Interviewee: Virgelio, called “Billy,” Carpio
Computer programmer and photographer
Interviewer: Anna Herscher
Masters candidate at SUNY Empire State College
Location: Cragsmoor Stone Church, Cragsmoor, New York
Date: August 14, 2016
AH = Anna Herscher
BC = Billy Carpio
AH: I\’m here today with Billy Carpio. We\’re in Cragsmoor, New York. This is August 14th 2016, and I\’m just looking forward to hearing what he is going to be telling me. I would invite you, Billy, to just start telling me whatever you like. Just jump in wherever and start talking.
BC: OK. You mentioned something about childhood and if there was any hiking involved at all in my childhood. I would say there was pretty much none. I do remember my Scouting days, I was a Boy Scout in sixth grade. One of the activities whenever we would go bivouacking go pitching tents on the mountainside, there would always be some walks in the woods, which we called hikes, so as far as I remember that is the only part in my early childhood years which would be considered hiking. I did not hike with my parents, we were not a mountaineering kind of family.
My recent adventures and misadventures in hiking are very recent, starting in maybe 2009 and off and on since. It\’s not like I do it every week or every month. Whenever I feel like it — that’s pretty much what I do — me and my wife will sometimes go together, especially around where we live in Middletown. We consider ourselves in the outskirts of the Catskills, so there is really plenty of nature compared to, for example, if you lived in New Jersey or Long Island. Those places are very congested, whereas up here there is plenty of fresh air and mountain trails. It is very beautiful, so it automatically became a part of our lifestyle, I guess you could say, to explore nature.
AH: Just automatically? You just started doing it.
BC: Yes because, as I implied, you are surrounded by nature up here. Drive five, fifteen minutes in any direction and [there\’s] nature, some relatively untouched by humans. Yeah, I love doing that now. There\’s the Catskills, there\’s the Shawangunks — they are another mountain ridge, I think it is parallel to the Catskills — and I am trying to think to think of the trails that my wife and I went up. The longest one we took was going up to the hotel ruins in the Catskills. You start from Woodstock and you go up I think three miles. Everything is uphill, so it is very tiring. We never considered turning back, but our bodies were thinking can we make it? Sometimes we would encounter people coming down and we would ask and they would say encouraging words, like \”no, it\’s not too far,\” when actually I think it\’s two miles. So, we just kept going until we reached the top. I guess hiking is one way of measuring one\’s endurance. How far can you go? How strong your body is. I don\’ t think I have ever reached the point where I am at the point of exhaustion where I could not go any further. I always think that I might not make it, but once I\’m there I wouldn\’t call it a walk in the park but I can still go on, I probably haven\’t met my limit yet as far as endurance.
AH: You think you have met…
BC: No, I don\’t think so. I always think, whenever I set on a trail, whether it is walking or biking that at some point that I think I\’m not going to make it but I always do eventually, so I don\’t know where my limit is — not yet — and I don\’t want to find out really.
[Laughter]
I just want to have a good time. It’s not really my objective to find out my limits. I am just saying that these are the thoughts that come to me whem I am hiking or biking.
AH: And you are a photographer…
BC: Yes.
AH: How is that part of your hiking practice? Do you always take cameras?
BC: Basically, photography is what drives my hikes. Now I would not hike just for hiking\’s sake without any camera. I would always have a camera with me. The thing with photography is — I think the difference between hiking and photography as hobbies or passions is that as a hiker you want to reach a beautiful spot and look at the world from there, whereas as a photographer you don\’t necessarily want to go there, you want to view it from a distance and take pictures of it and not view the world from it, while standing on it, you know what I mean. You see a nice bridge and instinctively you want to go up to it and look around, and then you start thinking what would be a good picture to take. That\’s really funny because you don\’t take a good picture of a scene when you are really in it.
AH: You look for intimate spots, like the bridge, and also what about the grand vistas, like the scenic look off the mountain kind of pictures?
BC: I\’m not really interested too much in that because you just see the mountain tops that surround you, the trees that are mostly green. Maybe if it\’s in the fall when there\’s plenty of color, but still I would prefer taking pictures of fall leaves more up close than from a distance. I kind of think that, if I were to go to Mt. Everest, I would have absolutely no desire of getting to the top. I just want to come to the point where I can see it majestically and take a nice dramatic picture of it, that\’s all I would want to do. That\’s probably the most extreme example I can think of.
[Laughter.]
AH: That sets you apart from some others who are looking to reach that goal.
BC: Right. I think that\’s the instinct of humans, but as a photographer, I don\’t think that is what photographers want to do, although I am speaking for myself only. I would just rather be at a distance and taking dramatic pictures for people to see.
