The purity of Boracay

I first heard of Boracay from my friends in the 1980s, when there was still no airport and Conde Nast Magazine has not yet listed it as “the most beautiful island in the world.” In the 1990s, I took my graduate studies, lived abroad and wrote my books, and only visited the island in 2005. Karen Berthelsen Cardenas, who was the director of the Ateneo’s office of research and publications, pitched a dream project to the then vice president, Dr. Miren Intal. It involved sending faculty members on a retreat in Boracay, to write.

I gladly applied and was selected for the 2005 and 2006 writing retreats. We stayed in Sea Wind Beach Resort on Station 1, when the bancas could still unload passengers right onto the beach. Karen was kind and efficient and she was our solicitous sister, arranging everything from accommodations to food, even reminders to put our cell phones in zip locks because the sea water might leave our phones wet and unusable.

We arrived at exactly 12 noon in that summer of 2005, and my impression of the beach was one of immense whiteness: it was as if all the white powder detergents of the world had been poured on the beach, and I had to shield my eyes from the sun and the sand’s blinding whiteness.

And so for the next four days and three nights we wrote and ate and drank and talked. Then and now, as I told Karen in Facebook last week, when the tedium of the present moment has tired me so, I think of those two summers in Boracay, and I feel a wash of healing energy coming back right into my veins.

During those two summers in Boracay, I wrote two short stories and five poems, all newly minted, which were published in the two hardbound anthologies that Karen edited, as document and repository of our stay in the island. One of the poems was occasioned by our afternoon trip around the island. When we were going around on a motorized banca, I already saw a mound of garbage being burnt in that part of the island that tourists rarely saw. The black smoke rose from the hills, smothering the blue enamel of the sky before vanishing in the air. And when I looked down, the water was so clear that you could see underneath, but there were no more live corals, colorful and waving in the sea with fluidity and grace. There were only calcified corals, white and dead like skeletons. Even in 2006, I already told myself that I fear for Boracay: it has no garbage-disposal system, its corals are dying, and when I looked around me, another batch of tourists were on board their banana boats, belching diesel into the water.

When we returned to Sea Wind Resort it was almost six o clock and en route, I first heard rather than saw them: the bats flying out of the caves and filling the air with their raucous cries. Their V shapes wavered in the air, so many of them coming out now that the day was dying, and I wrote a poem about them as well, a poem whose ominous tone sounded like the tolling of bells.

On our last night we sat in one of the stalls on the beach and drank some cocktails. I am not a good swimmer and frankly, I would rather swim in the pool than in the sea, even if the salt water could bear me aloft for ages. But I loved walking on the sand, by day time picking up a shell here and another shell there, looking at the point in the far distance where the sea met the sky, in a line as straight and sharp as a pencil.

Walking around the beach before the sun became too oppressive led me to write a short story called “The Last Summer,” where three children come to the beach with their parents one summer. The children collect sea shells of varying colors, even shaping a sand castle by themselves, until a roaring wave comes to the shore and destroys their castle, then bringing their shells they had collected back to the sea.

But Cody, the lead character in the story, begins to collect sea shells once more, both the whole ones and the ones that have been fragmented. He plans to bring them to the United States where they would soon migrate, and put them on the sill of his window so that when the snow comes and turns the landscape into the color of bones, the shells with their dazzling colors would remind him of home.

The next time I was in Boracay was on another retreat, this time with the United Nations Development Programme where I served as communications analyst for several years. We also stayed in a hotel in Station 1, and when I was walking on the beach I saw my former students, who told me the beauty of Boracay reminds them of the haikus we took up in class, those short poems written by Basho and Issa.

“And why does Boracay remind you of those poems, aver?” I asked wickedly, as if they were still in class, asking them to answer in a graded recitation.

“Remember what you said, sir? That the Japanese aesthetics is found in the haiku, where what is beautiful is also sad, because it does not last.”

I smiled at my former students and felt glad they remembered the Japanese poets, who said the world is like a dewdrop, glistening and full, clinging to a leaf. But when the sun rises, the dewdrop breaks, and is gone.

My colleagues at UNDP and I met with the government officials of Aklan, the governor and the mayor, and they apprised us of the development projects for the province and for Boracay. But I wonder what has happened to those projects, now that Boracay has been called “a cesspool” and closed down, to heal from the many wounds we have inflicted on her.

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