The man I was going to visit was my friend Noah Jackson,
a compadre from my days of working in California as an outdoor educator. Noah
was the sterling example of a workhorse on our staff. His roots in New Hampshire
and Maine have imbued him with a sturdy dose of the Puritan work ethic. On
more than one occasion, he inspired us all by continuing to do his job even
when sick and laryngitic. Noah takes his moral sense of duty and ecological
responsibility to new lengths. He works incredibly hard, putting lazier naturalists
on my staff to shame. Noah was our collective exemplar of generosity and creativity.
He had a blossoming romance with another staffer, Kara, at the same time that
I was falling for another, Scarlett. I remember, the four of us went to Death
Valley one weekend, and had a terrific adventure among the arid wastes, the
canyons, Badwater, and the empty streambeds. We dipped our arms into a hypersaline
pool in the Devil’s Golf Course, and came away with crystals of salt studded
from fingertips to elbows. Another weekend, we drove to Big Sur. I had been
training for months to run the Big Sur Marathon, a tortuous and beautiful
26-mile run along California’s Route 1. Noah joined me with a few days notice,
signed up for the race when we arrived, and ended up winning his age category
for the entire race! He beat my arduously-trained-for time by a good 45 minutes.
This is not your average human being. This is Superman.
There was a mild thunderstorm in Manila when I stepped
out of the airport. Noah was there, precisely where he said he would be. We
walked out of the airport parking lot in the drizzle, and hailed a cab. The
ride was lengthy due to intense traffic on Roxas Boulevard, the main road
north along Manila Bay.
We arrived at the Pension Natividad, a great lodging
that would become my home away from home in Manila. The Pension is situated
a block away from the Bay, in the shadow of an immense high rise, the Diamond
Hotel. On the other side is a raucous karaoke bar. It is situated on the boundary
between the neighborhoods of Ermita and Malate, both relatively well off and
directed towards tourism and merchandise. Out in front of its cement wall,
the Pension advertises “Clean Guest Rooms for Individuals, Married Couples,
and Families.” It is made of concrete and stucco, with bars over the windows.
It was at the Pension that I was first shown what a Catholic culture prevails
in the Philippines. Tile portraits of Jesus and the Virgin Mary beamed benevolently
at Pension guests. Each of the religious figures were fitted with a Sacred
Heart which was startlingly anatomically accurate, and spouting flame like
a Zippo, to boot.
The damp Philippine air penetrates most buildings,
as they lack the “climate control” that pervades Western architecture. The
rain imbued everything with a wet smell, including the concrete walls of our
room. Still, it was a room, and not Seat 13C.
Upon arrival, I showered and reclaimed my sense of
hygiene. I was in a zone between jet lag and exhilaration at being in a new
country, and was ready to go out and experience something. Noah recommended that out first stop be the
Hobbit House, a bar not far from our lodging. We passed another Peace Corps
Volunteer in the lobby of the Pension, and Noah introduced us. When he mentioned
that we were on our way to the Hobbit House, a look of intense amusement came
over the woman’s face. Noah refused to explain, telling me that I would understand
soon enough. I realized the source of her bemusement as soon as we ducked
into the bar: the Hobbit House is staffed entirely by dwarves and midgets.
I am no Wilt Chamberlain, and I measure a modest 6 feet in height. As such,
it was surreal to enter a place where everyone else was less than four feet
tall. The set-up for a bar like this seems incredibly un-P.C. I’m sure it
would never fly in the United States, but I guess it works for what it is
here in the seedy capital of the Philippines. We ordered San Miguel, the Filipino
version of Budweiser. Not everyone was a midget; a talented band of ordinary-sized
Filipino men was playing covers of American pop tunes. An attractive Filipina
ascended to the stage and sang “Torn” in perfect imitation while gyrating
her bare stomach and showing off the top several inches of her thong underwear.
Though we were enjoying the (ahem) unique vibe offered by the Hobbit House,
it was too loud to talk. Since Noah and I had been years without seeing each
other in person, we decided that catching up was going to take priority over
bopping with the little people.
Outside, the sewage smell was rank and fetid and distinctly
third world. We wandered through alleys, and along a maze of dripping streets,
taking shelter where possible under awnings. Many of them were so low that
I was forced to duck, lest I stay dry only at the expense of knocking myself
cold. We searched out another place, helped along by Noah asking directions
in Tagalog, and the restaurant delivery boys looking amused to see a white
man talking their language. It turns out that Noah speaks Kinaraya, the dialect
of the central Phillipine island group known as the Visayas. He was using
his rural accent here in the height of Philippine urbanity. To these locals,
it must have seemed comical. A comparable situation might be found as New
Yorkers deal with a Japanese man asking
for directions in a pronounced Creole drawl.
The Café Adriatico: We found a small table by a rain-streaked
window overlooking the street. When our beers came, the waiter brandished
a small towel and wiped clean the lip of the bottles. This was new to me:
why would he do that? Noah explained that in the Philippines, a glass bottle
is a commodity not to be wasted. Each bottle would be reused again and again.
Indeed, I inspected the bottle and found two parallel rings of scratches around
the outsides, and a faint rim of rust around the lip, where liquid beer had
oxidized the metal bottle-cap. This rust was the offensive material wiped
off by the waiter’s towel.
Noah conducted a ranging monologue about his life in
the Philippines, his village, his girlfriend, his work life. I was listening
and drinking beer, gazing out the second story window into the rain, lit by
a string of bulbs burning above Adriatico Street. We stayed up late into the
night, sitting and talking at that table.
I had not seen Noah in over two years, and though I
had kept in touch with him by means of e-mail and writing letters, there was
one aspect of his physical presence that I had forgotten. I refer to his laugh,
which is a braying guffaw. In fact, it stretches the limits of the definition,
to merely refer to his noise as laughter. Noah expresses mirth with a gasping
honk, like an asthmatic donkey. It had not been my fortune to hear this laugh
for 2 years, and judging from the reactions of the other patrons in the restaurant,
no one there had ever heard anything like this before. Heads turned. I sipped
some more from my bottle of beer, smiling at the scene.
Back to pension, sleep on dampish sheets in a dampish
room. I woke up early in spite of only 3 hours sleep and whatever jet lag
I was harboring. As Noah slept in, I engaged myself with a novel and by attempting
to bird-watch from the barred window of the room. There was mystery
out there in the morning Manila air, I thought. As I listened to sounds, I
hypothesized what strange feathered creature might be making them.
We went jogging that first morning. If you care for
your lungs, do not attempt to go for a run on your first morning in Manila.
We loped across town, breathing gross air, dodging holes in sidewalks, and
in places where there weren’t any sidewalks, we shared the street with jeepneys.
A jeepney is a vehicle unique to the Philippines. Mechanically,
they are a cross between a bus and a jeep, but then decorated in hallucinogenic
garishness. Images and slogans are plastered over every available surface,
including the windshield. They proclaim the driver’s sexual prowess
to the same significant extent that they exhort God to bless their trip. Each
jeepney has a name, emblazoned in letters so extravagantly ornamented that
they strain legibility. As we ran, I read the jeepneys: “Gift of God,” “Scorpio
Boy,” “Virgin Snow,” “Fine Lover,” “May God Grant Us A Safe Journey.” Images
of astrological signs, the Virgin Mary, and plagiarized commercial logos predominated,
all rendered in the most eye-popping glossy colors known to science.
There were numerous big hotels in the area, located
there for the good view west over Manila Bay. As I ran, I wanted to look in
a thousand directions at once: at the street-side spectacle around me, at
the skyscrapers overhead, the whirring colors of the umpteen jeepneys, and
even occasionally at the pocked street itself, so as to avoid tripping.
We jogged through the mile-long Rizal Park, where practioners
of tai chi and homeless men and women could be seen in equal measure.
At the end of the park, a large square pool featured a model of the archipelago.
Little chunky islands like paiper-maché demonstrated the diverse sizes and
shapes of the 7107 bits of land that are designated as the Filipino nation.
My love of maps was excited by this encounter with an acre-sized topography.
I stopped my run and studied it for a few minutes. Large cone-like volcanoes
rose from several of the islands, painted as if they were snowcapped, which
they are certainly not. The islands of Luzon (where Manila is located) and
Mindanao are the largest landmasses by a wide margin. Together, they comprise
over 65% of the land area. A thousand of the smallest islands do not measure
even one square kilometer; a further 2500 even lack names!
When we got back to the Pension, I was raging hungry,
and the food was slow to arrive. I had several cups of coffee and a pile of
fruit. The mangos and bananas came with a nice local yogurt.
This was to be our day of chores in Manila before venturing
out the following morning to Noah’s “site.” For readers not familiar with
Peace Corps, each volunteer is assigned for a two-year assignment at a particular
job, in a particular town. The combination of address and job description
is referred to as the volunteer’s site. After breakfast, Noah and I went to
the Peace Corps offices on Roxas Boulevard. I checked my e-mail, and sent
out notification to friends and relatives of my status. I mentioned the Hobbit
House. I also amused myself by turning down an electronic party invitation
with the unusual excuse that I was in Southeast Asia, sorry, can’t make it.
We arranged a flight for the next day.
