Summer And The Sea

It was bound to be chaos. Nineteen adults, five children, four cars, and one mother-in-law in a wheelchair. We drove 178 kilometers from our home city all the way to Sipalay, partly because we had never dipped our toes in its famed waters, and partly because there was nowhere else to go. It was the Holy Week, after all, and everywhere else had been booked months before by other irreverent beach-loving bodies.

The proponents of this four-family outing had a noisy alcohol-filled evening appointing committees and drawing up a budget. Then there was the matter of finding handicap-friendly accommodations for Nanay who was still suffering from the effects her second stroke over two years ago.

While the driving committee guzzled their beer, the budget and food committee argued the merits of organic versus imperishable, plastic utensils versus metal, tankinis versus maillots, and whose monthly period was on the verge of gracing the much-awaited four-day weekend. In the midst of all this discussion, the fun-and-games committee scurried in and out of the house, chased by one or the other.

Maundy Thursday dawned bright and early. After several mobile phone arguments about the correct rendezvous place, we sped our way southwards, making only a few stops along the way to buy several large watermelons, and to make water by the side of the road, hidden amongst the tall sugarcane stalks.

By ten o'clock, we arrived at sunny southern Sipalay.

Eli and Wowo, Artistic Diving Resort

Starfish Troopers

Kylot: My starfish can carry the most shells.
Woog: No, mine!
Ia & Eish: Wanna bet?!

Sweet revenge: "death" by starfish

Achieving starfish zen

Isle hop

Atch at Campomanes Bay

DeeDee & Kylot's service de luxe

Yoohoo...! I broke your snorkel...!

Coming up for air

Corals

No Tatay! No Tatay! Noooooo!

Comforting the hydrophobe

"Swimming". With a life vest. By the seashore.

Atchbund & Aifee, Campomanes beach

Family at Campomanes beach


Tito Sam: Get me another bottle, Eli?
Eli: No! Gimme...coral!

HRH, Queen Mama of Langub Beach

Wowo, aboard M/V Spongebob, Langub beach

Pirates of the Langub-ian

Beach belly-boys

Atch & Aif, Langub

Sunset in the shallows

Beached mermaid

Stoned

Caved

The family that "rocks" together....

On the way home, via Mr. Sandman's sea

By Black Saturday, we dragged our waterlogged and sandy selves into our respective vehicles and made for Hinobaan, where we visited distant relatives, and scouted Happy (not-the-brothel) Valley's white stretch of beach, marking it for our next seashore foray.

And then we headed home. But this is not the end of summer...

The Beach

Mom, Woog whispers conspiratorially with a hopeful look on his face, I want to ride a boat this summer.

He glances sideways at his Tatay, almost fearful that any whiff of his wish would cause said paternal authority to reply with a stern rebuff.

But Woog gets his wish in a spur-of-the-moment decision. After dinner at my parents’ house one Saturday, someone vaguely mentions the beach, and slowly the whole family drifts toward the discussion like seaweed undulating in a lazy current.

Plans are made. Assignments are handed out. By the time we head home an hour later, Woog is too keyed up with excitement. He loudly thrashes on the bed the whole night, keeping everyone awake.

The next day, we are up before the sun. Atch heads out to the market to buy the day’s dose of high cholesterol for the grill, and I stuff clothing, swimsuits, sunblock, sandwiches, and other miscellaneous items into beach bags.

By 8 am, two cars are on the road to Cadiz, 48 kilometers away. We take a pump boat ride to Lakawon

and I tell Woog that the last time he visited the island, he was a 9-month-old fetus in my tummy. You know, our weight broke the boat's gangplank in half, just the two of us.

And I tell Kylot that he was an hysterical 3-year-old screaming to be let off in the middle of a choppy sea. The boys giggle, wriggling in their seats like puppies.

Woog & Kylot

All aboard!

200-pound capacity rubber boat, 300+ pound load

Easing into the sea, butt first

Me: Come swim, Tatay!
Tatay: No! The sun will give me more liver spots.
Me: How 'bout a beer bath instead?
Tatay: *snort* Get your wobbly abs out of here.

Coral pirate

Auntie Dada: Give me back my cigarettes, El.
Eli: No! Mine!

Family on the sand

Smiling through the sunburn

And so we head back home...tired, a little too sandy and painfully sun-drenched. But very happy.