AH: Right, right. Umm, I do have some questions that I can start to ask you. You already said one thing that jogged my interest and also you are a computer programmer as well as a programmer [photographer?] — am I correct?
BC: Yes.
AH: … and so I am interested in the interplay of these two different things. What I thought we could do — with your permission — is go back to your childhood a little bit and you grew up in the Philippines — is that correct?
BC: Yes.
AH: … and where in the Philippines was that?
BC: In Malabon, which is a suburb of Manila. The ?? region near Meho, [outer region near Metro-] Manila. You can consider me a Manila person.
AH: Right away, I was interested, oh, they have Boy Scouts, I did not know that.
BC: Yes, it’s very big in the Philippines. Scouting is a very active institution or activity or childhood thing.
AH: They have Girl Scouts and Cub Scouts?
BC: They have Girl Scouts and Cub Scouts. We bivouacs every year, every school. I loved it. Not all of my classmates had money, my classmates and I studied in public school so some of my classmates were really poor, so only those who can afford it get to go, so maybe ten of us friends would get to go.
My mom was a public school teacher, so we were not wealthy. We were part of the very small middle class of the Philippine population, but she would make every effort to have me and my brother go on these trips.
AH: Then how did you run into the computer work?
BC: When I graduated from high school, I really wasn\’t thinking of what I would want to be. Before I knew it, there was an application form for colleges. You had to pick something, and since you have to pick something, since my mom was a high school math teacher, that\’s automatically what I picked although I am not particularly good in math, I suppose I am, but I struggle just like everybody else, more so than the others I would think. But, since my mom was a math teacher, that\’s what I checked. So, that landed me to a scholarship in De La Salle University in the Philippines. Full scholarship and it\’s an expensive school. I didn\’t have to pay anything, so it was a no-brainer. Yeah, sure, of course I will get into that university. It is run by American brothers, De La Salle brothers, and the course was — at the time, they could not offer a pure math course, I think because the caliber of the math department wasn\’t that strong, this is just my guess. So, they called it math/physics and it sounds very impressive because it sounds like someone is an expert in two fields, really you are not an expert in either.
[Laughter.]
You are not a mathematician and you’re not a physicist. That’s what I ended up taking. Still, it’s a very analytical field, and my choices upon graduation from college were to either become a teacher or — at the time computers were booming — and this was 1982. Again, it was a no-brainer. I started looking for a job as a computer programmer. I took a summer class on computers and that’s how I got started. I got hired as a computer programmer trainee and they hired me at the Philippine American Life Insurance Company, again it’s an American company in the Philippines. That’s how I got started as a computer programmer. From that point on I just stayed in it because I considered myself lucky to have been born in a time when computers were proliferating and very hot. My friends are envying me in that position because I have a stable job that pays good compared to other fields. So, I just stayed in it.
When it comes to photography, I think there is a very big intersection between the two fields. Real photographers might say otherwise, this is what I notice when I start talking with other photographers. Real photographers, especially the film ones in the olden days before digital, they shoot the scene right when they are shooting it. Me, as a computer person, in the back of my mind, I am thinking in the back my mind, I can go back to my computer and fix my errors, so I am more relaxed when it comes to shooting on the scene. You could say I am less disciplined when I do that compared to traditional photographers. I think there is a big interplay between the two fields, computers and photography because nowadays everything is digital, everything is manipulated digitally. There are a lot of things you can do with computers rather than film — like the stuff I am doing with three hundred sixty-degree photography — that you cannot do with film.
AH: Do you notice other programmers who have a past time of photography?
BC: That\’s a good question. No, not really.
AH: I\’ll ask you some really way out-of-the-ballpark questions. It\’s very interesting to me your kind of American connections in the Philippines and that you are Asian. I am wondering whether you see yourself as a hiker or as a photographer as having any Asian quality that you might — or Philipino quality, is that correct, Philipino? — that you would ascribe to yourself, part of yourself, part of your self-understanding?
BC: Two thoughts jump into my mind as you are saying that. One is that — I don\’t know if this has anything to do with it — ever since I was a child, I always was the one who lived the farthest from school, or sometimes the second farthest. But, that\’s the farthest I can get, or the second farthest. I walked the longest distance, and that is because the next Barrio is a better public school than our barrio. My mom, again, is focused on our education although, by law, we are supposed to stay within our barrio. There are ways — we have relatives there — that\’s why I went. This is back in my first grade, even kindergarten days, I am used to walking long distances ever since I was in grade school.