The next task was to pick up Noah’s camera lenses,
which had been dropped off for a cleaning several weeks previously. For this, we had to travel to a different part
of Manila, the district of Cubao. A train ride was necessary to get to Cubao,
some miles from the waterfront.
The presence of terrorist cells in the Philippines
have led to bag checks as a fact of life whenever entering a shopping mall,
bank, or system of transport. I unpacked my bag to guards’ observation hundreds
of times in the next month, resenting it every time. Of course, the events
of September 11th have softened my resistance to security precautions.
This was back in June and July, before the attacks in the US, but after the
beheading of an American tourist on the Philippine island of Palawan.
In Cubao, we navigated through a maze of shopping malls
inside and out, and found that Noah’s camera lenses were not yet cleaned.
I was frustrated with the lack of good customer service, not realizing that
the behaviors that I deem “good service” to my American view are not necessarily
the same qualities that Filipinos look for in their commercial establishments.
Noah handled the poor service with remarkable restraint and aplomb. I felt
like hitting the snotty brat who was working behind the counter. Noah negotiated
a better deal, and then we adjourned for lunch.
We dined with a fascinating character. Noah knew of
this odd place, and led the way past a stagnant lake with large lumpy sculptures
of Disney characters rising in the middle. (It is worth noting that all of
the water around Manila is hopelessly polluted. Eight rivers run through the
city, and Noah informed me grimly that all eight were classified as “biologically
dead.”) Past the lake we came to another enormous shopping mall. I had not
expected malls and pop commerce itself to be such a prominent part of life
in urban regions of the Philippines, but malls proved to be the mainstay of
my experiences while in Manila.
This was a half empty mall, where the odd restaurant
was located. The Cod Building, as it was called, was partially occupied by
active retail, but we had to hike up through several empty floors of space
before finding the EartHaven café. Now if I was surprised to find a culture
of materialism and shopping in Manila, then I was truly floored to find an
organic café in the midst of it. Noah knew the owner, Edgard, and he introduced
us. We all sat down at a rustic table and had a delicious lunch of pasta and
lemongrass tea and little wheat-germ candy bars. Edgard was intense and opinionated.
Talking to him, I got the send that he had been forced to explain his beliefs
and politics many times before, and he rose to the task with a practiced air
and (it seemed to me) a standard and well-worn series of phrases.
Some might think that an “environmentalist Filipino”
would be an oxymoronic description, but Edgard fit the bill. Besides running
this strange little haven of hippie foodstuffs in Manila, he also owned and
ran a “Geo Farm” in the Sierra Madre of north Luzon. His environmental beliefs
meshed with my own, but he also had a lot of the so-called New Age influencing
his mindset. He mentioned auras, and how he could see them. He waved his hand
at the area around my head, as if to indicate “like this one here.”
Digesting my lunch was just the opportunity that latent jet lag had been
awaiting. It overwhelmed me. Back at the Pension, I fell asleep for several
hours, and only woke because we had to go run some more time-essential chores.
I needed caffeine.
We got it at, of all places, a Starbucks franchise,
one of ten in Metro Manila. It was just like an American Starbucks,
decorated in that well-designed but canned style that may be found so many
places in DC and in America. There were differences: the security guard at
the door, searching my bag for bombs, the prices in pesos, and the clientele:
no Dupont Circle yuppies here! I ordered in English, but all the conversation
around us was in Tagalog. Noah lamented his ability to speak well in the national
dialect, and assured me that he would be in command linguistically to a greater
degree when we got to Panay the next day.
Noah’s friend Carmela and her sister Sophia met us at the coffeehouse.
They were cute and animated to me in a phenomenon unique to Asian women and
puppies: the smaller they are, the cuter they appear to me, and the more energy
they seem to possess.
We talked mostly about disgusting foods, a subject
that evidently fascinated us all. They detailed some Filipino dishes for me:
dinuguan or “chocolate meat,” for instance, a dish of cooked offal
and blood, and bulalo, a sort of kneecap soup. Most repulsive was balut,
an embryonic duck egg, cooked just before it is ready to hatch! Balut
adventurers from the Western world (Noah included) can distinguish the beak,
feathers, and legs of the developed birds as they crunch them down. I decided
then and there not to try it, though in most cases I pride myself on the breadth
of foods I consume. I have sampled widely among the species, but I’ll leave
balut to the macho Filipino men who believe that it jacks up their
virility better than Viagra or Spanish Fly.
We also discussed Noah’s remarkable propensity for
hurting himself. He listed off a terrific series of ailments that have befallen
him in this country, and Carmela, Sophia, and I listened in awe. Noah was
attacked by a colony of stinging ants while dangling on a rope 40 feet above
ground in the rainforest. He writhed in pain on his tether, unable to descend,
unable to escape. Another time, he groped
his way to an outhouse in the midnight darkness, only to put his hand directly
atop a scorpion. A month previously, Noah had been guiding a photographer
from National Geographic through the rainforest in search of hornbills. A
branch smacked Noah in the face, carrying with it a small leech. Hours later,
they noticed that the leech had attached itself to Noah’s eyeball. He told
us, “As he was pulling it off, there was a tremendous pressure. I wasn’t
sure which was going to go first, the leech, or my eye!” Then he got
roundworms. Then he fell down a cliff. Then he was in a motorcycle sidecar
when the motorcycle flipped over and crashed. All these stories he told in
a jocular way, as if it was all happening to someone else in a movie. He grew
somber when he related a final tale, of how he became trapped underwater when
a bamboo bridge collapsed on top of him. Pinned by its lattice structure,
he nearly drowned, and escaped just as he was on the verge of blacking out.
He has not told his mother about that one, he told us, which we knew to mean
that it really shook him up, and counted as being truly dangerous.
We four went to dinner at a restaurant called Shwarma, which served Indian
food. Shwarma was smarmy. We were seated in their lone upstairs room, with
a wide low table surrounded by flat cushions. A stray cat had skinnied through
a broken windowpane and had deposited a stringy turd on one of the cushions.
To my utter shock, the waitress left it there after I pointed it out to her.
We ate there anyways; I was hungry. I had eggplant dip and pita bread, which
was tasty, though I worried about its level of contaminants.
Flight
to Panay, to Kalibo
The next morning, we flew from Ninoy Aquino International
Airport’s domestic terminal south to Panay. Our flight would take us into
the town of Kalibo. We passed over the Sibuyan Sea, which got visibly more
blue the further we flew away from Manila. I strained to see the plume of
smoke from erupting Mount X. The Philippine archipelago has a pocky topography
resulting from an intense volcanic and seismic history. There are 37 known
volcanoes in the Philippines, but only this one had been erupting in the past
couple of days. I couldn’t see it: too much cloud cover over the highlands.
Low islands were more easily seen, fringed in yellow sand and coral reefs.
Our destination, the island of Panay, was also clear.
As we made the approach to the Kalibo runway, I was pleased to see a different
countenance to this island, as compared to the rank urbanity we had just left.
There were sinuous rivers full of V-shaped fish traps. Amid clearings in the
palm forest, I glimpsed rice paddies gleaming with reflected sky.
Panay is shaped like a cat head, point chin in the
south, and point ears sticking out in the north. We were landing on one of
the pointy ears – the Northwest Panay peninsula. The airport in Kalibo was
on one side, and Noah’s site, Pandan, was on the other side of the peninsula.
We took a trike ride from the airport to Kalibo proper.
A trike is a motorcycle with a tall, roofed sidecar welded to it. They have
no seatbelts, no doors, and no cushions on the seats. Decorated in a style
indicating that they would be jeepneys if they could, these trikes routinely
carried up to eight people. They would be crammed into the sidecar and riding
on the motorcycle behind the driver, up to three deep.
Like any third-world den of squalor, Kalibo had a petrol
fume/human excrement stink to it. The town was drier than Manila, but with
much more exhaust and dirt in the air. I was glad when Noah arranged a ride
on top of transport bus to Pandan, his village. Riding on top of that vehicle
was an experience I will never forget. At first, I was thrilled by the air,
the views of paddies, and bamboo and palms. Farmers were threshing rice by
hand, drying rice on the street, planting new rice behind a plow pulled by
a carabou, the ox of the Philippines. As we rode, I gripped tie-lines that
held in place a half-ton of luggage and supplies. These sacks and boxes were
lashed to the roof of the bus, and Noah and I and five other men were clinging
on top of it all. Soon a few drops of rain began to fall, and the temperature
cooled noticeably. There was a gray
wall of clouds ahead of us, and it looked like thunderstorms to me. Noah shouted
something to me that I couldn’t quite make out: it sounded like he said “typhoon.”
The raindrops increased infrequency and decreased in temperature. I put on
a pair of sunglasses to protect eyes, in spite of my giddy desire to see as
much as possible.
Two days before I had been back in America, packing
up my classroom, getting coffee with my girlfriend, and now I was here. Surreal,
I thought, gripping the wet guy-lines, atop a bus, hurtling down a mud road
on a minor island in the Philippines, rain lashing my face. We rigged up a
tarp to protect us from the cold rain, and in the lee of its shelter, we made
it comfortably to Pandan.
