Good while it lasted
Those were surreal — the two months of driving through the, at times, nearly deserted streets of Metro Manila during the enhanced community quarantine or total lockdown imposed by the government starting on 16 March 2020.
In totality, it was an experience that could have matched Charlton Heston’s own as he lackadaisically zipped through empty American city avenues in the opening scene of the 1971 post-apocalyptic film The Omega Man.
Itself a remake of the 1964 Vincent Price-starrer The Last Man on Earth, The Omega Man was to be redone anew and released in 2007 as I Am Legend, featuring Will Smith driving that year’s model of the Ford Mustang Shelby GT500.
Smith also had Sam, the German Shepherd who left many crying when she perished trying to save him from the flesh-eaters.
All three movies were a take on Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend. Disfigured, white-eyed robbed survivors of the chemical holocaust served as Heston’s “enemies” while for Smith’s character, no less than fast-moving zombies.
Even through the black-and-white television set on which I first saw it, The Omega Man was both creepy and exhilarating, especially on scenes that showed Heston “shopping” without paying whether for what food were still on grocery shelves, guns and fuel for his rides. Yeah, rides, because the last man on earth only needed to barge into a car dealership to take home with him the latest car model after fueling it up with the gasoline Jerrycan he had with him. Sighted in the film were, among many other period-correct vehicles, cars like the Ford Galaxie 500 XL, 1969 Opel GT, 1970 Chevrolet Camaro, a 1967 Cadillac ambulance and a Citroen Meham. Back to reality in 2020, the Metro Manila lockdown was not against Ku Klux Klan-like figures or zombies but against the unseen but equally dangerous coronavirus disease 2019 or COVID-19.
“Now is the time to learn how to drive,” a young editorial staffer at Daily Tribune was told by one of the bosses as the paper continued operating and printing copies when most other newsgathering outfits shut down or kept minimal presence. “The streets are deserted and there is hardly any traffic enforcer.”
The aspiring reporter indeed got to practice what he learned in the driving school he enrolled in just weeks before COVID-19 shut it down like most “non-essential” enterprises.
The two-month COVID-19 lockdown was a fun time to be behind the wheel since there were no traffic logjams and the only bottlenecks were at the quarantine checkpoints where policemen and soldiers checked motorists’ papers to see if they had any business to be out risking getting infected.
While some gasoline stations closed shop, those that stayed open sold fuel so cheaply that P1,000 got me a full tank from the near-empty of my beat-up subcompact daily driver.
Motoring will never be the same after getting to be free as a bird while 90 percent, at least of the population, are hankering down against the virus. With the proper accreditations like the IATF-EID (Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases) I.D. and the DoST (Department of Science and Technology)-issued “rapid pass,” going from point A to B was never a hassle as traffic was non-existent.
If only I had that Opel GT of Charlton Heston or the Shelby GT 500 of Smith in the movies, the experience would have been doubly perfect. It was good while it lasted. Now it’s back to earth with the logjams.
The streets are deserted and there is hardly any traffic enforcer It’s not as bad as it seems