Deep blue seas

When my firstborn came to visit over the Christmas holidays after being away for over a decade, we naturally thought to lay out the red – or rather, green – carpet for him. See the Philippines, rediscover Asia, son (we slyly thought to ourselves), and pretty soon we’ll have you moving back home from your oh so desolate bachelor’s existence in the States.

So we plied him with what I now call the "multiple-B" vacation treatment. First the whole family hopped on a plane for Bangkok, where my Manila-based offspring learned for the first time that brown-skinned natives and tropical weather aren’t necessarily synonymous with bad roads, uncollected garbage, and roving beggars.

The cuisine and temples of Thailand are legendary, and of course we paid due tourist deference to all that. But frankly, we spent more time ooh-ing and aah-ing over the well-stocked malls, the wide, clean thoroughfares, the eminently breathable air. Perhaps it all rekindled some spark of hope in our forlorn breasts that we might see something like it in Manila within our lifetimes.

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Right after New Year, we trekked up northern Luzon on a Banaue to Bontoc to Baguio itinerary. The famed rice terraces on our first stop were spectacular all right, but still oddly disappointing, as if they’d been overly hyped. One would have expected more from what’s been billed since our childhood as no less than the world’s eighth wonder.

The drive to Bontoc on our second day was much more interesting, a whole morning’s adventure on narrow dirt roads barely clinging to vast mountainsides. Here we experienced the full solitary grandeur of the Sierra Madres, an endless range of towering mountains disappearing into the horizon everywhere we looked, with only the occasional bird cry to break its echoing silences.

An overnight stop at Mt. Data Lodge proved downright hazardous to our health, with its freezing-cold rooms, barely functioning water heaters, and absence of amenities or company. We all came down with sneezing or coughing fits the next day, which served to entertain us on the unexpectedly long and rocky drive to Baguio. Luckily, the very civilized appointments of the country club there put a nice final touch on our expedition.

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But the vacation spot my son enjoyed the most was the last one we took him to – Boracay, of course, whose sun-and-sea charms are by now a staple of globetrotting stories the world over. Even in its present, extremely developed state, crowded with visitors and harassed by growing issues of environmental carrying capacity, Boracay retains a unique capacity to enthrall, especially for the first-timer.

Which is exactly what my son was, for sure. I could see him immediately taken by the white sandy beach, the luminous water, the hush of late-night walks under the stars past barely discerned shadows of other visitors drinking and smoking and laughing softly in the dark.

Fresh seafood feasts for under a thousand pesos, wild rides to and from our hotel aboard noisy tricycles jouncing over mudholes and potholes, the local schoolchildren every afternoon taking their shoes off to wade through the shallows on their way home – my son is an aspiring photojournalist, and all of these memories also formed the grist for his voracious camera eye.

Most of all, though, Boracay was all about water – endless expanses of it stretching away to the horizon, deep blue or dappled green and clear as light, water to swim in or dive into or frolic atop in sailboats or jet-skis or the humble outrigger bancas of the locals.

I think it was on our trip there with my son that I first understood that the Philippines, at the core of its being, is truly a gift of the waters. Whichever rocky island any of us may happen to be from or live now, what we all share in common are the watery boundaries that define us and separate us, and across which we must travel if we are to break bread together.

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This understanding came back to me over the Holy Week vacation, which we decided to spend at the Costa Aguada resort on one of the islands of the Guimaras chain. It’s a lovely little place owned and operated by a branch of the Oppen family, a local-landed clan who may be better known to older readers as the in-laws of San Miguel’s (and, later, perhaps also the country’s) big boss Danding Cojuangco.

The cottages at the resort are not (yet) air-conditioned, I suspect because the owners still need to invest in additional power generating capacity. However, they all face the open sea, and so guests quickly become attuned to the eddy and flow of the landward breezes. One learns to look up at the clouds in the daytime, trying to sniff out the prospect of cooling winds by nightfall.

In front of the resort is an unfinished breakwater that creates a shallow pool of still water for amateur paddlers and kayakers. Here too one can learn more about the sea, about how it ebbs away from the land with the setting of the sun, raising the entire breakwater high above the waterline, only to rush back and up the next day at high noon, submerging the breakwater into patches of rock strewn here and there.

One morning I hired a local boy to guide me on a jungle trek, which mainly consisted of 20 lung-squeezing minutes climbing straight up the cliff behind the resort, followed by an hour and a half trying not to slip and stumble over fallen leaves and hidden tree roots on the long way down.

The various views from the hilltop were spectacular, again dominated by vistas of the sea stretching away to the distant outlines of neighboring islands. Even from a thousand feet above sea level, one cannot shake this feeling about the impermanence of the land, its puniness against the dark and restless might of the sea. Whoever first described our country, jestingly, as a collection of 7,100 islands – but fewer of them at high tide – spoke deeper truths indeed.

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Perhaps our inherited condition of archipelagicity serves to breed a certain outlook towards life that is uniquely ours. The waters divide us one island from another, and so we grow up trusting first in the villages that inhabit common ground, then in the neighboring islands that speak a common tongue, and only later, much later do we discover ourselves to be, in fact, Filipinos all. The accretiveness by which we come to this national identity serves to impose priorities – what is local and immediate almost always trumps what is national and remote, and so our civic conscience becomes limited, much like a stunted, though beautiful, bonsai tree.

The waters that divide us also challenge us to become seafarers, and so we take to the wide open road like fish to water, scattering all over the globe in an expanding diaspora. There are nearly 10 million Filipinos now who live or work overseas, their communities extending the reach of the home country like so many more islands added to the archipelagic chain. But these are islands that will not sink below the waterline no matter how high the tide rises – these are islands that will endure.

But perhaps it is the arbitrariness, the truly unfeeling and uncaring power of the sea that most shapes our essential view of life. The weather changes of its own will, the winds blow wherever they may, the waves beat upon one’s fragile craft with no regard at all for its passengers’ stations in life. Chance upon a storm at sea, and no matter how prepared you may be, the outcome of the test ultimately depends on fate – or nature – or God.

I think it is from our life by the sea that we draw our essential fatalism, our attitude of bahala na that speaks to our helplessness and our instinctive reliance on other than ourselves. The wind and the waves, the very tides seem to mock the notion of permanence, or any striving for it.

But this can no longer be. We must look to the example of the very first sea creatures eons ago who crawled onto dry land, their unused lungs gasping for breath, their fins still forming into rudimentary limbs. Like them, like those long-ago creatures, we too must soon learn to walk on solid ground, on our own.

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Readers can write Mr. Olivar at gbolivar1952@yahoo.com.