stands at its apron and asks, “Where to?”