My Name is Frustration

Atch was urging me to take five days off from work. “Let's go on a long vacation,” he said, “let's take the boys and go to the beach.”

“But we just came from the beach,” I protested wearily, “and five days? That's too much!”

Atch was insistent. Atch was persuasive. Atch was a big spender, at least for the moment. He had filed a vacation leave from work for five days and asked me, nay...commanded me to do the same. “Let's go to this beach,” he said.

“But we went there when Woog was little, remember? We had car trouble, remember? The car died on the slope, and you swore never to go to that beach again. Besides, it's expensive.” That was me, ever the damp washcloth. Always the thundercloud over every bright summer's day.

“There's another road going up to that place. Why don't you research their rates over the Internet, then call them, and we'll talk about it tonight.” That was Atch, adamant and implacable. Never taking no for an answer. Not even from me. Especially not from me.

And so the dutiful wife filed a five-day leave, and hunched over her work like someone possessed, making sure no backlog took a chunk off her ass upon her return. The beach resort was called, the reservation made, and an accounting duly presented to the head of the household.

“There are lots of other things we can do instead,” I ventured hopefully, “I was thinking about scrubbing the bathroom and dusting the blinds. And you have to seal my leaky washtub and glue the straps of Woog's red slippers...” But he wrinkled his nose asked me whether I'd prefer the second floor hotel room or the ground floor one. “Whichever's the least expensive,” I sighed.

But it didn't take long to get into the mood of summer. I started packing away our sunscreen and beach wear, charged the camera's batteries, and modeled my bikinis in front of the boys, hoping to find one that didn't amplify the inappropriate bulk of my tummy and thighs. Woog volunteered to take pictures of the wings of excess flesh on my back, while Eli dragged everything out by their strings, baptizing them in his mouth, and pronouncing the damp scraps of fabric fit to wear.

Excitement's not an easy thing to come by, at my age, but the stirrings of anticipation swelled at my breast like waves upon the seashore, and I started looking forward to baking under the sun, lazing around with nothing urgent to do, having a Thai massage, and sipping a margarita at sunset. Maybe even get busy with the husband once the boys fell asleep.

I went to the office for my last day at work before the beach trip, buoyant, bubbly, and giggling at no one in particular. Until I opened my email. It was Personnel, no less. “You cannot take five straight days leave from work. You are only allowed three. Email back with the days you have chosen.”

Just like that. My bubble had burst.

But no matter. A three-day vacation is better than none. I updated Atch, and called the resort to change our reservation.

Only, a few hours later, the skies fell.

Rain, such as no rain we had ever seen in the middle of summer, grayed out the horizon and drenched every living thing for miles around. We Yahoo'd the weather and the forecast reported scattered thunderstorms until the following week.

Atch and I could barely look at each other, and Woog bemoaned our fate by giving voice to such a howling and whining that lasted a whole week. Atch and I pretended we didn't want to howl ourselves, and equally reassured and reprimanded Woog for adding to the damp. Eli didn't care. Water was water. He spent most of his time hanging around the downspout with his hands upstretched, and splashing on the puddles in the courtyard.

As for the bathroom, I did get to clean it. Scrubbed the toilet, as well. And dusted the blinds. And wiped the walls with disinfectant. And changed the sheets. And took the boys to a childrens' birthday party. And watched an Angelina Jolie movie marathon with Atch while we drowned our sorrows in rum. Played nookey. Had a massage. All three days worth.

“Maybe it was meant to be,” I told Atch, trying to look convincing. My poor alpha male looked deflated without all his belligerence. And I looked at the rain, and it pounded and pounded and pounded. And I wasn't able to convince myself at all.

The Island

“Maybe you'll write about us in your blog,” the bespectacled man said. I turned around, bewildered. Beside me, Atch was sitting on a piece of driftwood in the sand, doing his drunken master thing and insisting that some of the rechargeable batteries still had power in them.

“She will.” Atch slurred empathically, before I even had a chance to open my mouth.

The man continued, “My wife, she's blog-crazy. She reads all blogs.”

I gave the bespectacled man an embarrassed grin. “Maybe I will,” I amended.

In my arms, Eli was whining. On the sand, Atch finally gave up trying to stuff the batteries into the camera.”They're all dead, Aif,” he mumbled, fumes of Tanduay 15-years carried by eddies of ocean air to my face. I wanted to tell him “I told you so”, but the bespectacled man was still lounging on the railing behind us, playing host.

