Fishing in Miagao

The smell of tanguigue, dalupane and hasa-hasa still fills the air. The orange-red brilliance of the setting sun stains the cloudless blue sky as the ebbing tide brushes silently upon the shore. Small boats dot the horizon. The green seaweed, slimy jellyfish and scattered piles of gravel that used to border the bare landscapes are gone, however.

I spent a good dozen years of my life on this seashore, from the time I could walk until I finished grade school. I did my first real living and thinking here. And I think of it now, like a reader flipping through novels read a long time ago, turning back to old chapters of my life.

I was born in Manila, where the asphalt streets were full of people, speeding cars and jeepneys, even at night. But here in the seaside town of Miagao in central Philippines, where I lived with my parents and grandparents during my grade school years, another world existed.

In the morning, the voices of the fisherfolk hauling nets from the sea would break my sleep. Even before I was awake, I could smell the damp, salty morning air. Flocks of birds would perch on coconut trees or set out across the sky to welcome the new day. As I walked on the coarse sandy beach with my Lola (my grandmother), I would see my grandfather arriving on his baroto, a small boat made of local wood, with his catch of aloy, sapsap, lapu-lapu or liwit.

The barren landscape was my playground. On evenings when the sky was clear and the moon was bright, I would play patintero, a game of tag, with children in the neighbourhood. During the daytime, I would swim or climb coconut trees and collect the young fruit. I would also hunt for beetles that fed on the buds at the apex of the tree, and lay poles between two trees and invent new monkey swings. But every time I did that, I would end up breaking an arm.

Lolo (my grandfather) fished to support his family. I was ten years old when he brought me with him out to sea for the first time. We left in the afternoon. By the time darkness crept in, we were in the middle of nowhere. The night chill was biting, and the water silent, deep and dark. Flickering kerosene lamps from other boats in the distance assured us of company. Lolo set out his hooks, and we sat there waiting for fish to take the bait.

We caught a big tanguigue. Lolo held it beside the boat, half submerged in the water. It held still, heavy and homely, with skin the colour of an old silver spoon stained with age. Seaweed hung from its fins; its belly swollen with millions of eggs.

Lolo stared at the fish for a long while. As I held the lamp closer to the creature, the light diffracted – a rainbow of colours! I was fascinated. Without the light, the skin shone like silver.

Lolo removed the hook gently from its jaw and let the fish go. He never told me the reason for this, but I assumed that he had wanted this expecting mother to lay her eggs and produce more fish for the future.

From that day on, Lolo brought me with him every weekend. A love grew in me for the rhythm of nature: from the restlessness of the tides and the biting chill of the sea breeze, to the brilliant stains of the setting sun across the horizon, to the joyous nights of bountiful catches and the dog days of drought.

At the same time, my mind wandered. I discovered that the baroto would not capsize even though the earth was round, because of the strong force beneath holding it in place. I learned about the constellations, the Big Dipper and Ursa Major. I looked for the belt of Orion and the twin stars of Mizar and Alcor, and realised that the ancients had named these stars thousands of years before.

Even in my childish ignorance, I felt conscious of Man’s long and varied, albeit limited, time on earth. I thought of the deep and wide ocean that had existed beneath the star-filled sky for ages before the fore-fathers of my grandpa settled on this beach. I thought of the generations that had fished, played and swum on this beach, and felt worshipful of the earth, the sea and the seashore.

After grade school, my parents and I moved back to Manila for my high school education. We never had a chance to go back during vacations. Although I wrote my grandparents often, I never saw Lolo again.

Lolo’s death in 1998 brought us back to Miagao. Returning to places I had once relished made me sentimental. The seashore had changed. The sea had advanced over much of the beach, leaving little space for children and patintero. The coconut trees had been replaced by nipa frond huts, which sheltered poor people who could not afford their own land. The landscape, once filled with jellyfish, seaweed and gravel, was now littered with charred logs, banana stalks, a dead dog, faeces and bamboo sticks, the refuse of overcrowding.

The night after Lolo’s burial, I stayed on the beach and felt once again the biting chill that once seeped through my pores. Under the stars and the yellow moon, I listened to the restless waves splashing on the sand, leaving behind seaweed, jellyfish and my memories with Lolo. Further away, the lamplights of barotos flickered like stars, reminding me of the lamplight that had once created a rainbow and given life back to a tanguigue.

Florence Yul N. Saquian, 32, recently moved back to Miagao and works as an ear, nose and throat surgeon at St Paul’s Hospital in nearby Iloilo City.