Dismounting from the bus, we walk a few steps into
the BioCon office. This is the organization that Noah works for. They have
as their goals the preservation of the forested interior of the northwest
Panay peninsula, and in particular, saving the two endangered species of hornbills
that live there. Hornbills are large rainforest birds, similar in appearance
to toucans. They are bulky, noisy fruit-eaters, and they have been hunted
close to extinction by those who covet their feathers and meat.
Four other
Americans live in Pandan, working for BioCon. Two are PCVs like Noah, Jesse
and Tasha. The other two are Noah’s boss and his wife, Eric and Jill, both
on the verge of leaving the Philippines. They are due to move out in less
than a week. When they leave, Noah will move into their house. In the meantime,
he tells me, we will stay with his host family in a small village ten miles
further up the coast. I also meet Fel, Noah’s counterpart in the organization,
a native of Panay well versed in conservation theory.
We all go to lunch at an open-air café and store. I
order soup with a fish head floating in it. My own Peace Corps experiences
interest them, and we talk about Mongolia. There are flies everywhere, landing
on my food, on my skin, on the table and walls. As we eat, a fierce downpour
begins. We are protected by a roof, but the rain seems to drive all the mosquitoes
inside too, joining the flies. I alternate between eating and swatting at
them. I’m a little bit worried about malaria, because I am not taking any
preventative medicine. I elected not to, since Noah told me that malaria wasn’t
present in this part of the island, and that he himself chooses not to take
the Peace Corps-issued prophylaxis. Noah in fact takes a cavalier approach
to disease and sanitation. I blanched when went to the back of the café to
wash hands and urinate in their little pit toilet: everything was slimy, dark,
and to my American eyes, festering with germs.
After the meal, the rain has stopped, though the main
street in Pandan is flooded by six inches of water. Noah again demonstrates
his comfort with low levels of sanitation by wading on through. I wait for
him to fetch the Jeep and come back to get me. The Jeep is property of the
BioCon organization, but Noah uses it for errands. It is not however, called
a “Jeep.” I suppose this is to distinguish it from the jeepneys, but they
call this one the “Owner-type.” We travel north in the Owner-type on the main
road. It is dirt. Our destination is Noah’s host family, in the small village
of Cubay. Everywhere, there are chickens and dogs. School has just let out
for the afternoon, and uniformed children are walking home in haphazard phalanxes
of black and white. As he drives (taboo to Peace Corps), Noah demonstrates
Filipino reliance on horns, beeping almost constantly, emitting a sort of
early warning sonar, especially when rounding sharp curves. Along the way,
Noah suddenly brakes and tells me, “That’s my dog.” A medium-sized mutt with
a plumed tail spots the familiar red Owner-type, and runs towards us. He leaps
up into Noah’s lap. This is Pawikan, named the Kinaraya word for sea-turtle.
We drive Pawikan up to Cubay with us.
In Cubay, I meet Lolo and Lola, Noah’s host family.
They are old, gray but stringy and compact. They feel like grandparents to
me. Lola fixes up a nice meal, bananas and fish. Rice is the staple of the
Philippine diet, as it is for much of the Orient. I’m not used to consuming
so much of it, though, and this meal is the first of what will be way too
much. After dinner, Noah and I take a walk to the beach. It’s about thirty
meters from Lolo and Lola’s house. Standing on the shore, surrounded by trees
and quiet, seashells underfoot, I feel like I am finally here. This is what
I had imagined the Philippines would be like: nature, forest, sea, peace.
I inhale with contentment. We walk to the nearby Bulanao river, another quarter-mile
distant. En route, we run into a friendly drunk who wants to drink tuba
(fermented coconut juice) with us, though we defer. We cross the Bulanao River
and Noah tells me how the current runs both ways, depending on the tides.
This is pure poetry, it seems to me: a river that runs both ways! What a metaphor
for the life of a Peace Corps Volunteer.
Back at Lolo and Lola’s house, I am ready for sleep.
The adjustment to my circadian rhythms is still in flux. Again, I wake up
early, and from my bed, I can look out the window at the tropical sunrise.
Bats and birds are dark in the lightening sky. I look out from my pillow onto
the Jungle. Mango, papaya, banana, coconut trees grow in every direction.
The papaya, in particular, impress me: they grow wild like weeds.
Breakfast follows, more fine Mindanao coffee. After
we have eaten, we walk back to Bulanao for the hornbill feeding. Another BioCon
coworker, Nestor, lives in Bulanao, the village adjacent to Cubay, even smaller
than its neighbor. Nestor maintains several captive birds in a set of cages
there. We join him and Fel there, and I take photos of the birds.
There are two species of hornbills that are of particular concern to the
staff of BioCon. Both have long, scimitar-like beaks, decorated on top with
a vertical ridge that meshes with the skull. The first, and less endangered
species, is a medium-sized hornbill, decorated in a decisive pattern of contrasting
black and white. This is the tarictic hornbill, Penelopedes panini.
About 500 pairs of them remain in the wild.
The other is a massive bird, much more gaudy in appearance
due to a bright red bill and canary-yellow facial skin, and an orange neck.
This is the Visayan writhe-billed hornbill, Aceros waldeni,
but no one calls them by that name. The native Kinaraya term is easier to
say: dulungan. Dulungans are extremely imperiled: only 60 pairs remain
in the wild. When I say “the wild,” I mean “ the world”: they only live on
this one island, and they are going fast.
There were five new tarictics held captive in the cages
that morning. Nestor and Fel told us how the birds had been confiscated by
the police in a raid, elsewhere on the island earlier in the week. The police
had turned them over to BioCon for safe-keeping. Also present were a changeable
hawk (what does it change into?) and a spotted dove, (elegant and timid).
On our way back from the bird cages, through the two
tiny villages, we were obligated by the mores of Filipino culture to do a
lot of visiting in peoples’ houses. This aspect of our day, these polite social
calls reminded me of Mongolia. Actually, it occurred to me that in spite of
the humidity, fruit, ocean and jungle, there was a great deal that reminded
me of my own Peace Corps experiences in Mongolia. The sketchy airplanes, the
bland food, the dark skin and short stature of the people, the foreign tongue,
the prominence given to chintzy decorations in households, the smell of diesel
and woodsmoke, the overloaded vehicles lumbering down the ad hoc dirt road.
There was a sweet rural simplicity to the several days
that I spent in Cubay. There wasn’t anything loud or offensive, no need for
me to feel anything other than contentment at slipping so easily into small-town
life on an island far from home. Lolo and Lola accepted me into their house,
and I felt comfortable there in almost every respect. We ate bananas off the
trees in their yard: short fat bananas that smelled like oranges, with fragrant
meaty flesh inside. For meals, Noah and I would alternate cooking with Lola,
and we sat down together at a formal meal, eating with our spoons only, slurping
fish and fruits and onion and rice. I slept with open windows, learning day
by day to accept the mosquitoes. I enjoyed the night air, aware that I was
sharing it with ten-pound bats and all manner of winged insects.
There were two boys in the neighborhood who had befriended
Noah, Rene and Rumnick. They were welcome company on our sorties in the forest
and along the beach. Neither spoke English, but evidently they were interested
enough in us to persist in trying to explain their home and show us new oddities
of Panay nature.
One day they showed me how to find hermit crabs in
the forest. On a walk through a teak plantation, Rene held up a crab, a little
bundle of claws and antennae, folded up inside a swirled snail-shell. The
crabs fascinated me: I had not been able to see them at all until Rene and
Rumnick pointed them out. Suddenly I became aware that at the base of almost
every tree there were several crabs clustered in their candy-striped shells.
On another afternoon, I woke from a nap to see Rene
in the tree outside my second-story window. He was gathering tart Indian mangos.
When he picked one, he put it in a net with a long handle. I peered down,
and at the other end of the handle was Rumnick, grinning up at me. Inspired,
I climbed out on the roof and reached out to grab a few fruits myself. They
brought their harvest upstairs with a can of crystal salt. The technique to
eating the Indian mango was to press chunks of salt into its green interior,
and then suck on the juice. The flesh of these mangos was tougher than their
yellow cousins, and far more bitter. The salt mollified the bitterness, but
it was the experience of sitting on the roof with these two kids that was
truly sweet.
Rene had a puppy with big teal eyes. It was a fat little
dog, very friendly and curious. It was cute enough that Lolo and Lola had
allowed it the run of their house. Noah had been asked to name the dog, and
he chose the same Palutan, the Tagalog word for the salted meat snacks that
are served with alcoholic beverages. Rene went with the name out of deference
to Noah, but later told him that originally, palutan snacks often are
salted dog meat.
One day, nothing much was happening, and Lolo suggested
that I go for a ride on his carabou. The carabou is the beast of burden in
the Philippine islands. It is an Asian ox, with long horns and a dripping
nose. I had not seen anyone else riding a carabou, though Lolo assured me
that it was an acceptable use of the animal. He grabbed a rice sack and we
walked out to his mahogany grove. The carabou was tethered there, chewing
a wad of vegetation. I stood by with my camera as Lolo washed the carabou
in a stream, splashing it and talking softly to it. Once mounted, I realized
how uncommon it actually was for a person to ride a carabou – essentially,
it’s riding a cow, which would earn you a stare in America. Add to that the
fact that I was already an object of curiosity as a white man in a brown village,
and you can imagine how many heads turned as I directed the animal down the
dirt road. We soon had a sizeable entourage of laughing children, and I began
to feel a bit ridiculous. The carabou is not a tall animal; my feet were only
a few inches from dragging in the dirt.
