White men walking

Having read about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s brave/foolish decision to jog through smog-choked Tiananmen Square the other day, I couldn’t help thinking about a similarly peculiar thing I did recently: I decided to walk home.

After a film screening in Ortigas Center around 7:30 p.m. one Thursday night, I decided to hike the three or so kilometers back to my Quezon City domicile on foot.

An odd choice for an expat, maybe. Not so unusual, of course, for the daily pedestrian commuters around me who had no choice.

Usually, I would never do this. Usually, I would seek out my car in a parking lot and join the widening gyre of cars circulating in and around Ortigas Center and EDSA on the nightly commuter torture wheel with the rest, sitting in traffic for an hour or so until reaching home.

The difference was, I didn’t have my car. And I didn’t know enough about public transportation — such as it is — to hunt down a bus or jeepney heading my way. And I’m not into Uber.

So I decided to hoof it.

I guess I had memories of doing this sort of thing back in Boston, where you could take a stroll along Storrow Drive or the Fens with the moonlight as your companion, and only the odd statistical possibility of getting mugged. I remember it felt invigorating, back then, taking in the night air, going for a little perambulation.

All such memories disappear as you try to walk from one corner to the next in Metro Manila. I won’t say this was the first time I’d tried walking anywhere in the Metro… but it has been a while. Has traffic, pollution and the overflowing populace really grown to this choking point since I first came here?

Rather than the crisp night air, it was raw bursts of exhaust, trapped by the muggy, breezeless night. The kind of sting that gets right down there in your lungs. So this is what pedestrian commuters most nights. No wonder so many traffic cops now wear ski masks to block out some of the toxins.

Zuckerberg took the whole Beijing smog thing lightly, though FB users in China warned him to quit it: “Mark, don’t u see the air pollution? Stop running outside!”

I won’t say Metro Manila’s at Beijing levels yet (nor will Beijing admit as much), but the city’s pollution is set to become an even bigger medical problem as some 20,000 new cars are added to the streets every month. We luckier commuters with cars can gripe about the number of hours spent in traffic; pedestrians have to deal with a more lethal kind of math: how much particulate matter is inhaled per minute by Manilans stuck in the streets waiting for public transport?

I remember screwing in my earbuds, cranking up a little playlist as I prepared to cross Meralco to Ortigas Ave. Joy Division was playing, I recall. The music was a balm, but it made awareness of the many passing cars and jeepneys difficult. I asked a traffic cop when I could cross; he just kind of vaguely motioned to the street, where people were already scampering to cross against a red light (though Manilans hardly ever “scamper” crossing a street; it interferes with their texting).

I chose to scamper. I didn’t want my experiment in Revenant-style home-seeking to end up with me splattered on the grill of a jeepney.

You quickly learn that not only streets are problematic: sidewalks are more or less theoretical concepts. There are these long chunks of broken concrete laid out parallel to the streets that you could call “sidewalks,” but they’re usually interrupted by utility poles, trees and other obstacles. You are actually in more danger of falling into the street by walking along a sidewalk than by walking in the gutter.

And obviously, bicycle riders are s**t out of luck, because those sidewalks aren’t wide enough for a medium-sized Filipino, let alone a cyclist. That’s why they all choose to grind it out in the middle lane of heavy traffic, weaving hither and yon, under some weird mystical faith that the million things that could go wrong won’t go wrong. Ah, faith: a beautiful, sometimes deadly thing.

Speaking of faith, I had faith in my Google Maps, upon which I had set my destination by foot. It told me I would arrive home in about 35 minutes — only about five minutes more than if I’d driven a car.

I guess I had memories, too, of that old R.E.M. video, the one in black and white where people just abandon their cars in the middle of an L.A. traffic jam and just… walk. No such thing happened that night. There were endless bumper-to-bumper cars up and down Ortigas Avenue, and I guess I got a vague sense of satisfaction knowing I wasn’t pinned down like the rest. But the tradeoffs made it hard to enjoy the moment.

I took a left up Greenmeadows, and at least breathed a little easier, seeing as there were fewer cars and less exhaust. But there was also less lighting. I also nearly stumbled over a few people sleeping on the curb. As if there weren’t enough obstacles for pedestrians already.

I took a shortcut up Temple Drive and tried not to get hit by cars speeding past me to catch the green light at White Plains Avenue. By this point I was sweating, breathing hard more from the accumulating levels of carbon monoxide in my lungs than any actual “exercise” involved.

Unlike Leo DiCaprio in The Revenant, I didn’t feel resurrected upon reaching home. I felt like dying.

When I reached my subdivision gate, I realized there was another small problem: the guards didn’t know me by sight, and I was stumbling my way towards their guard shack on foot. That’s the kind of behavior that’s generally considered “shady.” Fortunately, I had a driver’s license to flash, and it had my correct street address on it, so after a little back and forth, I was allowed to pass inside, and before I tucked the thing back in my wallet, I felt tempted to kiss it. And I reminded myself to have it with me — behind the wheel of a car — from now on.