Who needs police when you have chickens?

The rooster approached the road. He looked both ways. He took in the situation. Then he strutted to the middle of the concrete-paved strip in Basco, Batanes — and dropped a load of poop.

Then he strutted off to the other side, looking defiant, like a Roman emperor:

“I came, I shat, I threw shade.”

There’s the answer to your age-old riddle, right here in Batanes.

Chickens are an integral part of provincial life in the Philippines. Whether they’re raised to produce eggs, or bred to wear Dothraki-style gaffs to claw their opponents in a sabong ring, chickens have always served a vital function in this society. They might even be the reason there’s so little crime and vice in a place like Batanes. They’re kind of like the secret police of country life. Clearly, they run this place.

Why do I say this? That probably requires some explanation. My wife Therese and I recently traveled to Batanes for a two-night stay, and chose a B&B situation. Touching down at their tidy and clean domestic airport (we’d flown in from Clark International), we were struck by how similarly tidy and clean the capital town of Basco was. Streets are paved everywhere — even a road leading us up to the rolling green hills that Filipinos (or is it foreigners?) tend to associate with The Sound of Music. It shows how a local provinciality can spend its money wisely, instead of on graft and kickbacks. In fact, everything about Basco seemed to be a model of efficiency, especially if you’re coming from the dumpster fire that is Metro Manila. It is generally like that in the provinces; trikes are all licensed, carefully maintained, and fully operational. (Not like the post-apocalyptic Fury Road types you encounter in Manila.) Bad people don’t last long in a place like Basco. For one thing, everybody knows what everybody else is doing. And everybody talks.

The famous Honesty Coffee Shop in Ivana has been operating since the ’90s. Manila tried a similar experiment recently, but, according to The STAR, it soon had to close down. Perhaps honesty is in short supply in the metro.

As for tourism, it’s been on the rise here for several years running (up 40 percent, I heard). Most of those visitors are Filipinos, drawn to the exotic thrill of taking selfies atop rocky cliffsides, or imitating Julie Andrews sweeping across the fields in her nun getup. It’s a whole niche market, right there.

To keep things nice and clean, every visitor to Batanes is required to pay an ecotourism fee (P350) that not only goes toward keeping the place clean and green, it helps monitor arrivals and keep an eye on possible undesirables. 

The people of Batanes are generally lacking in cynicism (at least to this outside visitor); I was greatly surprised when I opened our van door to step down onto a narrow street, and a young kid skidded his bicycle to a halt right in front of me. “Sorry!” he immediately said with a sheepish grin on his face. This is a far cry from the crazy, erratic behavior we tolerate from foolhardy cyclists, trike drivers and bus operators plying EDSA; and you’ll never hear a kid say “Sorry!” for nearly ramming into you with his bike in Manila.

The people of Basco speak Ivatan, as well as Tagalog and English. They seem carved from a different era, a little touch of 1950s Pleasantville in their civility, their unforced niceness. As mentioned, everybody knows everybody in Basco. Everybody has a central or supporting role. The husband and wife that ran our B&B were actually integral to things running smoothly there: the husband was the main air traffic tower supervisor in town; the wife was a schoolteacher working for the Department of Education. So getting up early here, paying your taxes and keeping the streets well swept is kind of expected. In fact, you’ll find that most establishments lock up around 8 or 9 p.m., and a lot more close their doors by sundown. There are no woozy karaoke joints within city limits (none that I could hear) or late-night bars, though people do apparently drink. They just seem to do so responsibly, at home or indoors.

This lack of apparent vice had me puzzled. That is, until Therese and I settled down for our first night’s rest in Basco. We decided to watch a video on my laptop to kill some time after the whole town shut down (there’s very thready internet service to be had, so Netflix and hours of posting to Instagram are kind of off the list of available pastimes).

As soon as I pressed the spacebar, and the 20th Century Fox opening theme music began, the neighbor’s chickens that were roosting about five feet outside our window began their assault.

We were struck by how tidy and clean Batanes was. What’s their secret?

“Bu-bu-bu-bakaw!”

They had awoken from their apparent 8 p.m. slumber, and were now trading that same phrase back and forth between neighboring chicken coops. First, you’d hear the ruffle of feathers over there, followed by “Bu-bu-bu-bakaw!”; then more feathers rustling, and another chicken coop would join in the twilight choir until you felt like you were in Chickentown. Just that four-note phrase, repeated so often that I thought it was either a bunch of chickens doing an open audition for a Beckett play, repeating the same line in different, absurdist inflections; or — this thought eventually struck me — maybe the chickens were keeping an eye on people. Maybe they were, in their way, maintaining peace and order by raising a fuss whenever anyone made too much noise. In short, they were policing Basco.

This could be the reason people get a proper night’s sleep here. They’re forced to sleep early to avoid rousing the chickens. And then, of course, they’re woken up for work every morning (even before sunrise, mind you; our chorale group started up about 2 a.m.) by a regular reveille of screeching fowl. So few people malinger or skip work. And forget about that iPhone alarm; you won’t need it here in Batanes.

By the second night, we were quite tired of the cranky, easily woken chicken brigade, but what could we do? Being city dwellers, we did consider seeding the next-door chicken yard with tablets of Melatonin, hoping the chickens would slurp it up with their grain and conk out. That should buy us a few hours’ sleep. But we didn’t, because we didn’t want to disturb the delicate balance of nature, human co-existence and civility that keeps a place like Batanes so well-functioning.

So, to rephrase that age-old riddle: “Why did the tourists in Batanes cross the road?” Possible answer: “To find someplace where they could catch a little shuteye.”

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