The water in Coron

Don’t ask me how, but I found myself a couple of weekends ago in Coron, Northern Palawan, riding a pump boat over cool green waters to a cluster of islets that was home to the Tagbanwa, a gentle tribe who buried their dead in jars and who have retained their traditional script. They were the formal object of our visit – myself and a camera crew, working on behalf of a private client – but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that a little rest and recreation crossed our minds as well, given how stupendously breathtaking the scenery was.

I’d been to Puerto Princesa, much farther down south, many times before, but never up north, where dreamy (and hyper-expensive) hideaways like El Nido and Amanpulo were reported to exist. A trip to Coron was supposedly a somewhat downscale version of the compleat epicure’s tour, but – never having been to El Nido – it didn’t hurt not to know what I was missing. Here were beaches, coves, limestone cliffs, dive spots, and islets aplenty, starting with the main island, Busuanga, where Coron town (as distinguished from Coron Island) is and where cows graze along the sides of the earthen airstrip.

A relatively new airline called Seair flies to Busuanga several times daily from the old Manila Domestic Airport, in 19-seater planes that are surprisingly more comfortable than they look; the round-trip fare from Manila is P4,600 – which seems like a lot until you factor in the cost of staying at an excellent lodging house like the Darayonan, where a double room with a cool bamboo-slat floor, a ceiling fan, and a mosquito net costs just around P400 a night.

Busuanga’s airport consists of no more than two large hut-shaped buildings (arrivals and departures, get it?); a terminal is still being built, and there’s no electricity anywhere to hook up your laptop or your digicam to. Coron town is a 30-minute ride away by jeep, on a dirt road cutting across wide swaths of pasture land (planted, said my driver, to Australian grass in President Marcos’ time, thickly implying that Marcos had much to do with Busuanga’s assets; indeed, the famous – or infamous – Calauit game "reserve" is nearby.)

Coron overlooks the water and the islands beyond; its main industry, apart from fishing, seems to be the dive shops that cater to tourists who descend on Coron, peaking in December and January. Lodging places abound (although the Darayonan was fully booked when we were there, so it probably helps to make advance reservations); there’s an Internet café or two, and you get Smart cellular service, but not Globe (get and always carry a spare SIM card from one company or the other; they’re cheap, and could save your life). The seafood, as you can imagine, is bountiful and fresh; life could be a lot worse than having a tub of kinilaw na tanguingue and a cold beer at the water’s edge at the end of a long day.

And what a long day it was last Sunday when we took that pump boat across the bay to a secluded spot called Kiangan Lake (I hope I got that name right), a pool of limpid water in all shades of green, fringed by limestone massifs and hardy shrubbery. In the middle of the pool was a half-finished houseboat, to which my sprightlier companions kayaked while I waited for a real boat to ferry my portlier and infinitely more prudent self (the low tide kept our large pump boat away in deeper water). The coral beckoned beneath my very dry feet, but I felt tempted more by the packed lunch of pork adobo than by the prospect of a swim, which I must say has never particularly appealed to me (I have this vision of death by drowning, so that the water both fascinates and terrifies me).

Then we moved on to Cabugao on another island, where the Tagbanwa lived in a settlement along the mangrove-thickened shore. On a clear and windless day, Palawan’s islands look like tabletop décor, their bottoms sheared straight by the sea. But as we made a turn the sea got choppier, sending gouts of spray across the deck, and I couldn’t wait to hit land again. As it turned out, I wouldn’t, for a long time; when we got to the Tagbanwa village, the low tide kept us out at sea again, and I politely offered to stay on the pump boat while the camera crew boated and kayaked onshore. I took a nap and munched on crackers until the boys dove into the water for handfuls of crisp seaweed, which I munched on with gusto, sand and all.

So I never actually got to visit the Tagbanwa village (formally speaking, it wasn’t part of my job), but I did get to observe the view from a distance for a few hours, proving once again how engaging the imagination can be, held at a distance from palpable reality; for there, at the mouth of that bay, I stood as if at the entrance of a great cathedral, roofed only by the sky, massive walls of stone soaring left and right of me, keeping safe their ancient dead in crevices of the same rock from which the Tagbanwa now drew their living, in the nests left by the swiftlets or the balinsasayaw. I could see flocks of small white birds riding the drafts down into the valley like so much confetti, then resting on the branches of the tallest trees like a constellation on a strange green night.

We were running late, and sailed home after the sunset, smack into a squall that churned the water into the coal-black froth of my worst imaginings. Still I managed to keep my composure, and my feet dry. Reaching Coron, once more in low tide, we had to move to a motorless lifeboat that drifted aimlessly in the dark until the passengers started paddling with their bare hands. I felt a clammy rush of water snaking into my shoes, as if to remind me that there’s no escaping the water in Palawan.

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I was given the honor of delivering a eulogy last Tuesday for the late National Artist Franz Arcellana on behalf of the department with which he worked for almost half a century, and I’d like to share these final thoughts with you:

"The Department of English and Comparative Literature was Franz Arcellana’s home for the longest time. He joined the department as an instructor the year before I was born, in 1953, and was with us as Professor Emeritus to the end.

"He taught more than writing; he taught art, the humanities, indeed, a way of looking at and living life the artist’s way.

"He was father and teacher to us all. All conversation paused when he spoke. He spoke with authority – an authority that was more than artistic, more than linguistic, more than a product of his learning or his age: he spoke with that rarest of privileges, a deep and hard-won moral authority, by which he could demand honesty and nobility of every artist or writer he met, and certainly of his own work.

"This way he was a difficult mentor and critic to please, which made our encounters with him always memorable and worthwhile, if sometimes necessarily painful. He looked for artistry; he looked for honesty; he looked right through you and your work, and he told you if he found you wanting in one thing or the other.

"Unlike some of us who found ourselves embroiled in such mundane travails as public relations, political commentary, and commercial film writing, Franz managed in the end to achieve a clarity and a purity in his calling and his passion, defined only by his love for his God, his art, and his fellowman. He aged a modest man; aside from his beloved cognac, which I suspect was often the gift of friends, Franz didn’t have what most of us would recognize and celebrate as worldly extravagances.

"This didn’t mean that he didn’t know how to enjoy life or a good laugh; he could certainly laugh as hard as anyone else, and even his laughter had a rising cadence to it. He would tell jokes the way he wrote his stories – with the punch line repeated and incrementally rephrased, his laughter and excitement mounting with every retelling.

"I hope we don’t get too solemn this morning that we forget what a living, breathing creature Franz Arcellana was, how engaged with the world he could be when he wanted to, what a sharp and saucy wit he wielded.

"‘Get real!’ he would often admonish young writers at a workshop, his increasingly bushy eyebrows meeting like God’s own frown. But what is it to get real, and who and what was the real Franz Arcellana? In his summing up of Manuel Arguilla’s life some eight years after Arguilla’s death at the hands of the Japanese, Arcellana would say something that could very well be said of himself today: ‘The realest thing about him of course was his writing.’

"If the writing is all that most of us, especially the young, can know and remember of Francisco Arcellana, it will still be enough, it will be more than enough.

"Thank you, Professor, from your students, your colleagues, and your friends at the Department of English and Comparative Literature, thank you very much indeed."

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com..