After dismounting, mud clung to my legs. I wondered
whether some choice parasites had made the jump from cow to rider. Noah and
I went to the beach to take a swim, and the crowd of kids followed. We all
played in the waves, careful to avoid the large sharp chunks of coral that
littered the floor of the ocean. The kids were tough, and threw themselves
headlong into the waves and into the beach-sand to amuse us. We collected
some seashells, and swam down the beach to the river that runs both ways,
and swam there too. Pawikan was nervous about swimming in the ocean, but he
readily waded in to dog-paddle once we got to the river.
After our carabou adventure, Lolo took me to meet his
son who lived across the street. I was shocked to see the interior of his
son’s house: it was really well decorated, clean, well lit, and almost Western
looking. I was surprised that a person would live so much better than his
parents: it seemed odd to me. His son spoke English well, and we had a nice
talk as I was thinking how disproportionately more comfortably he lived.
Another day, we took a hike in search of hornbills.
We picked up Jesse the Peace Corps Volunteer, Bimbot the local veterinarian,
and Pinoy the local hunter. Together, the five of us went to Malumpati, a
small settlement at the end of the road weel inland. Malumpati is something
of a spa, due to its river of turquoise water. This was cold water, flowing
from caves hidden deep in the shade of the rainforest. It was a glacial blue,
like paint, unreal in a setting so dominated by green. When I asked why the
water was this teal color, I was told it had minerals dissolved in it.
Pinoy led us off into the rainforest on a thin path.
We hiked past an enormous hairy spider and a brown vine snake that was thin
as a string but as long as my arm. We waded across tributary streams, all
“normal” water color, which is to say, clear. Eventually we crossed over the
river on a bridge of bamboo. A trio of children in shorts was squatting on
the bridge, spear-fishing for suckers.
The forest was rich in animal life. Every rotting log
seemed home to two or three giant millipedes, fully seven inches in length.
Butterflies cavorted in the open, sunny areas. We saw birds and rodents and
large insects. Turning over a leaf, I found the underside studded in a convocation
of disclike snails. There were crimson forest-crabs on the rock outcrops,
scuttling into the pocked limestone like little moving flowers. On more exposed
areas of rock, we found rubbery little mollusks, unlike any animal I have
ever seen. Later, I found that they were locally known as “naked snails.”
Pinoy picked up a nut that had been chewed on. He told us that a monkey had
done it.
The object of our hike was to check on a known tarictic
hornbill nest hole. These birds have a unique was of making a home and raising
their young. First, they select an appropriately-sized hole in a tree. The
hole should have a relatively small exterior entrance, but be cavernous inside.
Once they find one, the mated female goes inside, and she seals herself in.
Building a wall of mud and feces, she narrows the outside hole to a small
slit. The male remains outside, where he must gather enough food to feed himself,
his wife, and his child. Food is passed beak-tip to beak-tip through the tiny
access hole, and the same hole is used when the female defecates: she shoots
her waste out in pulses, and teaches the hatched baby to do the same.
The nest hole that we were checking on today was unusual:
it was located only two meters off the ground. Usually the birds nest much
higher up, far from easy access to those who would conserve them. Unfortunately,
while it was a simple matter to check on the birds, it would also be a simple
matter for predators to get to the nest. On a previous check-up, Noah and
Bimbot had found scratches from the claws of a monitor lizard leading up to
the hole. They had installed a protective sheath of metal around the tree
trunk, in the hopes that the carnivorous lizard would not be able to climb
its slick surface.
When we got to the tree after two hours of hiking,
we had passed stands of bamboo as thick as my leg, small scraggly fields of
corn growing on steep hillsides, and copses of coconut palms, with a sort
of stepladder hacked into their trunks. Eventually, all these symptoms of
human influence had grown less frequent, and we entered the virgin forest.
The trees here were far larger, and more varied. No coconut, but gnarled rainforest
giants like teak and XXXXXXXXX, with drippy trunks like melted candles. Some
of the roots formed huge curtainlike buttresses. Both Noah and Jesse wore
smiles. The surrounding jungle with its cavalcade of multiform green was their
reason for being here, isolated from their own culture, for two years. “This
is it,” Jesse told me. “This is the real forest.” Hornbill country.
We found the nest hole, and it was empty. The mood
changed. Concern clouded the faces of my companions. Noah, Bimbot, and the
hunter all played detective, trying to puzzle out whether the birds had fledged
naturally, or been eaten by the monitor lizard, or been poached. They inspected
the grubs inside the hole, grubs eating the detritus left behind by the birds.
Based on the size of the grubs, they were able to make a guess about how long
the nest had been abandoned: any grubs present during the hornbills’ residency
would have been consumed as an in-house snack. There were more claw-marks
from the lizard, though it was difficult to say whether it had made it past
the metal collar. Pinoy the hunter climbed the tree, to search topside for
clues. He found a second entrance the nest hole. Ultimately, we gave up, had
a snack, and hiked back down to Malumpati.
The way back, being downhill, was slippery and tough
to negotiate. The three Americans all stumbled and fell several times. Each
time I fell, more dirt and rotten leaves stuck to my sweaty skin. A swim in
the blue Malumpati water was definitely next on my To Do list.
The water was cool and refreshing. It had quite a current,
too, and I had to swim constantly in order to avoid being swept downstream.
Noah and Jesse joined me in the water, but the Filipino men did not. We ate
a lunch that was disproportionately satisfying to its apparent simplicity:
canned tuna and crackers, and some bananas pulled off a nearby tree.
One evening, Noah told me that he had met up with a friend of his on the
road. His friend, named Boy, had been host to a party the previous evening,
and was fortuitous enough to have a gaggle of San Miguels left in his “ref”
(read: “refrigerator”). Boy had invited Noah and I over to help him polish
off the stock of bottles, and have some dinner as well. We took the Ownertype,
the little red jeep that Noah’s organization was letting him use. It felt
a little bit decadent to be driving to dinner, given the setting. Most of
the people on Pandan would never be able to afford such an extravagance. It
also seemed to be a bit at odds with the Peace Corps profile. When I was serving
in the Peace Corps in Mongolia, we weren’t even allowed to touch a motorcycle.
Boy lives in Libertad, a town north on the coast of
Panay. It represented the furthest north that I ventured up that side of the
island. We passed the Libertad National Vocational School, where Noah and
I had been coordinating a pen-pal exchange between my students and the local
kids. Boy welcomed us in a manner both complimentary and relaxed. We left
our shoes at the door and popped the caps off the first of many brown bottles
of San Miguel.
Boy’s wife Natty was at the dining table with two friends,
preparing food. Boy and Noah and I sat in the living room, talking business
and nature and culture. Before long, a comfortable buzz warmed the evening
and the living room scene.
We snacked on palutan: those salty snacks that
are traditionally served to men when they are drinking. The palutan
for the evening were: skewered pork strips and a broiled tropical fish, white
with maroon edges to its scales. This fish was beautiful: it could easily
have been the centerpiece of an American aquarium. (It probably would have
been better there too: I found it entirely too bony to be palatable.) The
porky kabobs, on the other hand, were just fine. I had renounced my vegetarianism
for this trip, and this was why. Those skewers reminded me just how sublime
carnivory can be.
Boy was very articulate despite his lack of teeth,
and he had a ready laugh for us, as well as a storehouse of knowledge on a
variety of topics. We talked about herbal medicine and mining and Filipino
history. Dinner remains a bit of a blur to me, though some more fish and a
lot of rice were featured, and one of the shredded pickled “salads” that are
so pervasive in Asia.
On the ride back south, in the blackness of the coastal
road, the stars were fierce overhead. The headlights picked out a fresh-water
turtle crossing the road, and we stopped to examine it. Noah said it was the
first one he had ever seen in the Philippines. Sea turtles up to a meter in
length were relatively plentiful, but little sliders like this one are a rarity.
In fact, Noah’s dog is named the Kinaraya name for “sea turtle,” Pawikan.
The days in Cubay passed in a relaxed routine of eating,
cooking, swimming, sleeping, mosquitoes, fruit, and hikes. I lived the small
details like everyone else. Standing in the kitchen making coffee, I was bitten
by an ant, right between my toes. When the patter of rain began to sound on
the roof, I ran outside to rescue my drying laundry off the line; the rest
of the village was doing the same.
After the better part of a week in Cubay, the day came
when Noah’s boss Eric was leaving. Noah had volunteered to drive Eric to the
airport, and would then return to move into the vacated house on the beach
in Pandnan. We picked Eric and Jill and Fel up, and then drove to Caticlan,
a village on the other side of the island. Fel was fawning in the Jeep, a
bit of a sycophant towards Eric. Caticlan has an airport because it is the
gateway to the tourist island of Borocay. This “jump off point” for Borocay
had a very different flavor than the backwaters of Cubay and Pandan: there
were advertising billboards and restaurants serving German beer, and in general,
a greater feeling of affluence based on tourists spending money as they passed
through. We were passed by hordes of rich Koreans, sunglasses and nailpolish
and strappy sandals. Eric and Jill treated us to a glass of fresh mango juice,
we say goodbye, they get on the plane, they fly away.
