Burnham Park: portrait of a community

It is named after Daniel H. Burnham, the Chicago architect who designed the city’s basic layout. Burnham Park is synonymous to Baguio City as Central Park is to New York City. 

   Featurewise, it’s pretty basic. A man-made lagoon dominates the center of the park. Flat-bottomed boats rent out to tourists who care to jostle among a hundred other boaters in this tiny lake. In the 1960s there were real sailboats here too. But few people knew how to work the till, rudder, main sail and jib to actually scoot around the lake on windpower alone, and mishaps were frequent. Increased siltation has also made the lake shallower. The sailboats, with their heavy ballasts under the keel, began running aground. On most days, dead winds forced boaters to use loose oars which were constantly tossing overboard. Finally, the last sailboat was lifted out of the lake in 1974 and all the boats now have anchored pivoted oars and flat bottoms.

     They are less exciting for real seamen but friendly to most landlubbers who have never sailed. At the very least, the boats present a more picturesque alternative experience to sweating it out on a rowing machine in a gym. Imagination has flourished too. More recent novel ideas have given way to prowheads in the mold of "Little Mermaid" and other Disney characters.

With prowheads shaped like these pretty mermaids
who wouldn't be enouraged to pick up an oar and
start paddling around Burnham Lake?

The boats also give you unobstructed access to the entire lakeside flower beds ringing the lake. The city parks services does a good job of repotting flowers in sync with whatever species is supposed to bloom at any given season. So the flower beds lining the lake’s perimeter alternately hold robust growths of chrysanthemum, dahlia, marigold, everlasting, gumamela, gladiola, baby’s breath, statis, giant sunflower, and many other flowering plants all year round. Towering at each corner of the lake is a giant Norfolk pine, kin to the tall "grand pine tree" at the foot of Session Road--which transforms into the largest outdoor Christmas tree in December.

     About the only other activity going on in Burnham Park is biking. Private concessionaires rent out bicycles by the hour on the south lane of Lake Drive. Not much of a cycling circuit this one--mostly, it is there just for people to learn how to ride a bike. But if you’re an accomplished cyclist, the 100-meter turnaround presents little challenge. But for the serious two-wheeler, the rest of the city is perfect cycling country. There are several mountain biking and road cycling clubs active in the city. On weekends, colorful pelotons are a common sight around the circumferential roads of Baguio, like Loakan, South Drive, Ambuklao and Kennon roads.   

Biking brought families together and also helped a
lot in the gender equalization movement. Daddy
rested his arthritic knees while Mommy worked the
pedals, little Junior thinking "What's wrong with
this picture?"

    But the biking in Burnham Park is popular for a whole different reason: it brings family and friends together. Also, with its proximity to local schools, I used to believe that every school kid in Baguio at one time or another would have indulged in the basic truancy of cutting classes to ride these bikes.

     I know my school mates in Baguio City High School (1980) and I did. We were an entire class, in fact, who would promptly forsake a day’s worth of classes just to scrape our knees and collect road rash in our arms and legs (or sometimes faces!) riding these bikes. Until you learned to ride one of them, you were not considered a "true City Higher."

     We rented our bikes from a retired local sports legend, Alejandro Cabusora, who was one of the concessionaires. He was the 1968 Northern Luzon Athletic Association (NLAA) decathlon champion and would have gone on to become national champion. But the bus carrying the Baguio delegation to the games figured in a crash on the way. Alex Cabusora suffered a spine injury that left his sprinting legs paralyzed. He would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair--but kept inspiring young athletes with his motivational speaking. The City awarded him a bike rental concession in Burnham Park in appreciation.

     Back then, the bikes rented out for fifty centavos for 15 minutes--or two pesos for a full hour. At least in theory. Whenever time was up on our bikes, Alex Cabusora would glance at his stopwatch and yell out to us, "take one last round!" That "last round" would stretch for another half hour because each time we pulled in to return the bikes, Alex would keep saying, "Didn’t I tell you to take one more round?" I know I once rode his bike all morning and paid fifty centavos. Time stood still for City Highers on that bike lane.

    When all of Alex’s bikes were out, we rented some from another kindly old man, Rudy Lomibao. He’s another guy with a defective stopwatch just like Alex’s--his "fifteen minutes" also lasted some 2 or 3 hours. If my City High batchmates and I were cardiologically healthy in those days, we owe it to Messrs. Cabusora and Lomibao and their bicycles.

     There were memorable incidents too, like when a few misguided misfits (who were not from City High) would attempt to steal the bikes. They snuck out the hilly portion behind the Children’s Park and spilled out onto Kisad Road. Then these jerks tried to make a run for it, pedaling madly up towards Legarda Road. But all it took is for one of us to shout in Ilocano, "Adda agtatakaw!" (Someone’s stealing a bike!). Mr. Lomibao would chase them down on his motorcycle--and he always caught every one of them. But the perps usually never got so much as a tongue-lashing from Mr. Lomibao. He basically just scared the bejesus out of these deviants, threatening to tell their parents about their mischief. They quickly realized their mistake and asked for forgiveness--which they always got. Today, these once bratty smartasses would be very forgiving adults themselves, I imagine.

All of life is a swing, if you think about. It's all
about achieving highs and hitting lows and knowing
that at the end of the game you still have to get off
the ride and ger your feet back on the ground--as 
these little girls are learning. Where are they now, 
you wonder.

The Children’s Park has been renovated recently. New rides (seesaws, slides and swings---all for free) and jungle gyms have been installed. But I miss the old giant "rocketship" slide that used to sit on the outer edge of the park. Rust and disrepair had forced city engineers to finally scrap it in 1985. It was a tall tower, shaped like a rocketship sitting on a launching pad. The gantries are the downslides--there’s one for fraidycats about 5 feet off the ground, a middle chute for aspiring bullies about 10 feet high, and the topslide for certified playground toughies which was all of 20 feet high. You either slid down off it on the steel chute, and touch on the ground five or six seconds later. Or you could get ambitiously show-offy and slide down "bannister style" sitting on one handrail while keeping your weight across the opposite handrail. You either slid faster and reached the foot of the slide about 2 seconds faster--or you arrived even faster than that and a little "more vertical" at 32 feet per second squared. That means you fell off the slide completely and landed badly on the sandpit below, with a whole new practical understanding of Newton’s law of motion.

Back during my time, that is not a slide. A slide
defined is something where if you fell off it, 
you actually broke a bone. I guess we were 
sturdier kids back then.

     Other kids picked you up and maybe offered a word of two of empathy. If you were shaken up really bad, you get carried to one of the benches in the side. But I remember in those days, unless you were bleeding or you actually broke a bone, no one really paid attention too much. I guess kids we were sturdier then.

   But the best thing to do around Burnham Park is still this: nothing.  Just trolling around without a care but to catch a sunbeam in your face, feel the wind in your hair, smell the flowers, pat a dog on the head, just loiter aimlessly about, soaking in the community life. This is the beauty of Baguio City and its supreme privilege--to be able to say "This is the life!" ** (all photos copyright 2010 Joel R. Dizon)

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON