Snapshots from Samal Island
Wonder Woman Sitting Under the Talisay Tree in Paradise
She is three or four, sitting on a lounge chair under the shade of a talisay tree. She wears her favorite bright yellow, red and blue bathing suit, just like Wonder Woman’s on TV. The sand beneath her is white. No one else is around.
Paradise Island. That’s what they named one of the very first white sand beach resorts in Davao. Or more accurately, on Samal Island.
Up until then, I had only seen beaches of volcanic black sand spewed from Mount Apo’s long-ago eruptions. Eager to explore a new beach, my young family—both my parents barely 25, my younger brother less than a year old, and I not even in kindergarten—set out in my grandparents’ orange Opel car all the way to where the airport used to be in Sasa district, to take the five-minute pump boat ride across the channel to Samal. “Pambot” the boat captain would call his vessel. It was the first of countless times in the years that followed.
Paradise Island in the early 1980s was nothing more than a couple of lounge chairs, a few talisay trees, and a strip of white sand between two breakwaters. The breakwaters were impenetrable, made of concrete and dead coral. Even then there were already these boundaries defining the territory.
Whether they were to separate the resort from the sparse competition, or to keep the local public from using the beach, no one thought to ask. We were just happy to have a nice beach that not a lot of people had discovered yet. Several meters from shore were long bamboo poles strung together with rope that marked the limits of the swimming area. These were intended to keep people from getting swept out by the channel’s tidal currents. All in all, an oversized, neatly rectangular natural swimming pool.
My young family was never much for boundaries or limits. We would go to the farthest end of the breakwater, on the other side of the bamboo poles where the pambots docked. Here the clear aquamarine water was always deep enough to swim in, regardless of the tide. This was where I first saw what corals looked like.
And fish! Who knew that they came in so many colors and stripes? Once, I saw a banded sea snake slip gracefully between some rocks. I would put on my father’s swimming goggles and venture a little bit further out each year as I got older. Something in me sang every time I dove underwater, something that dissolved the boundaries between sun-browned skin and sea.
I was seven when I got my first magnifying glass. At low tide, we kids would walk out to the mats of seagrass, examining the hermit crabs and sea stars stranded in the tidal pools. It became a game to find as many as we could camouflaged under the sand. Sometimes the sea stars would give themselves away by moving their hundreds of tiny tube feet, carrying the sand with them. If we waited long enough, the wet sand would be covered in imprints of stars, like a white night sky.
Even more fascinating were the huge orange sea stars. They had dull, black thorns dotting their five arms in parallel lines, and were bigger than my face. Rhinoceros sea stars, I later found out they were called. When I finally worked up the courage to touch one, I was surprised to feel its arms soft yet firm under my fingers -- almost human-like.
Our house was a five-minute drive away from Times Beach, one of Davao’s most popular and most easily accessible black sand beaches. As Times Beach became more and more polluted with too many people’s garbage and sewage, the more frequently we found ourselves crossing the channel to Paradise.
As did the other residents of the city. Fascinated, some kids would collect the sea stars and put them in a pile, higher up on the shore than the tide could reach, leaving them to die. Many of the grown-ups themselves would collect the rhinoceros sea stars to bring home as souvenirs. I couldn’t understand. Had they not also held the sea stars in their hands, and felt their humanness?
Aquanaut Ashore on Punta del Sol
Her black fins extend more than a foot long. She stands on pieces of old, broken coral washed ashore. A snorkel dangles past her chin. She leans forward slightly, the steel tank on her back weighing her down. On her face, a big, delighted grin.
Everyone had stepped off the boat into the water, and were now slowly descending to the sandy bottom. Except for me. About five feet down, my buoyancy control vest was already fully deflated, but I wasn’t sinking. No matter how much I tried to exhale and empty my lungs of air, I just wasn’t sinking any lower. I started to panic. Where was my instructor? Was I going to fail my graduation dive? Was scuba diving even for me?
In college, I had decided to major in Environmental Science. But in the end, it was writing that led me deeper underwater. It was 2001. I had just gotten news of my acceptance to the country’s most prestigious writers workshop—three weeks of discussing poetry in the coastal town of Dumaguete on a full grant.
“But you know the best thing about it?” I told my mother, “I can finally go and see Apo Island. It’s supposed to be the most beautiful marine sanctuary in the country!” Except that I didn’t really know how to snorkel, much less scuba dive. Despite our frequent trips to Samal, I had not gone much beyond plunging perhaps ten or fifteen feet down with my father’s goggles. “You should get a scuba diving license then,” she said, “You still have time before you leave for your workshop.”
I wasn’t as confident in my abilities as my mother was, but I went ahead and signed up for classes. Given my ease in the sea, the dive instructor skipped the usual lessons in the pool and had me practice scuba diving skills in the relatively calm waters of Punta del Sol, on the northwestern tip of Samal. Every time we went out, he would make it a point to pick up some trash underwater. “Our dive has so many commercial sponsors,” he’d joke sarcastically about the brands of shampoo, coffee, and other packaging that we kept seeing. It was becoming more common for trash from Davao City to aggregate like rafts near Samal’s coastline.
The dives at Apo Island—my first ones since I had completed the dive certification—were more breathtaking than I had expected. Suspended under 60 feet of water, I could only stare as schools of jackfish swam by me, and a column of butterflyfish stretched like an infinite staircase winding upwards to a liquid sky. It was as if I were floating inside a giant aquarium, everything magnified larger than life. How could one think about panicking when there was so much beauty to feast one’s eyes on? On the way back to the mainland at sunset, a pod of dolphins crossed our small banca’s path. I had never seen dolphins in Samal! I couldn’t wait to go back and get to know my beloved Samal underwater.
Perhaps I was spoiled by Apo Island. Perhaps the waters of the Davao Gulf were not as rich a fishing ground as the Mindanao Sea, where Apo Island sits. But many of the sites I went to were mostly sand and coral rubble and algae. Later I discovered the sinister cause: dynamite fishing. Some of it was damage from tourist boats dropping anchor wherever they found something stable, whether it was rock or coral.
By this time, I was working at an environmental NGO and knew the signs. I now also knew that putting up breakwaters on the beach had been illegal since the late 1990s. Still, their number continued to multiply around the island as resorts raced to cash in on the tourism boom.
On one dive off Malipano on the western coast of Samal, I found several of the rare pygmy seahorse, their tiny pink tails wrapped around the branches of fan corals jutting out of a rock wall. They were only as big as the nail on my thumb. Difficult to spot due to their camouflaging habits, and very fragile. Because they lived on these walls rather than on the sea floor, they had so far been spared from the usual hazards. But for how long, I wondered.
Paradise Island was now also offering dives at their “house reef” in the deeper waters beyond the bamboo poles. Here they fed the fish with bread to attract divers to the reef. Since I’d come back from college in Manila, the resort had expanded so much, it was unrecognizable. They not only had lounge chairs, but also at least a hundred tables with nets hanging above to prevent the talisay leaves from falling into people’s food. Just to make sure there was something for every tourist, they now had a mini-zoo, and at least three beaches fenced in by concrete breakwaters.
They had also cleared most of the seagrass and rocks where the sea stars used to live. The shallow swimming area was as pristine as a tiled swimming pool. Now people didn’t have to deal with walking barefoot on the unfamiliar, disconcerting surface, or risk stepping on sea urchins. More people could enjoy wading in the water. Everyone loved it. Well, except perhaps the sea stars. I have never gone back.
Girl Watching Mountain at Sunrise in Kaputian
The sky is overcast. It is sunrise. The light is soft, quiet, careful not to wake those who sleep. At the edge of the white shore, she stands looking at the mountain hued in lavender and indigo, her head turned away from all that is behind her.
It was my thirty-first birthday. It was my last day at home. The next day I would be leaving for Vietnam for a conference, then on to the US for a new job, a new home. All of my portable life so far was packed in two suitcases. The day before, my friends and I had taken a bus from downtown Davao City, crossed the channel by ferry, and got into a tricycle that brought us here to Kaputian Beach. It was a public park that rented out tiny treehouses for overnight stays.
All throughout the night, my friends were singing, playing the guitar, and drinking to celebrate my birthday. I was sitting with my laptop, trying to finish my presentation for the conference, trying not to be anxious about yet another move. A more permanent one, it seemed.
Just four years before, I had quit my NGO job and begun what turned out to be a grand adventure: enrolling in a master’s program in marine biology in Dumaguete and Manila, doing field research off remote islands in Palawan and Batangas, and ending with a master’s degree in coastal management in four countries in Europe. I had my fill of learning the names of fishes and corals and mangroves and seagrass. I finally understood the habits of tides. I explored the sea floors of different continents. Now, just months later, I was about to fly halfway around the world to my first international job.
The work would be about reducing the environmental damage in the South China Sea, but it involved mainly poring over documents and analyzing data on a desktop computer in landlocked Washington DC. The irony did not escape me.
I spent the months before my departure exploring Samal as much as I could. I had met a group of friends who were actually from Samal, and they brought me to places on the island I’d never been to in all my years of going back. This was my last night in Samal. At midnight, when I officially turned 31, I put down my laptop and went for a swim.