Because Noah and I were broke, we had been planning
on taking a jaunt across the water to Borocay. We had need of the ATM and
e-mail resources that were only available there. However, we were forced to
ditch our plan to go to Borocay because Fel had to go to the bank, and he
was being difficult. He and Noah had a tense discussion that bordered on a
spat. They were different people with different agendas, and Noah was getting
very frustrated. We stopped to get a snack, and Fel waited in the car. Noah
vented his frustration to me in a strained whisper while we walked a short
distance to the store. He was beet-red as he told me, “This happens…all…the
fucking…time.” We got back in the car, a tense situation: me and Fel
and Noah, the counterparts who were each fuming at the other for impinging
on each other’s plans. I gave up, realizing that I could not talk to Noah
while Fel was there, and that I could not make the requisite smalltalk with
Fel without driving Noah crazy. I lay down in the back seat and go to sleep.
They traded turns playing music: Noah playing a folk music tape that I brought
from the States, Fel playing pop crap like the Backstreet Boys. It was a relief
to get back to Pandan and part company.
Noah’s house is made of bamboo and roofed in a native
frond called nipa. The nipa is arranged in bushy layers, like
shingles. The bamboo slats that comprise the floor are elevated a meter or
so above the ground; they flex slightly as I walk through the three-room house.
There is running water, which Noah says is safe to drink. I take full advantage
of the shower in the bathroom. At Lolo and Lola’s house, I had bathed with
a bucket and ladle, squatting on a concrete floor. As a consequence, I never really felt clean. Here at the nipa
hut, I stood up on a white tile floor and turned a knob: the showerhead immediately
began spraying. Sweet luxury: I felt very American. I had developed a rash
due to the humid tropical heat, a series of raised red bumps across my chest
and back. Noah, the eternally-wounded, gives me a cursory glance, and tells
me not to worry, “That’s nothing.”
The house comes with a cat and a dog, Eric and Jill’s
pets left behind. The cat is a real misanthrope of a beast. It gives me a
peevish look as I head for the shower. Noah’s dog Pawikan is so much better
adjusted, a very flexible and adventurous dog, comfortable moving around constantly
with his vagabond master. The cat obviously resents my presence. I could care
less, the miserable furball. The hand-me-down dog, Maggie, runs away immediately,
stressed by this new set of humans in her house.
I like the nipa hut, it seems like a good place
to live. I am relaxing after the stressful jeep ride, reading and feeling
clean(er). But no sooner have I stretched out and gotten into my book than
Noah returns with guests! Silent rest postponed, I sit up and meet them. There
are four: three British citizens, one a traveler like me, the others a couple
who work as VSO volunteers on another Philippine island, Sibuyan. The VSO
is the British equivalent of the Peace Corps. The fourth person is a Filipina,
native to Sibuyan, named Zita.
Zita was a former coworker of Noah’s when he lived
on Sibuyan. She is now the counterpart of the VSO couple. The other British
girl was just visiting her friends, when the trip to Panay was launched. She
had no choice to tag along. Zita did have a choice about coming along,
since she had no upfront motive for making the trip. However, the longer I
watched how she related to Noah, it soon became obvious enough what her motives
were.
Zita is edgy and flamboyant and skinnier than it seems
like she should be. She is loud and brash and articulate in the English language,
including crude slang. Meeting her for the first time, my instant impression
was that she loves fun in its myriad modern forms. She seemed a little unstable,
but suddenly, the first evening in Noah’s new house, we had a party going:
Who was I to be a stick in the mud?
We all had a welcome-to-Pandan beer, and then I went
off shopping. This was my first solo shopping trip, and I daresay it was successful.
It’s amazing how far you can get on just a bit of sign language and a smile.
I bought a bunch of vegetables and eggs and cooked up a spicy stir-fry for
the assembled party. Noah’s pal Boy came by too, which made for seven in all.
It was a fine way to “house-warm” a new nipa
hut. We stayed up late sharing our three cultures and customs and our impressions
of the one country that we all had in common: the Philippines. Around 10pm,
the Brits left to go stay in a hotel, but Zita stayed where she was. I went
to sleep not long after that, leaving Noah and Zita up and popping the tops
of more San Miguel, and catching up on old times.
I slept on the porch, but a squall came through in
the middle of the night, and I had to move my sleeping bag inside the little
storage room.
I woke up and stretched. Sitting in my sleeping bag,
I realized how light-tight the small room was. The sun had risen outside,
but the only place that light came in was between the bamboo slats of the
floor. I wondered at the efficiency of the walls at blocking out light so
well, yet the holey design of the floor: why would they build it this way?
(I would soon find out)
I opened the door and went out on the deck. It had
stopped raining. I gazed in a sleepy way out over the ocean to the south and
west. Blinking away the sleep, I felt good. I walked down to the surf, and
waded in. I swam out a short ways, floating and side-stroking to compensate
for the longshore current.
Usually the first thing I do upon waking in the mornings
is to start some coffee brewing. It is rare for me to feel the motivation
to get up and immediately go. But it was delightful, to be hanging in the
Sulu Sea, looking back on the forest-draped mountains of Panay, rising up
like any tropical island you have ever seen; Gilligan or a skinny Tom Hanks
would find their roles here easily. Golden sunlight arced over the crest of
the mountains, causing a glossy sheen on the palm fronds and nipa leaves.
A few bats skirted the canopy, late in returning to roost after their nighttime
feeding. Out in the ocean, boats were floating: fisherman trying for an early
catch. The Filipino boat is a simple affair like a canoe, but with two large
bamboo outriggers. Unlike the thinner supporting framework, the outriggers
are made of substantial bamboo, at least six to seven inches in diameter.
It has an appearance like a spider dividing its legs between two skis and
a surfboard. As I floated there, waking up and facing inland towards the rising
sun, a persistent breeze approached from behind my head, out to Sea.
After a while, Noah emerged from the house and made
his way down to the waves. As he swam up beside me, he had a strange look
on his face. I suspected something was up. Not wanting to let on that I had
noticed, I waited for him to bring it up. He eventually did; telling me that
Zita had made a pass at him late the previous night. HE told me that he had
responded at first, full of the glee of being the master of a new house (not
to mention full of San Miguel). Then, Zita apparently started seriously trying
to seduce Noah, which he resisted. This left her offended, he told me, and
they went to sleep on less-than-good terms. I raised my eyebrows and swam
a few strokes along the shore.
We talked it over, as men will do. Noah was worried
that he had permanently soured his relationship with his friend. I was just
glad that she was only visiting, and would soon be gone. The last thing I
felt like dealing with was a jaded stranger from another culture living in
the same two-room house as me.
That was the day that the typhoon started.
The “persistent breeze” that had been blowing from
the southwest intensified through the course of the day. It was a sort of
wind that we do not ever experience in North America. This typhoon wind was
steady and constant, not gusty. It just continued to blow and blow and blow,
hitting the beach at Pandan head-on; the shoreline perpendicular to the main
force of the wind.
The rain came in mid-afternoon, joining the wind by
degrees, until at sunset, the two were one: an unvarying horizontal threshing
of droplets. The palm trees were all bent back, giant fronds splayed towards
the northeast, like spiky-haired tykes squinting into a powerful hair drier.
Just 8 degrees north of the Equator, the sun sets early
in the Philippines. Or rather, it sets “early” to my summer North American
perspective. Bear in mind, I had come from DC, where the sky stays light in
summer until almost 10pm. Here there is less variety; year-round, the sunset
comes between 6 and 7pm. While the day began with a spectacular sunset as
I swam in the ocean and heard Noah recount his traumatic evening, it ended
with a dull fade-out. The lashing rain diluted any view of the sky or the
horizon that we might have had. It just changed from light gray, to dark gray,
to darkness.
I sat in the nipa hut in the darkness, thankful
for the electric light that allowed me to stay up writing and musing on this
new storm. The same wind that had been blowing all day was still blowing.
The same rain that has been falling all day was still falling. Steps on the
bamboo deck outside shook the house, and the door opened in a splatter of
droplets. Noah had returned from town, and he yanked back the hood of his
Gore-tex jacket, revealing a large wet grin. “It’s officially a typhoon,”
he told me. “The whole town is talking about it.”
There is a mesh windscreen in front of Noah’s house,
but the wind and water come through it with ease, and the beach-front side
of the nipa hut was already sodden. The back of the house, facing inland,
towards town and the mountains, is in the lee of the wind. I was surprised
to find it was completely dry there, and even for several feet extending back,
in the “wind-shadow” of the house. This evidence convinced me that the wind
really had not changed direction all day. I was reminded of the act of spray-painting
a textured object, where shadows of unpainted areas extend beyond any raised
obstacles, fading at their edges into the exposed areas.
In the nipa hut, we had moved into fortress
mode. All the windows facing the beach and the force of the typhoon had been
shut, resulting in a greater than usual sense of darkness in the house. We
had a few windows open on the leeward side of the house, thankfully, admitting
light and fresh air. There was a constant “white noise” roar outside the walls:
the sound of furious but constant wind tearing through the coconut fronds.
It had been an odd day. We three (Noah, Zita, and I)
had spent pretty much the entire day at the house. In fact, Zita had not left
at all, not beyond the porch. The unceasing rain coupled with Noah’s urge
to “nest” as a new homeowner kept us on the property. I took the opportunity to do some reading. I read through Pico Iyer’s
perspective on the Philippines in an essay included in Video Night in Katmandu,
and an ecological history of these islands titled Plundering Paradise.
Noah and I walked into town in mid-afternoon when we
were both getting a little stir crazy. Also, we needed to talk out of earshot
of Zita. We bought some hardware and some random fruits from the market. When
we got back to the house, we sampled guava, mango, avocado, breadfruit, and
santol: a nice filling little frugivorous feast. But out on the road, hunched
under our Gore-Tex hoods, we discussed the situation back at the house.
Zita was being a sullen sloth. It was incredible to
see how starkly her personality imploded. I compared last night’s devil-may-care
rash party animal with today’s sleeping grouch. All day she had been laying
around sleeping in the dark house. She told us bluntly in the morning that
her period had arrived, but I was sure that Noah’s rejection of her advances
led to her sour mood. When she was not asleep, she wrote silently and fiercely
in a small journal.
She was not speaking much to me, and only marginally
more to Noah. He had been polite to her all day, but kept taking every opportunity
to try and convince her to leave. Cultural conflict was swollen in this situation:
it’s the Filipino way to host a guest as long as they wish to stay, but it’s
obvious to me that the situation was tense in this small little house with
such foul weather outside, and her taking up all this space and energy by
hanging around. Both Noah and I wanted to be rid of her. The longer she stayed
there, slumbering in the middle of the room where Noah and I were trying to
get things done, the more frustrated we became. She was dampening the mood,
and making me nervous: I had seen the energy she was capable of the previous
evening, and now I was seeing the sullen grade of her fury. Would she lash
out? Would she burn down the house? My God, what to think? How to get her
to leave, culturally sensitive or not? She didn’t even wake up to eat the
dinner that Noah and I made: banana shoots and squash in coconut milk curry.
Noah asked me to sleep in the same room as them that
evening as a deterrent, which I did. Roaring of wind and rain when I fell
asleep, roaring of wind and rain when I woke up.
Day Two of the typhoon was a lot like Day One. The
storm raged through the night, and continued unabated. In fact, it intensified
in strength, though the unidirectional wind remained unaltered. The electricity
had died during the night, some wire blown down somewhere on the island, wherever
it came from. I had seen the haphazard wires in the trees, and I guessed that
we wouldn’t have power for a while. I was right. Stepping out onto the deck,
I was shocked.
The ocean had come up almost to the house! A furious
whipping surf stretched from a few meters away, to a distance of about two
hundred meters offshore. It was an incredible sight, and I thought first of
running. But, as I stood there observing, I realized that it was holding steady,
at least in terms of the reach of the waves. The whitewater was solid, a strip
of froth as wide as an interstate freeway, running up and down the shore as
far as the eye could see. The eye, incidentally, could not see all that far:
the raindrops were thick in the air, and all images faded to gray before they
were a quarter-mile distant.
Slack-jawed and breathing hard, I stared at this raging
ocean. I was squinting, of course, since the wind and rain were coming straight
in at the house. And it was loud: the constant roar of wind and waves had
not faded nor paused for a full day. The beach was but a sliver. As I watched,
a strong wave breached the storm-shield mesh screen. My eyes popped: I had
never seen a storm like this before, never seen the sea so churned up.
I worried about the integrity of Noah’s house: obviously
the thin bamboo structure would quickly disintegrate under a pounding from
these waves. The question was: would the waves actually reach the house? Another
one washed up past the netting and coconut fronds of the storm shield, curling
white foam like a tentacle around one of the porch supports.
Across the way, one of Noah’s neighbors was wearing
a green “hard-hat” helmet as he readied his homestead for the onslaught of
weather. I guessed that this was to protect his head from stray coconuts that
might be dislodged from above by the winds. He and his sons were pulling in
one of their large V-shaped fish traps, trying to get it out of the greedy
reach of the waves.
I go back inside, where I find Noah on the porch, and
he says to me, Whoa.
We go inside to make some coffee. Zita is (of course)
still asleep. I see that the cat has returned from its hermitage hideout (wherever
that may be), and has snuggled up next to Zita. Perfect, I think, they deserve
each other.
I’m really glad that Noah is as much an aficionado
of coffee as I am. We use his French press and some coffee beans from the
southern Philippine island of Mindanao. We can’t sit outside because the rain
has again started in earnest. We aren’t comfortable in the main room, because
Zita is still sleeping in there. So we end up standing in the kitchen, which
is actually about the size of a closet. There is enough room for two men to
stand there, but a third would be too much. We stare with eyes that are at
once revelatory of the stress of Zita’s presence, of the ocean that threatens
to engulf the house, and our cramped quarters while drinking our morning coffee.
Our eyes reveal fear and frustration at the predicament. We stare, then laugh.
Pure comedy.
As the day goes by, I adopt a Zita-like strategy of
staying indoors as much as possible. However, I start feeling tinges of cabin
fever. I watch Noah cope with the stress.
He tried to coax the other abandoned pet into the house
for some food. This was Maggie, the dog foisted off on Noah by Eric and Jill
when they left. Maggie hates Noah. He was bitten twice by the dog: once on
each hand. The dog was freaked out,
unhappy, abandoned and well aware of it.
As Noah was pouring Betadine into his cuts, his neighbor
Linda came over. She apparently had a good relationship with Eric and Jill,
the former residents, and accepted some pay to do their laundry for them.
She didn’t waste any time asking Noah if she could borrow money. He had to
turn her down.
I can tell by Noah’s lip-smacking mannerisms that he
is perturbed. He has a lot to cope with at the moment: the storm, the mooching
neighbor Linda, Zita intruding on his home territory, the new house itself,
work, and even my own presence as a guest and therefore as added responsibility.
He remains calm, but he is not his usually exemplar of happy ebullience. This
reminds me of my own Peace Corps experiences in Mongolia: attempting to deal
with ten issues at once. It is taxing.
I step outside during one of the drier lulls in the
storm. The wind never quits, but sometimes it carries more water with it,
sometimes less. There is an immense pile of coconut husks, bamboo, fronds,
and colorful trash piled up next to Noah’s house: pushed there by the largest
waves. Indeed, as I watch, another one washes up past the fence, into the
yard, and under the porch.
During an especially strong gust earlier in the day,
one of the four main supports for the storm-shield had cracked, and slumped
against the house. The mesh slumped and whipped in small rivulets as the wind
pummeled it endlessly. The bamboo that had cracked was a good five inches
in diameter, substantial and strong. I was thankful for the presence of the
storm-shield; I supposed that had it not been there, that damage would
have fallen to the house itself.
Among the deposited flotsam, I saw a large pufferfish.
It is dead, a big flabby bag-like fish, with an immense clean white beak,
like a parrot’s. I beckoned Noah outside to investigate with me. He picked
it up: a heavy sodden corpse, with scaly jowls shaking. We used the bizarre
creature as a prop for some photographs, excited by this minor event in our
otherwise boring day spent indoors. Noah, taken with a halfbaked inspiration,
took the fish over to the neighbors who earlier had solicited him for a loan.
They refused, claiming it poisonous. Ah yes, so this was fugu, the
species that the Japanese prepare to eat. Specially licensed chefs prepare
the fugu, avoiding the toxic glands. Invariably each year a few meals
are botched, and a few Japanese gourmands end up on the floor of the restaurant
dying, twitching as the neurotoxins take hold. We toss the dead fish back
into the surf. We (ahem) do not have to walk far for this task.
Somehow, the weird fish brought back our sense of humor
for a while. It felt good to be outside, away from grouchy Zita, in the fresh
air, stretching our legs.
We joked and laughed and squinted into the wind. Then
the rain started pelting again, and we yelped and ran for cover.
Back inside, Noah gleaned some facts from the radio:
it’s a Signal One typhoon, the mildest incarnation of the five-part scale.
I could imagine a storm being worse than this, I guess, but my imagination
stops at Signal Three. What a Signal Five typhoon would be like, I have no
earthly clue. It must be horrendous, and must strip the islands clean of anything
on them. Despite the low classification, the winds in excess of 150 k.p.h.
have earned this storm the classification of “supertyphoon.” Also, there are
the first reports of casualties: two men from Pandan died when their fishing
boat capsized several miles out. The radio also reminded us that today is
July 4th, American Independence Day. No fireworks for us tonight.
Cabin fever had set in full by the end of the second
day. 48 hours is a long time to spend in a bamboo cabin with your friend,
a sleeping dog, a piss-ant cat, and a woman scorned. I tried to relieve my
inner tension by doing push-ups in the storage room. It helped for a while.
The electricity was still out, and the routine of sitting, reading, writing,
talking, eating, and sleeping had begun to chafe.
