The accident itself was a minor misadventure within a bigger tragedy.
It was the black Nissan Patrol skirting the ravines on an ambulance run that prompted me to comment about a brewing problem: inadequate parking spaces in a mountain idyll that used to draw only a frontier-spirited few.
Not two minutes later, it was made clear that this particular specie of the gas guzzler genus won't be making it to any parking space at all, in Sagada or elsewhere, for at least the next three months.
A beast among Philippine roads --- its many hairpin twists and turns snaking atop the breathtaking chasms of the southern Cordilleras --- the notorious Halsema Highway won't be tamed just yet --- certainly not by any presumptuous driver believing a vehicle priced over a million comes equipped with automatic override for recklessness and stupidity.
The brawny Cordillerans who drive along this highway on ragtag public buses have a point with those cowboy tunes they play during the long hours of travel. They've earned their spurs reining in this bucking bronco of a road --- not by riding roughshod over it but by observing a healthy respect for its rules.
So ironclad are these rules and one breaks them only at the risk of one's neck (or a broken fender if one is very, very lucky) that there are probably more road courtesies practiced by these drivers on any given day than in the whole history of EDSA bus driving.
Ironically, it is the same muck tainting things government from the ground up which seems to be preserving Halsema and the mountain enclaves it unlocks like Sagada from being overrun by the country club and theme park crowd, at least for the time being.
The present Malacanang tenant, herself far from pristine pure, is said to be furious over the sub-standard quality of the highway portions that has so far been paved. The meantime clutter in the road portions under snail pace construction may actually have slowed down travel time from before, keeping the crass mob at bay.
But for how long? Walk around Baguio nowadays and weep.