The moon was high in the sky and almost full. I remember how clear the water was. I could see the seagrass silvery under the moonlight as I sat on the sand, the warm water going up to my shoulders. I remember the waves coming in fast as the tide rose, following the moon’s arc.
All my life, I had flowed with such rising and falling. This was how I had been able to move so many times, and cope with many changes in so short a time. Ebbing and flowing. The sea had taught me this fluidity. Despite everything that had happened and had yet to happen, this was my constancy. I would be alright.
By sunrise, my heart was as serene as the waters. I stood on the beach facing Mount Apo in the distance, memorizing the moment, saying goodbye. By nine o’clock I was ready to board the pambot that would take us directly back to Davao.
Three Women Dipped in Emerald Waters at Babusanta
They hold on to the bamboo outrigger of the boat, their legs floating in the clear, green waters. Large coral colonies spread out, visible beneath them. The water is cold from the rain. Their smiles are radiant.
It was the first day of the new year, 2017. I woke up almost in tears, grateful to be alive and breathing.
When the clock struck midnight, I was alone in bed in a hotel room, barely able to speak or raise my head due to a vicious virus that had caught me unawares. Just a few days earlier, Princess Leia a.k.a. Carrie Fisher, hero of my generation both onscreen and off, had died, followed quickly by her mother, Debbie Reynolds, whose musicals I had watched as a child.
I was in mourning. Not just for the loss of these icons, but for all those who had lost their lives in the past year—poverty-stricken children who had been senselessly killed for petty or imagined crimes, beloved friends my age who had died without warning or after a long, painful struggle with illness. I mourned as well the self that I had lost, withered away from the last six years of living by deadlines and logical decision-making in a corporate, landlocked office. Was this the trade-off for a prestigious, better-paying job? What had happened to my spirit, my sense of wonder, poetry? What if I myself died in the next moment? I feared I would never get myself back.
This was why I had come back to Davao, celebrating Christmas and the New Year at home for the first time in ten years. To hold my dear ones while they were still alive, each person who had shaped me into the person that I was. And in the process, perhaps find my forgotten self as well. Despite all the deadlines at work, I decided this was the most important thing that had to be done. I bought my plane ticket a week before Christmas.
One of the things that I vowed to do on this week-long trip home was to rent my own pambot and take my childhood playmates on an island-hopping trip around Samal. They, who had peered with me into the tidal pools, who knew me longer and better than any other friends or relatives--and loved me regardless.
At first they were hesitant to go, afraid of the weather, the timing. But I insisted. In the back of my mind, this trip to Samal was an attempt to return to a time long gone, when all that mattered to us was sea, coral, sea star. None of the conflicts and responsibilities that had turned us into shadows of our once-carefree spirits.
But on the first day of the new year, I was still sick. I was getting on a plane the next day and could not afford to get worse. There are moments in your life when you get to define who you are, instead of letting an inevitable situation define you. This was one of them. I chose the health of my spirit over my body’s. I needed to see Samal. I needed to be out on the water.
It was raining when we finally set out. I was wrapped in a blanket to shield myself from the wind. Our first stop was at Babusanta, right across Kaputian. Seeing my friends’ kids swim among the corals, the first time for some of them, lifted my spirits despite my chills. But I had come so far! I could not be so close to the sea and just be an onlooker. Gingerly, I stepped down the wooden ladder on the side of the boat, and braced myself for the cold.
As the water enveloped me, I felt only a peaceful warmth. I was alive! I no longer felt the virus’ hold on me. As we did when we were kids all those summers ago, my friends and I grabbed on to the bamboo outrigger of the pambot, marveling at the fish darting around our legs. We were older, perhaps wearier. But here, in the water, our sense of wonder returned easily, as if we had never been away.
Even from the surface we could see all kinds of fish and coral, branching and stone-like, all vibrant and growing relatively undisturbed. The boatmen had been careful to drop anchor in sand, not coral. It seemed the tourist boats had already changed their ways. Hope leapt in my heart.
On the way back, I savored the wind on my face, as I had on countless other late afternoons. This was one of my favorite things about those trips to Samal--going back on the latest possible boat, letting the rhythm of the waves wash over me, a delicious tiredness cradling my body.
Then from behind me, one of the boatmen gave a shout. I looked over to where he pointed and saw the outline of fins moving up and down the water in the horizon. I had taken this trip back from the island so many times in more than 30 years, and never seen it before. It was unbelievable, especially since in my experience in other places, a rainy day like this one made it practically impossible to see such things. Yet there it was, unmistakable, as if a sign for a covenant made years ago: a pod of dolphins, heading home into the sunset.
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