It was the afternoon of our first day on the island resort, Atch's company's summer outing. His colleagues were scattered all over the sandbar: soaking, kayaking, snorkelling, drinking. Woog was showing off his new swimming skills and was half-floating under the stone bridge of whose railings the resort manager was now resting his prodigious bulk on.

This guy doesn't know me, I told myself, transferring Eli's 10-ton weight to my other arm, he's guessing I might have a blog, probably on the off-chance he'll get free publicity.

And isn't he the same guy who overcharged us on the kayak rental nearly ten years ago? I squinted, trying to remember, but my memory flitted away on the salty sea breeze.

I was on this very same island one summer almost a decade ago, pre-Atch. With an ex-boyfriend, also pre-Atch. There were brightly-coloured starfish by the hundreds, then. And the kayaks didn't have half patched-up holes, or missing paddles, or absent lifevests. And the tennis court didn't look like an overgrown Celtic ruin, and the sand around the “floating” cottages was free of squilchy grey mulch.

Still, I didn't want to offend our host. I was here as a guest of the guests, after all. I was here for Woog and Eli, the former having the time of his life, the latter having set foot on the seashore for the first time.

Where am I again?

Poor Eli. He wailed on the aqua-bike. He screamed aboard one of the kayaks. And now the cold waves and the whipping sea wind were giving him second thoughts. Give it a chance, pet, I urged him silently.


Woog, meanwhile, dug a hole in the sand and asked me to bury him. We gathered and discarded countless shells and other sea creature skeletons before it finally turned dark, and we headed back to the lodge where I equally cajoled, bullied and manhandled the boys to shower and change.

That evening, Atch sweated off the alcohol at the grill, fanning at the hot coals under the beef while a tropical storm raged outside, and lightning fandango-ed across the sky.

“Boot!” Eli exclaimed, pointing to the moored jetski. “Boot!” he squealed at the three anchored outrigger watercraft. He and Woog passed the time getting in the way of food preparation and popping mixed nuts into their non-stop mouths. At least Atch's officemates found my sons cute and adorable. Or maybe they were only being polite.

We woke the next morning to a mildly sunny day, and despite my desperate urging, the boys hardly bothered with breakfast before trooping to the sand, buckets and shovels in hand. Like a miniature sumo wrestler, Eli stomped down on every sandcastle Woog tried to build, and Woog wailed each time, pushing his brother away with his feet. Finally Atch pulled the baby aside and dug a depression on the sand for him to trample on.

Across the sandbar, the loans collector and the office manager were gingerly lifting sea urchins from the water with a paddle and laying them on a kayak. Woog ran off to see them at work, facinated by the spiny black balls undulating on the hot pink plastic. But they weren't spiny for long. The gatherers broke off the poisonous but strangely fragile points and hauled the creatures away in one of Woog's pails. “The new bucket meal,” the loans teller announced. Apparently, they tasted very well with rum, whiskey or beer. “Raw too,” the office manager added. One of the spines had pierced his palm and he went off to find a pair of tweezers.

The urchin with the urchins

Would they have harvested sea urchins if there were plenty of starfish around? I wondered. For that matter, would they have eaten starfish? Urk.

Lunch was uneventful, though I saw no sign of sea urchin flesh on the table. Later, everyone packed up to board one of the pumpboats that would take us back to the mainland. “Boot!” Eli gurgled sleepily. He and Woog seemed none the worse for wear after their island adventure.

But the boys slept all throughout the two-and-a-half-hour road trip back home, Woog cramping my left shoulder and the top of Eli's head lodged hard under my chin. This is the beginning of the end, I thought. And I bade a wistful farewell to summer days when I would go away to the beach to unwind, splash, soak up the sun and have fun. It's my babies' turn now. And I never felt more of a parent than I did at that very moment. A very exhausted, ancient and windswept parent, but a parent nonetheless.

Back home, Atch swore loudly when he found a dent at the rear of the car, something he had tiredly overlooked when he claimed it at the port where we had parked. And I swore just as loud when I put on a shirt that brushed against my fiery red back. In my zeal to protect the children from the sun, I had smothered them in sunscreen and forgot to put some on myself. Behold, here grimaces a sunburnt parent.

And Atch plans to take us to another island next summer. Oh, help.

*****

Much later, I remembered the bespectacled man, and in fairness to him, I did write this post. So there.