images from my childhood: beaches

I love the beach! If I had a choice between living in Manila or living in the coastal towns of Zambales or Ilocos, I would choose the latter. However, my life is here; it is circumscribed by obligations to my family, my work and my friends in this city. Moreover, I am not ready to give up the comforts of cable tv, the excitement of shopping malls, and the overall ease of living despite the turbulent economic conditions we are currently facing.

Nevertheless, the beach beckons me, at least, every summer. God blessed this country of ours with miles and miles of sandy beaches, it might take a lifetime to even experience half of them.

My mom grew up in a tiny town named Pulot along the coast of Batangas Bay. She lived near the ocean for half of her life, leaving it all to pursue her college dreams in Manila and raising her own family later on. When my father died, I believed my mom longed to go back to her roots, to where she grew up, to be with her father and siblings, but of course she couldn’t let us live there. She knew it would prove to be difficult. Instead she insisted on the next best thing: that we visit her hometown every December and summer vacations.

Traveling to Batangas City from Manila took around two hours by bus. From there on, we would take a scary and bumpy jeepney ride along the dusty, rough, and zigzagged roads going to Pulot. It was a terribly unpleasant journey, if not for the anticipation of something really awesome and beautiful around the last bend: an unobstructed view of the ocean. It never ceased to amaze me. The ocean was sometimes like a sheet of shiny blue paper that reflected the bluest daytime sky and sometimes it was a troubled, chaotic cauldron of unrelenting forces of nature. It stirred emotions of awe and humility, agitation and trepidation in me. The moment I saw the ocean, in whatever state of activity it was in, whether tranquil or turbulent, was the singular moment that made the exhausting trip seemed trivial.

We would stay in my aunt’s house in Pulot for a few days where Time seemed to stand still or go so slowly. The day seemed to stretch for hours on end. I don’t particularly remember being in a hurry during those times, one could take walks along the beach, pick up a few pretty shells, throw some rocks into the ocean and see how many times it skims the water’s surface, take a dip (weather permitting) in the sea, make toy boats out of dried coconuts and see whose boat goes the farthest without capsizing, and lie on a bamboo bed (papag) under the sampaloc tree.

We would only leave our little beach playground when my mom or my aunt calls us to eat merienda or lunch. Our favorite native food was the suman, made of sticky rice and wrapped in banana leaves, which I learned later on was the reason for the suman’s green coloring on the surface. You could eat it as it is but I was partial to putting latik (coconut shavings that were fried and caramelized) on it and having a cup of kapeng barako (brewed coffee) on the side.

Sometimes at night, we would wait for the fishermen to go out into the sea, some of whom were my older cousins, and turn on their lamps (Alladin, they called them, which I suspect is the brand name of the torch) to attract the fish. They don’t do this on a full moon because the fish get confused with the light coming from the moon. As a child, I was fascinated by all this activity. It seemed so romantic; to catch fish this way was like poetry in motion. It was not just casting a net and be done with it. One must have the patience and tenacity to withstand nature and human competition.

Life was never really easy for the people of Pulot. Most of my relatives have migrated to the city proper, leaving behind the sand, the beach, the sea. I wonder if they miss it as much as I do.