Tulatulahan, Part 3

Published by Vartan Koumrouyan at February 18, 2025

This is a serial. Read Part 1 and Part 2 first.

He has an innate knowledge of the surrounding fauna, and his body acts as a powerful shield to everything in his path, be it weather, poor diet, hunger, fatigue, alcohol, insects, or snakes. Out on bail after weeks behind bars, he savors his current freedom. He’s proud to lift a fifty-kilo sack of palay to his shoulder while talking to me, and smiles as he walks up the road to the rice mill.

The natives of Palawan have an astonishing immunity to the humid Pacific climate. Gerold, who helped us hack at the jungle when we first arrived, walks bare chested under both rain and sun, certain that he has nothing to fear. He celebrates life as he chooses — drinking, smoking, cursing, or striding down a carabao path to domesticate the wilderness with his resolve.

His wife birthed a boy while he was in jail. She left our area to be with family in the south, and only returned last week. We see them in passing again now, involved in their regular lives: He on the muddy path with his machete and a stack of coconut fronds, she sitting beside the goat shed weaving nipa shingles. If they have concern for the future, it doesn’t show.

Gerold carries a solid mental faith derived from his hard work in the rice fields. He wears his new Sunday shorts at church, and perhaps he has a Bible in his hut, though I doubt he can read. The presence of the Bible is a greater aid to his mental comfort, in case his physical force flails.

He goes to church with his wife, but I doubt he prays before going to bed. Yet in the presence of Sheryll’s Uncle Rufo, who reads the Holy Book in church and always seems contrite in his search for life’s meaning, Gerold speaks gently and low, as if choosing his words. He’s immune to the climate, but perhaps not so immune to quiet scolding.

Now that our home is better established, Sheryll and I can spend some time making a visit to her family. As we walk along the path to Tamalarong, she points out other plots of land to me.

“This is my auntie, and this my uncle,” she says. Further on she adds, “This lot of land will be for my cousin, and that for my other uncle.” She points towards the hills above a line of coconut trees, to an area which had seemed to me to be bare, unclaimed jungle.

The path leads us along the main street of Abongan, passing by a bridge and the elementary school playground. If we were to follow the road, we’d eventually find ourselves at Roxas or Taytay, and beyond that El Nido, Palawan’s main tourist destination.

But that’s not our goal. We turn down another dirt path to pass more coconut trees and nipa huts. Under the corrugated metal of the market we stop at, two women stand at a stall, chasing flies and dipping fingers into a bucket to sprinkle droplets on the fish arranged in a line over the tiles. On a nearby tray, translucent minnows lie stacked, the pinpoint of their eyes still quivering.

Three fishermen sit on the ledge of another stall behind the women, one taking his afternoon nap, his head resting on his hand like a cushion. The other two glance at me, then say something in their native dialect that makes them and the women all giggle. A few boys lurking near the pots of the sari-sari vegetable stand stop to watch as Sheryll and I come to the stall.

I smile in greeting and stay out of the way. I know I’m a curiosity, probably the first stranger they’ve seen apart from backpackers who motor through without stopping. Sheryll speaks to a woman standing at a round chopping block made from a tree trunk. The block bears witness to its frequent use. It’s covered with blade marks and fish scales, and the flies hover around it.

The woman nods, grabs the tuna Sheryll chose, and sets to work with her machete. She chops off the fins and splits the head in two with quick, deft blows, then with the tip of the blade she flicks an unwanted morsel towards a nearby dog, who’s been watching every move with hungry eyes. It grabs at the piece and moves off to enjoy it by a ditch, away from the flies.

“This is for sinigang soup,” Sheryll says, as the woman chops the fish into thick slices. “We’ll cook it over the charcoal when we get there.”

At last we reach the carabao path leading to her mother’s nipa hut. Uncle Rufo’s two-level rice field spreads out across the ground on either side, mud retaining walls bordering it to make a swampy area the size of a football field. A swath of reeds grows in the middle, and taller bamboo borders it along the higher ground.

A carabao lounges in a mud hole nearby, while strings of banana, coconut, mango, and cashew trees line the sloping hills. Farther away, the jungle’s wall of high mangium trees form a backdrop of silver haze, reflecting the afternoon sun. I hear chickens, ducks, and at least one dog in the near distance.

“Eleven hectares,” Sheryll says, sweeping her hand around in a vague gesture that I at first think is meant to impress me. All this land belongs to Uncle Rufo and kept by his son Titing. Their nipa cabin rises on stilts two meters off the ground, almost reaching the canopy of the shorter trees.

But she’s not trying to impress. She’s simply sharing the truth of her family, that they reside in a place of true peace. There’s no urban noise here, no traffic or scuffles. They’ll drink, but they know how to behave.

And while they have little, they know how to share. Even the cobra, frightening to the chickens and infuriating to the dog, receives their tolerance. After all, it keeps the rats away.

We enjoy our time with Sheryll’s family, sharing in food and conversation, in stories and laughter. But the night draws closer, and soon it’s time to return home. When the sun dips behind the mountain range, the transition from dusk to night is brief and sudden. We need to be home before then, so we move with speed along the paths.

I sit in the dark outside our house, drinking it in. I hear insects and owls, and then a bat as it changes course near the eaves of the roof and makes a sudden, muted swish near my head. Ardou barks nearby, angry at a skunk or some other creeping creature. Other dogs in the sitio respond, all barking instinctively one after the other, until they get tired and stop.

Slivers of light along the horizon give the impression that a long time has passed, that soon it will be dawn, but it’s only eleven.

The night, the dogs, and the people we saw today or see more regularly — they rest in my mind as a complete picture, as real harmony. There’s no intermediary, no outside intervention or primitive art. The wilderness and the proximity of the unknown awaken my senses, offering a ‘forever moment’, a unity of unchanging past and future.

This is the Pacific, and these are the natives.