In the late afternoon, the rain eased again, and I
elected to take a walk. Noah had taken a break from his efforts at attempting
to indirectly convince Zita to leave, and had gone to a meeting; Zita herself
was writing in her sullen notebook. I donned my raincoat and whistled up Pawikan
the dog. The gate to Noah’s yard had been sealed shut by the accumulation
of wave-borne debris outside, so we had to squeeze through to exit. Off on
a stroll through the typhoon!
The sea had receded a bit, and the beach was again
revealed to us to walk on. The sand was dark and firm, the mountains obscured
by the gray mist and clouds. As they had been for days, all the coconut palms
and nipa fronds along the beach were bent inland, as winds continued
to blast in unceasing from the south. But precipitation was light, and Pawikan
and I enjoyed the stroll west along the coast of Pandan Bay.
There were some terns with forked tails in the air
above the waves. How these birds were managing to fly in this wind was beyond
my comprehension: I could only just manage to walk!
We reached a gravel bar where a river flowed into the
bay. Huge clots of vegetation were bobbing down the swollen river, more mast
for the re-depositing powers of the sea. I threw a stick for Pawikan, but
he showed no interest. We turned around and began to meander back.
Almost immediately, a new squall blew in. I was pelted
with horizontal rain that stung my skin like gravel pellets. I was exceptionally
thankful I had my raincoat with me, and I pulled the hood sideways over the
right side of my face. I began running, and Pawikan needed no further cue.
The dog ran much faster than I was able to go, and periodically he hid behind
palm trunks and clusters of nipa. When I caught up to his position,
he would sprint for the next shelter. Shelter doesn’t mean having a roof above
your head, at least not here: it means having an object between you and the
sea! The equation for the Philippines is: Horizontal rain = horizontal shelter.
I got back to the house feeling really good, exhilarated
by my small adventure. I took an extended shower and dried off and felt clean
and exercised and contented. An evening cadre of guests gathered in Noah’s
house: Boy, Zita, neighbor Linda, Bimbot the veterinarian, Noah himself, me,
and the wet Pawikan, who was enjoying a scratch from his owner. The grayness
outside faded to black, and another day had ended. Still the storm continued;
I was exasperated: this was so unlike the summer afternoon thunderstorms that
I have been used to in DC and Virginia.
At some point, Noah and Zita talked and reconciled
their silent conflict. We bought some San Miguel and stayed up a while, listening
to the BBC. Zita had cheered up, and again I was shocked to see the 180-degree
change in her personality. She was again an extrovert, calling the beer by
nicknames like “SMB” and “Vitamin B1.” We had a good time together, the three
of us, more relaxed than in days. The storm reflected the change, and though
it could only be described as “a dark and stormy night,” the roar has abated
from freight train to mere Mack truck.
Like a fever, on the third day the typhoon broke. I
went out to the beach at dawn, and found myself one among many. Up and down
the beach, people were out surveying the damage. One woman was scavenging
through the detritus. For my part, bolstered by strong coffee, I surveyed
the shore. The ocean certainly looked calmer than it had the previous day.
The breakers were still a mass of froth, but less of it than before. The waves
still reached high on the beach, but not as high: there were four meters of
“breathing room” between the edge of the ocean and Noah’s house.
For breakfast, we walked into town. One of the vendors
at the market sells bananas fried in coconut oil. They are warm and sweet,
crispy and pasty. The bananas are served on a sliver of bamboo, like a Popsicle
stick. They had become my new favorite snack. We also bought some rolls and
pastries from the bakery. As we wander around eating, we see the first scraps
of blue sky above. Good news; I loosen the collar of my jacket. On the way
back to the house, we walked along the beach, dodging waves. A lesser frigatebird
hung in the air above the trees.
Noah had arranged with Boy to have Zita go stay with
them. Boy arrived, glad to have a guest for his wife to talk to. He pulled
Zita on his motorcycle, and they headed off to Libertad. We were thankful
to have her gone. Instead of luxuriating in the extra space in the nipa
hut, we opt to go for a hike, the sporadic tinkle of rain seems like Paradise
to our typhoon-weary souls.
We grab some snacks, some canned tuna and crackers,
fill our water bottles, whistle to the dog. Out on the main road, we flag
down a trike that is headed south. Noah climbs into the front part and pulls
Pawikan into his lap. I tuck myself into the tiny back space, and watch the
muddy road slide by and we chortle past rice paddies and copses of palm and
banana trees. I am feeling a cold coming on, and my stuffed sinuses distort
my sense of balance. I slam my head repeatedly on the roof of the metal sidecar,
as the road offers unpredictable potholes and washed gullies.
We have the trike driver drop us off near the home
of Nursing, a burly Filipino hunter who collects information on the forests
for Noah’s organization. Nursing is at home, sitting with his relatives and
neighbors under a corrugated tin roof. We duck under to join them. Several
of the old men and women are drinking tuba, the Filipino moonshine
of fermented coconut juice. We try a little, but I choose only a token sip,
since I am already mildly ill. I can see specks of dirt floating in the grayish
liquid.
Noah gives Nursing a copy of National Geographic:
earlier in the month, the two of them had helped to guide a Geographic
photographer on an expedition to photograph hornbills in the forest. They
converse in Kinaraya as Nursing examines the colorful magazine. All around
us is dirt, and children and chickens and dogs are covered in mud. They all
stare at Noah and I. I feel conspicuous. Even the damned chickens are staring!
After three days indoors, sequestered with a small crowd in the tiny nipa
hut, this public scrutiny seems extreme. I smile and nod, and fake another
sip of the noxious tuba. We bid farewell, and set off. Our next stop
is similar: another hunter and his family. To get to their house, we must
walk a balance-beam of mud between two adjacent rice paddies. If I slip and
lose my balance, I will be submerged in two feet of liquid mud and baby rice
plants. Frogs squeal as they launch themselves from our path, little amphibious
trajectories in damp air. We fold ourselves through the door of the second
hut, and I am introduced to another family, children, dogs, and curious elderly
neighbors again in conspicuous attendance. One little boy stands with snot
running down his chin. He wears only a stained tee-shirt. Noah makes a gift
to the hunter of a Lonely Planet Tagalog-English phrasebook. Who knows if
this will ever be of use to them: I guess that’s not the point.
After our respects have been paid, we set off into
the woods. A squall of rain moves in, and we run for cover. Noah pushed open
a door to a house and yelled to me, “I know these people!” I follow. There
were a woman and a girl in there, and they looked shocked. I hoped that Noah
knew what he was doing. Noah explained to them that he knows Junior, husband
to the woman, father to the little girl. They agreed to let us wait out the
rain in their living room. Again, the floor was merely dirt, and a pig snorted
from the next room. Noah found a pencil to offer as a gift to the daughter,
exhorting her to use it in school. Time passed, the rain continued. I began
to feel more and more like I was intruding. I suggested that we leave, and
Noah agreed.
The rain was less now, but the mud was thick along
the path that we follow up into the forest and hills.
My shoes were sodden: essentially hiking in a stream
of brown goo. Carabou shit mixed with the native soil, a volcanic clay mud.
It all sloshed in my beat-up old sneakers. We were rewarded with a fine view
the higher we hiked: Pandan Bay stretched in vast crescent from our vantage
north. Ahead of us, were hills and trees, and the potential of mysterious
birds. We encountered a man hauling some wood down from above: a poacher or
a subsistence gatherer or just a regular guy getting some firewood, depending
on your definition.
The rainforest up into the mountains was thick and
mysterious. Undrained of its fantastic biological potential, this forest emitted
odd shrieks and hums. We crossed several crude fences. At one, we stopped
and had our snack, and decided to head back downhill. The weather cleared,
and we hiked back down via a different route. We found a tree weighed down
with the nests of several ant hives. These were the vicious ants that will
swarm upon anything that disturbs their nests. I was glad that we spotted
them before upsetting their branches. The nests are each the size of a loaf
of bread, stitched together of green leaves with a white fibrous-looking glue.
Once safely past, I felt the inclinations of the meddling teenager in me rise,
mischievous towards the stinging insects. I pick up a stick. “Hey, Noah, watch
this.” I poked the nests to rile up their denizens. They POURED out in an
incredibly rapid stream. We backed away and chuckled. But first and foremost,
we backed away: these ants emit an alarm pheromone that recruits others to
the fray. Further down, we found ourselves picking our way through a terraced
rice paddy. There, an old man hailed us, and began talking to Noah in formal,
well-enunciated Old Visayan language. Noah was barely able to understand the
archaic accent, but politely listened, and offered me rough translations.
Like a modern Yankee talking to an Irish septuagenarian, he could only manage
a general gist of the monologue. The old man had bright blue eyes, very intense
as he gesticulated and apparently told us about the Bible.
He led us the rest of the way down to the road, presenting
us to a motley clan of family and hangers-on gathered by the roadside. They
were at first shocked at the appearance of these two strange white men from
out of the forest, but they relaxed significantly and even laughed when Noah
began charming them with his well-practiced Kinaraya. The old man now looked
sheepish, and he backed away to the rear of the crowd. The women in the crowd
expressed a fear of snakes, telling us that they would never venture into
the forests. Noah responded with an ecological tact, explaining to deaf ears
how even snakes have an important place in the forest ecosystem. Somebody
produced a bottle of Tanduay, the Filipino rum, admonishing us to drink. We
declined, and took that as our cue to cut short the conversation and get moving.