High school, it\’s the same thing. My mom was a math teacher at Manila Science High School, it\’s patterned after the Bronx Science High School where students will take an entrance exam to get into it, so that is not for walking or hiking. This is long distance by jitney [jeepney] or bus, again I [was] the guy who lives the farthest. It was about an hour\’s commute one-way every day depending on traffic. It\’s not like a ten-minute school bus ride, it\’s an hour or an hour and a half away.
Then, in college, it\’s the same thing, I even went farther. The De La Salle University is a lot farther from my house, so I am used to travelling long distances since I was a kid. I love to walk also. Whenever my friends and I from high school would go out to the shopping centers, I was always the one walking ahead of everybody else. They noticed that, they told me that. I
didn\’t know that about myself at the time. I was excited to get from point A to point B.
AH: What about when the kids went out to play? Did they stay outdoors or did you play indoors part of the time?
BC: When I was in grade school, we played outdoors a lot, all the time. We played football, not soccer, and not like American football. It\’s more like baseball, where you have four bases. You kick the ball and you run through four bases, That\’s very popular in the Philippines. In the first grade to sixth grade, we played volleyball, basketball was very popular.
AH: So, you were athletic, you could compete …
BC: My mindset, yes, I\’m athletic, but my body says otherwise.
[Laughter.]
AH: I didn\’t even have the mindset. I never liked it. So, any other strong memories from grade school or …
BC: That was one, travelling long distances.
AH: As you were growing up in grade school or high school, sometimes there are cultural movements, events that are very important. When I grew up, it was the beats, so I wanted to be a cool beat. When I was in my twenties, it was the hippies, they had certain values that I ascribed to even though I personally was only a wanna-be.
BC: Right.
AH: I am wondering whether there were any important events, political events maybe in the Philippines or other kinds of movements …
BC: I was not very political. I still am not. Probably something that I haven\’t thought about myself. There were in the Philippines at the time — I started working when Ninoy Aquino was assassinated and Marcos was kicked out from the country. I wasn’t very active in that. I heard it on the news but was not really paying attention. I only became involved a little bit because I had an activist co-worker who printed T Shirts with Ninoy’s face on them, but my heart and my mind wasn’t in it. I wore it and I went to a parade once, but my heart and my mind weren’t in it, I was just there. I’m not very politically motivated. I am not what you would call an activist with any good cause, like nowadays we have to keep the earth green, stuff like that, I can understand what they are doing, but I am not very active in those areas.
AH: OK. Umm, so tell me about how you came to New York.
BC: It wasn’t planned. My brother was working as a consultant to an accounting firm in Manila that was contracted by Harper Anderson in Chicago, so he was travelling back and forth and had acquired so many miles on his airline mileage. It was going to expire and he asked me if I wanted to use it and I said, “yeah, sure.” Of course, I had to pay him the cost of plane ticket — whatever it was — when I started to make some money here. At the same time, I was already a programmer, I was already — how many years? — I was like nine years into my career and I never once thought of leaving for America while all those nine years, everybody was. Once you get into the computer profession, your thoughts are in the U.S., Canada, or Australia for more money.
AH: Are the jobs more interesting outside the Philippines or about the same?
BC: Whenever something new comes out in the U.S., we have it there also. So, we are not behind.
AH: So, it is not qualitative, just the better salary.
BC: Yes, it is just the better salary. But, of course, once I came here, it is different — you are more focused on your work. You work harder here because of the competition. Over there, we are very relaxed. The same may be true in other States in the U.S. compared to New York City.
[Laughter.]
Probably people are more relaxed as programmers in Ohio or somewhere else. But, yeah, that\’s how I got here.
AH: Ummm, let\’s move on to this interesting piece that you wrote and posted on your website, and it was about how you really love serendipity, how you like to go some point on the map that is new to you and just start hiking, and I found that an interesting contrast to some other things that I had talked to you about in the past. That was your enjoyment of using your computer skills to learn about a trail, to actually see the trail before you go on it. That\’s why I wanted to [talk] to you today, really. I thought that was so fascinating that hikers in the twenty-first century have been on the trail before they get there. How do these two different tendencies come together with your story as a hiker?
BC: The two tendencies being?
AH: One is serendipity, using chance, and the other one is that interesting preplanning by being able to look at the trail, find it on a google map, whatever else you do you might tell me, that you do before you go.
BC: Before going hiking, I would like to say something about how I got into that habit of looking at the trail on Google maps before setting out. When we came to America, my wife and I, we went to garage sales a lot. Back then there was no internet, well, there was, but it was not so widespread as it is now. We used to look at paper maps to find the neighborhoods. We looked at the classified ads about where the house sales were that had the stuff we were interested in. My wife bought bric-a-bracs and I mostly was interested in computer parts. I visualize before I go there that I am going to make a right, go several blocks, and then I am going to make a left. I try to visualize in my head, and I have found that probably helps a lot in not having so many U-turns or so many wrong turns, to visualize ahead of time the trail that I am going to take. I apply the same thing when we are now hiking. I want to look at the Google maps on the computer, and, if possible since people have already gone there before me, look at their photos and see what the trail is like going in one direction looks like this, so at least I have some kind of memory imprint in my head so that it is easier to recognize the trail before I even get there. It helps me a lot.
