The Last Outpost

Isn’t this beautiful?" she said breathlessly, sweeping the landscape with a broad gesture. "I think of it as the last outpost," then she pushed her chair and left for the kitchen. It was our first evening in her house. We were sipping scotch neat (no ice for miles) from plastic goblets with fish stems and enjoying the muted sunset from the deck outside her bedroom. Sunsets are muted here because of the time of year or because we’re facing east and sunsets are only riotous in the west? Someone told me something like that. Probably a rural legend.

The last outpost! I mulled that over, like breaking waves seem to mull over bits of coral, broken seashells and brown sea grass leaves, turning them this way and that, then depositing them on shore when they lose interest. What did she mean by that vague statement? Maybe she’s distracted or totally exhausted. We have been going with the flow since we arrived. We landed at the Sandoval airport, the Cesar Lim Rodriguez Airport. Those letters almost cover the thatched roof of the one-room shack with laminated photographs of local flora and fauna on the walls. The dirt floors turn to mud when it rains. Our reception committee could not meet us because there was a storm when we arrived. We inveigled a jeep from a nearby resort whose staff found us a big banca powered by a Protestant minister and his son. "You are very lucky to be arriving in Gift of God," they said, pointing to the name of the boat that wound us through the mangrove swamp, to the river mouth and out to a by then surprisingly calm sea. It was raining. We had no rain gear.

The sea trip took an hour and a half from the river mouth to the island. It was not, as I expected, a small island in the middle of nowhere. It was a cove on a big island chosen because of a favorably located fresh water spring. I saw nestled on a hillside a sleepy structure with a pointy thatch roof and dark louvers hanging heavy and uneven, languid and tired in the noonday sun. It somehow reminded me of a disheveled tired old whore whose faded Japanese kimono slipped off indifferently here and there. "Look," I said, "there’s a lovely house with character." She looked, then squealed, "That’s it. That’s my house."

It is far and isolated but by no means the last outpost. There are islands beyond, farther away, less inhabited, more wild. Much later I asked her again, "What do you mean ‘last outpost?’" She gave me another unsatisfactory oblique answer. On the last day, I asked again, "Sure it’s not last resort?" If she heard me, she ignored me.

By separate arrangements known and understood only by the island folk, my friend had sent 32 boxes of personal belongings which included a gas range and a refrigerator, both LPG-powered. They left Manila more than a week before we did so we fully expected to find them waiting for us in the house. "No," her Sicilian neighbor said, "they are not here."

"But they will surely come, nothing really gets lost," assured his Filipino wife.

"When?" I asked.

"That we don’t know. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next month." I couldn’t help but break into a broad grin. I had agreed to take 11 days off to help move my friend into a house in the middle of nowhere but I could not do this again because I need to earn some money. If her things didn’t show up while I was there, she would have to move in alone. But what can you do? We decided to set up temporary quarters in her neighbor’s guest room. We peered into a rusting can to admire the cut-off head of a cobra floating in kerosene. It had been decapitated just that afternoon under the stairs, a scant hour before we climbed it. Two of the houses in this three-house cove were built against opposite hillsides with steep rocky stairs without railings. All porches cantilevered, all without railings. Always I felt on the verge of crashing into the rocks below. How long before my children could be notified? Maybe one day, maybe one month.

The first four days I was so terrified even my kidneys froze. Because I was afraid I might fall down the stairs on my way to the bathroom, find a snake coiled around the toilet bowl, discover a gecko inside the mosquito net, be bitten by the mother-dog who moved her newly-born puppies under the sink assigned to me, I didn’t even feel like going to the bathroom at night. Then I could go guided by a complicated network of flashlights. The last two nights I just used my little trusty flashlight. A few more days and I would have been rid of the fear or learned to see in the dark.

We were lucky, the lost boxes arrived the next day. I whipped on rubber gloves, scrubbed the kitchen down and began to unpack: pasta maker, popcorn maker, yoghurt maker, ice cream maker, electric mixer, pizza pans, French bread pans, layer cake pans. "Excuse me, ma’am," I asked sardonically, "is this last outpost in Paris?"

"Are you always so churlish?" she countered, looking hurt.

But on Easter Sunday, our 10th day in the middle of nowhere, five of us sat down for a late lunch on the deck off the dining room. We had homemade foccacia, which we ate with a fish (caught in our waters) ceviche cured with gin, vinegar and coconut milk. We had tortilla de patata and linguine vongole made from the meat of a conch that our Sicilian neighbor dove for and we had leche flan for dessert, all cooked on the one working burner we had. The bread was baked in the neighbor’s oven. While they talked about local concerns, I wondered yet again what I had come here for. Beyond fulfilling a promise to a friend, maybe I came to see if there was life beyond my perceived void. Out here in never-never-land, out here in the middle of nowhere beyond my familiar four walls – is there life and what is that like?

Now I know. There is life at the last outpost. If you have a friend who brings pasta maker, popcorn maker, yoghurt maker, ice cream maker, electric mixer, pizza pans, French bread pans, layer cake pans to her rough rambling home in pristine Palawan, it can be a cocktail of the primitive and the gourmet (sounds like the sublime and the paralytic). I also know now what "last outpost" means. It means "a place where anything can happen if you put your mind to it."

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