The Grim Reaper Looks Like a Golf Course

The Grim Reaper Looks Like a Golf Course

      The film advance lever refused to move.  I had just taken my last shot of the Taal caldera from the air.  As I slipped my camera back into my duffel bag, I glanced at the altimeter: 4,000 feet.  “Perfect!”  I said to myself, “Now I can observe a landing—from the co-pilot’s seat!”  At least, that’s what I thought.

         It had been a successful ocular inspection.  Club Paradise had proven to be a perfect location for the next commercial we were to shoot.  And the flight home via a 4-seater Cessna had been the mother of all treats for the kid inside me who, in a parallel universe, had gone to flight school instead of studying Mass Communication. Strapped onto the right front seat, with a full set of instruments and controls in front, and a commanding view of the landscape both ahead and to my right, I could just as well have grabbed the controls and lived out my fantasies. But I knew better. So for the past hour or so, I had been content to just enjoy the ride. And what a ride it was—complete with the bonus sensation of dropping out of the sky with a failed engine!

        And so it was that as I sat back and “prepared for landing”, the engine coughed.  The rotor went from a blur to three distinct— motionless— blades.  And then, silence.

        “Oh Shit!”

        I glanced at the pilot.  His face was one of fear and concentration at the same time.  He had his hand on the choke knob.

        The nose of the plane dropped.

        “OH SHIT!!”

        He pulled and pushed on the choke.  The engine came alive.  The nose leveled out.

        “Thank God!”

        The engine coughed and quit again.

        “OH SHIT!!!”

        As the plane tried to make up its mind on whether to nose-dive or level out, I glanced towards the back seat, at my director, Trevor, with an “Oh Shit!” look on my face.  He looked straight into my eyes, and calmly, without blinking or saying a word, made the sign of the cross.  I nodded.

        “Okay, so I’ll be dead in a while.  I hope it doesn’t hurt.  I hope I die instantly.  I wonder what my tombstone will say.  Shit!  What about my folks?  God, do something, I can’t die!  Oh, well.  If my number’s up, then my number’s up.  Look after my parents for me, won’t you, God?  Too late for confessions now.  Well, I haven’t been that bad, anyway.  At least I’ll find out, once and for all, what’s on the other side.  See ya later, God (I hope).”

        Thoughts, emotions, fears, curiosities— all racing through my head like images in an execution-driven but conceptually void TV commercial.

        At about three thousand feet, I decided to get my act together.  There’s quite a lot of bare real estate down there.  I thought of helping the pilot look for a good landing spot.  A subdivision under construction caught my eye.  “Nice, wide, newly paved roads,” I thought, “with no structures around.  Looks good, though I’m not sure if there’s a long-enough stretch to land on.  And besides, we’re way off line.  Forget it!”

        Just over two thousand feet to go before we smash into the ground and burst into flames.  I looked around some more—franticly.  “Is that a golf course down there?” I asked myself.  “If we began turning towards it now, we might make it.  Is that the Manila Southwoods or the Orchard?”  I turned to the pilot, struggling to keep my big mouth shut. “Hey, Mr. Pilot I think we should aim for that golf course,” I almost told him.  But I’m glad I didn’t.  One look at the guy, and I thought to myself, “shut up, frustrated flyboy!  Let the guy do his job.”  At that instant, it dawned on me: in the most crucial shot of your life—where you don’t get a second take—would you leave everything in the director’s hands or play your “creative” card and insist on doing it your way?

        But before I could gather my thoughts, Fate called “Action!”  I watched the altimeter needle spin. Two thousand feet… fifteen hundred…  one thousand…  “Here goes!  God save our souls.”  With one arm around the pilot’s seat, another braced against the door frame, and both feet on the instrument panel (in a Cessna, there’s no room for the head-between-the-knees crash position popularized by hot stewardesses), I set my senses on red alert, as the plane made a sharp left bank, leveled off, pitched nose-up, and landed hard on a newly plowed cornfield.  A carabao and some trees whizzed past before we came to a full stop, and we were off the plane— somewhere in Dasmariñas, Cavite. As I knelt on the muddy ground, ecstatic about having knees to rest on, I thought, “Gee! I wonder how many corn seedlings we killed today.”

        “That wasn’t so unnerving, was it?” I said to myself as I sat under the right wing, sipping coffee, waiting for our ride back to Manila.  The plane had survived the incident without a scratch.  Hours had passed.  We had become instant friends—Trevor, Sonny the pilot, and I. A crowd had gathered and brought us coffee twice over. Darkness had totally blanketed the place. And somewhere through my Nth cup of coffee, I wondered what I was more anxiously waiting for— our ride home, or some drastic effect this experience would have on my personality.

        “Maybe I’ll turn into a total square— paranoid, scared of my own shadow; maybe I’ll be an enlightened Buddha wannabe; I wonder how I’ll look bald; maybe I’ll never fly again; but we’re supposed to fly back next week to shoot the commercial; shit!, maybe I’m dead and I just don’t know it yet!”  Once again, the thoughts raced through my head as incoherently as a concept-less commercial.

        On the ride home, I told my director, “I’ll probably write something about this, one of these days, when I’ve got all my reflections together.  Who knows?  Maybe it’s through the writing itself that I’ll be able to figure out what to make of this whole experience.”

        It was May, 1998.

        Two years later, as I observed some young new employees at the office running around like headless chickens—caught up in the clash of idealism, ambition and existential angst—I found myself grinning in amusement.  “How long has it been since I last acted that way?” I asked myself. “Two years or so?”  Suddenly, my fingers began to type:

        The Grim Reaper looks like a Golf Course…