Now, in terms of serendipity — hum, I find it helpful to have a destination as opposed to no destination. Let\’s say, for example, I want to go to Minnewaska, I would not just go to Minnewaska and wander about. I would pick a certain spot there that I would want to see and map out the trail to get there. My wife and I, when we do this, we don\’t always reach the destination because we get distracted along the way because there are a lot of nice hikes. When it\’s time to go home, we go home, we save that for another day, the destination we made for today.
What I found out about when I picked up photography, is before when I had a destination, I would head straight for it. Now, photography made me, in a manner of speaking, stop to smell the flowers. look at every detail along the way to take pictures. That is what photography did for me. Same thing for shooting people in New York City. In New York City, when you go to work, you don\’t make eye contact with the people on the street, you even make an effort not to, that\’s what I have noticed. Now, with the photography I started taking pictures of people without them knowing. It felt really weird that I was looking at this guy\’s face, it was like I have been in New York all this time and this is the first time I am beginning to look into New Yorker\’s faces. They are all around, but I never looked at them. But, now I am kind of getting to know New Yorkers one person at a time. That, I guess, [is] where the serendipity comes in.
AH: … and the woods one tree at a time?
BC: Flowers, trees, bees, butterflies, backdrops against a nice lake.
AH: ummm, anything else to ask you here? [Long pause.] Your family, did they own their property and do any gardening or anything?
BC: No, that is one of the frustrations of my family, that we never owned property, we always rented an apartment.
AH: Oh, I meant more did they garden, did they use the land in any particular way?
BC: Not really, no. We were surrounded by concrete and pavement.
AH: Do you have any dreams for the future as a hiker? Special trips or …
BC: Yes, I have lots of dreams. I want to see the world. I want to hike trails in different parts of the world, if I can. I want to see Alaska. I want to see the Grand Canyon. I want to see Maine — Acadia, we have been there before, but I want to go back. Then, other parts of the world. I am not interested in Europe, like Germany or Switzerland. I think of that as congested. I am sure there are hiking trails there, but you are sure to meet people on the path, I would imagine, I have that idea. I liked northern Scotland, which we have been to, it’s very sparse, very spread out, very few people up there in the North. It’s very beautiful up there, that kind of thing.
AH: I was just curious, too, you saw trail on the web before you went there. You went there and you took pictures. Do you go to the original website where you found the trail some time and post a few of your own pictures?
BC: Umm.
AH: Generally not because you have your own website.
BC: It is really Google Maps that I go to, so people don\’t really write about their hikes there. It is just pictures that they took. It\’s not like I write back.
AH: So, social networking about the trails and all is not particularly important to you.
BC: No, it\’s more the photography aspect of it. I do go on social networking with other photographers, but mainly we talk about technique and not necessarily how long was the hike or how difficult it was.
AH: I think we have about done it, Billy. I will ask you one really wild question now.
BH: Sure.
AH: If I were to give you a little business card and you turned it over and it is blank on the other side, if you had to write how you see yourself as a hiker on the back of that business card, what might you write?
BC: Umm. I think that stopping to smell the flowers would be my objective, in a figurative manner of speaking. To have a good time seeing. You know they have a saying that getting there is half the fun. For me getting there is more than half the fun. I am not really hell bent on getting there, I am more interested in the trail that leads me there. If I put a business card a small number of words, I cannot think of anything better than to stop and smell the flowers.
AH: Stop and smell flowers that\’s a good summary — and the trip is more important than the destination. That would fit on a business card.
[Laughter.]
Do you think we have found an accurate picture of you today? Is there anything else that you would like to add?
BC: I think so. Just trying to think if I consider myself a hiker, because I have friends who are real hikers. I have the gear.
AH: [Lots of laughter.]
BC: Boots and …
AH: Sartorially, you are a real hiker!
BC: I don’t really know what these other guys do that consider themselves real, heavy duty hikers.
AH: Right, everyone defines that differently, you know.
BC: Yes, I suppose. I don\’t do mountain climbs. If I am riding my bike and if the hill is too steep, I\’ll walk my bike.
AH: That\’s good. OK, I\’ll take a minute and close these recorders down.
BC: I hope this was something that might help your work. Enjoyed it.
AH: Thank you, I am very, very grateful.