Getting back to Pandan turned from a sketchy proposition
into a glorious moment, when we hailed a beer delivery truck for a ride. We
presented a great tableau: Two white guys and a muddy dog balanced atop seventy
crates of San Miguel bottles, lurching on a flatbed truck on a muddy road,
surrounded by the glory of the rice paddies and banana trees and the rainforest
and the ocean, and indeed the whole fine world. I felt so good just then;
it was my crowning moment for the afternoon, the whole muddy hike worth it
just to be in this bizarre movement en route back to Pandan and hot food.
I felt like we were in the Macy’s Day Parade; certainly enough heads turned
to watch our progress as we rattled by.
Back in Pandan village, we met up with Boy and had
a bowl of noodles at a restaurant with him. The salty soup was excellent,
and at Boy’s suggestion, I ordered mine “special.” This turned out to mean
that it came with an egg dropped into the middle of the bowl. For dessert,
I insisted on another banana fried in coconut oil from the market vendors.
We finally did make it to the adjacent island of Borocay
soon thereafter. Because Borocay differs so much from its larger neighbor,
it’s worth relating a few details of that daytrip here. Struck with the realization
that we had little else to do one afternoon, we hopped in the “Owner-type”
and drove 45 minutes to Caticlan. In Caticlan, we parked the jeep. Noah paid
someone to watch it. Then we climbed aboard a water-taxi, which was a long
boat with outriggers of bamboo. The topography was different here, with chunky
limestone coming right down to the beach, in some places hollowed into caves
by the tides. Noah told me that Borocay itself was riddled with caverns, home
to one of the largest populations of fruit bats in the world. The boat took
us quickly across the water, and at a little cove we waded ashore.
Tourism has ruined this island, or has done 90% of
that job. It was hideous facsimile of Asian beachness, tacky and commercial
in a Vegas-like strip along the beach, but hiding a desperate squalor a few
meters away. Behind the curtain of shops, bars, and restaurants, there was
a sub-caste of workers living in foul mud. Noah told me of how a golf course
was going to be built here, and how an incredible amount of people were brought
in to do the work. The golf course deal fell through, and these thousands
of people were left there, with no income and nothing to eat. The island’s
famous bat population, resident in the caves, became the mainstay of the local
diet. The number of bats plummeted for years, and only after it was thoroughly
decimated, did the island achieve its current status as a fashionable get-away.
Sadly, the garish tourism may be the bats’ best hope for survival: so long
as the resort prospers, the island’s workers may have enough money to buy
other foods.
We found an Internet café, and connected briefly with
the outer world. I was feeling slow, and so was my connection. We didn’t have
time to dawdle, though, because we had to be sure to catch the last boat back
to Panay before nightfall. We grabbed some coffee and some whole wheat bread
(unavailable on Panay) and hightailed it back to the cove.
The sun fell as we were riding back across the water.
Noah made friends again, with perfect strangers, by virtue of his ability
to speak the language. I heard him explaining who he was and where he lived
and why he was working there. The other passengers on board were all very
curious. We gave a ride to two of the passengers on our way back, one of whom,
a woman peanut-seller. She gave us each a bag of sugar-coated peanuts as thanks
for the lift.
That night Noah and I cooked a fantastic meal. The
main course was tuna marinated in pineapple juice, garlic, and soy sauce.
We also had a big pot of mussels, and that diminished loaf of whole-wheat
bread. A swim in the ocean after dinner had to be curtailed when we drifted
into a school of “sea ants” which
began biting us. I have no idea what a “sea ant” is: it was dark, and I have
never heard of such a creature before. It hurt, that’s all I know. I left
the ocean after the second one nipped me.
The next morning it was certain that the typhoon had
passed. The dawn was a terrific sunrise at 5:15am. The sky was totally orange,
horizon to horizon, highlighted with small horizontal dashes of pink. In the
foreground, the black silhouettes of palm trees and fruit bats in flight.
I wasn’t feeling at my best, but since the weather
was finally suitable, we made a plan with the two other Peace Corps Volunteers,
Jessie and Tasha, to hike up to the rainforest research station.
The organization that the three Peace Corps volunteers
work for, BioCon, was started with the assistance of a German conservation
group, the Frankfurt Zoological Society. FZS maintains a research station
high in the interior forest of the island. It is staffed continually by a
German, Stefan, and his Ethiopian wife, AmSally. Also often present is June,
a Filipino jack-of-all-trades, who keeps the place in good repair and impresses
scientists with his common-sense knowledge of the forest.
Filipino porters bring supplies up to the station every
couple of days, via an arduous forest track. BioCon’s captive dulungans (the
more endangered of the two hornbill species) are all kept up at the research
station, in hopes of keeping them more habituated to their native habitat.
Half of the supplies are for the birds, and half for Stefan and AmSally and
whoever else is up at the research station.
We picked Jesse and Tasha up, and then drove back up
to Cubay. We left the jeep in the care of Lolo and Lola, and then began our
trek into the forest. The trail begins at the Bulanao River (running only
one way that morning). Almost immediately, my feet were wet. The trail meanders
widely, seemingly without regard for the presence of the river. We crossed
and recrossed it several times. The water was cool and clear, refreshing,
and I had none of the trepidation that I did with our slog through the manure-&-mud
trail that we had hiked a couple of days previously.
As with our Malumpati nest-hole check-up expedition,
we hike through several grades of human-influenced forest before we got into
the interior, to the ancient and undisturbed “primary” forest. We did a lot
of climbing upwards. Despite the lack of perspective on our surroundings because
we were immersed in the forest, it was evident that we were gaining a lot
of elevation, at least several thousand feet.
I was tired and nursing a cold, and found the hiking
more arduous than usual. The cold led to a decreased sense of balance, and
twice I slipped and fell. First, I fell down a small cliff, about five feet
or so, and stopped myself from plummeting further by jamming my hand into
the sharp limestone. While this worked to stop my drop, it also split my thumbnail
and scratched up my arm. The second time, I was traversing a downed tree-trunk,
several feet above the trail. My feet slid sideways out from under me, and
my hip came down hard on the wood. Then, because the trunk was round, my body
rolled off and I fell on my other hip a few feet lower, on the ground.
The trail led higher and higher into the green. Eventually,
it fed into a dry streambed, which was wider and made for easier walking.
Noah called it The Highway. We crunched along four abreast, surveying that
amazing place. Primary rainforest is an astonishing sight, alive and varied
and ragged and mysterious. Surrounding the Highway were giant cycads, plants
that are like ferns on steroids. There were elegant curtain-rooted trees all
around, draped in vines and mosses. The by-now-familiar crimson forest crabs
were here, too, clicking their claws as we passed them by. We heard some tarictics
calling up ahead, but couldn’t see them despite pausing for ten minutes to
search. We also explored a short cave, and surprised a group of eight fruit
bats that were roosting there. Hanging above us, they stared down with charming
dog-like faces.
When we finally got to the research station, we had
been hiking for five hours. I met Stefan and AmSally and June. Stefan seemed
a classically reticent German. AmSally was gorgeous, a Ethiopian fashion queen
whose Teutonic hubby had hauled her to the middle of nowhere for two years.
June was quiet and reserved, but with a ready smile. Both Noah and Jesse told
me, “This guy is amazing.”
I was exhausted: between my head cold, the rigorous
trek, and the injuries sustained in my two falls, my body was thoroughly worn
out. There was respite at the station though: they served us a fine lunch,
and then I took a shower. Philippine resourcefulness had combined with German
engineering in the construction of an ingenious outdoor shower. Water from
a cold spring was funneled into a bamboo aqueduct, and transported to the
station from distant parts of the forest. At the station, the flow could be
channeled either into a sink area, or to the shower. The shower stall was
made of bamboo as well (as indeed was the entire research station). It was
spacious and floored in round gravel pebbles. Above, the water flowed into
an empty bleach bottle that had holes punched in the bottom. It was an effective
showerhead, and I was delighted to clean up after the long hike.
I took a nap until sunset, ate dinner, and fell immediately
asleep again. It should give some indication of how tired I was to reveal
that despite my arachnophobia, I readily fell asleep in a room that also hosted
a spider the size of a dinner plate.
We spent two nights at the research station. The following morning, a mild hike brought Noah, Jesse, June, and I to a logged clearing, where we field-tested a new Global Positioning System (GPS) unit. It didn’t work at all. Along the way, we heard wild tarictics and wild dulungans, and even (rarest of the rare) a wild and distant Panay bleeding-heart pigeon. We also saw a large black snake, which June told us was “aggressive” and “crazy.” Noah and I ran into a patch of biting ants, he sustaining a dozen bites, myself only five or so. We waited a while in the clearing, hoping for a GPS satellite to pass overhead. Noah had roasted some peanuts with thyme and garlic and salt, and we snacked on these. There was a small herd of illegal cows grazing in this illegally-logged clearing, and a small lean-to revealed the unseen presence of those who worked here. I felt uneasy in the middle of th