Buko Juice

First and foremost, I'd like to say fuck Surviorman.  And the other guy.  I mean, ok sure, props for sleeping in a Moose carcass and for killing and grilling a Western Diamondback Rattlesnake, but "surviving" in a tropical jungle?  That's not even a legitimate challenge.  The jungle gives you everything you need; there's food everywhere and no shortage of drinking water.  Plus, there's more material available for building a shelter than you can find at a Home Depot.  

Yesterday morning, I met up with my friend Michael.  I met Michael the last time I was in the Philippines, in January of 2007.  You can read about that experience here.  This one was similar.  We started by catching a tricycle to Michael's house in another barangay; the driver just happened to be one of my cousin's surfing buddies who seemed to remember me fondly, probably because last time I was here I gave him half a carton of Marlboro reds.  (The quality of cigarettes here is a lot lower, apparently, so when people come back they often pick up a carton at Duty-Free and give them away as gifts to family and friends, tips to drivers, etc.  In two weeks, however, I found it difficult to unload that many packs, and so at the end of my trip, I gave the rest to him.)

We arrived at Michael's barangay, and again, for a detailed description, check out the previous blog.  I sat in a child-sized plastic chair while Michael looked for a machete, and the people from the barangay gradually came around to see me, like I was a big snake someone had just caught.  Most of them smiled, the little boys stared, and one of the men ventured to conversate in broken English.  "Do you like to drink a tubá?"  

"Hindi po.  Ok lang ako casi maaga pa."  I answered in Tagalog--no sir, I'm ok, it's early still.  I realized this argument held less sway here (we'd just seen a couple of old men stumbling drunk already at 10 in the morning) but I used it anyway.

Michael came back and we set off into the jungle, accompanied by two boys around 10 years old.  Michael introduced them, "This are my friend."  Later, he would elaborate in Tagalog that they were indeed family, and I speculated that perhaps he would've introduced them as such if he knew that 'cousin' was originally an English word.  But in fact, they were friends.  In small towns, I've noticed, groups of friends tend to be a lot more vertically-integrated in terms of age, so in any given circle, you'll often have kids ranging from 18 to 8, or in the case of Michael and these boys, 22 to 10.  Maybe because of this, I was less scandalized by the news that not only did my first cousin have a one-year-old baby, but the babymama was just 15.  Can you still call it puppy love if only one is still a puppy?

We trekked through the jungle for about 20 minutes before we found what we were looking for: pili trees.  The two little ones, Carlo and Junior, scampered up the tree with a pre-pubscent agility that would make the deadliest ninja blush.  Michael asked me, first in Waray and then in Tagalog, if I knew how to climb.  "A little," I answered, but I remembered my first time in the Philippines when, at age 7, I'd been as nimble as these kids.  It's been way too long since I climbed anything; I think that's why I feel so old.

The hot sun was making us thirsty, and when Michael scaled a coconut tree to get some water, I almost offered to do it myself, but decided that perhaps, as it's been sixteen years since I've done it, I ought to start smaller and work my way up.  There may be nothing in the world quite so satisfying as fresh coconut milk on a hot day.  The water is cool and sweet and, best of all, wet--a magic elixir straight from the bosom of mother nature.

Thirst quenched, we gathered the pili nuts that the boys had tossed down and Michael showed me how to open them.  Finesse is difficult when wielding a 14-inch machete, and only a few of my pili nuts came out whole.  The rest lay in pieces, victims of my ungraceful neanderthal blow.  "Masama siya," said Carlo to Junior, 'he sucks at this.'  I agreed.

Having filled ouselves with pili nuts and coconut flesh, we set out again through the jungle.  We passed rice fields and a number of other vegetables, carabao, pigs and chickens, all sparsely and seemingly randomly distributed.  It's a stark contrast to the agricultural fields of California, where acres upon acres of land are devoted to a single crop, parceled off in neat grids and fed by artificial irrigation pumped in from hundreds of miles away.

All along the way, we'd encounter other local people who were naturally curious as to who the fuck this white devil was traipsing through their neighborhood.  "He's from Alang-alang," Michael would reply, "Manu Jesse's son," or "Manu Ruben's nephew."  I like that.  He never said "He's from America.  Here to steal our virgins."  The best part, though, was that several times, when we passed a group of people they would discuss, either in jest or in serious debate, whether or not I was a woman or a man.  In the Philippines, even in some of the most rural areas, you'll find more openly gay and wildly effeminate men than in San Francisco's Castro district, and although there's quite a bit of jesting, most of it is good-natured and gays are generally more accepted here than in most places in the U.S.  And yet, a male with hair below his chin is enough to challenge their very notion of gender.  I guess it's not surprising really.  There are simply three acceptable gender roles here instead of two, but existence outside the boundaries of those roles is still marginal.

We crossed two rivers, or perhaps the same river at two different points.  At the first crossing, I took off my shirt and held it above my head (I don't particularly enjoy the feel of wet cotton on my skin), but at the second, I thought, "well, fuck it.  If we're going to be crossing rivers all day it doesn't make much sense for me to keep this dry."  We came, for a third time, upon a river, and Michael asked if I wanted to swim there (langoy, I learned earlier that day, is swim in both Tagalog and Waray).  I did.  

Across the river, there was a tree hanging out over the water, maybe 30 feet above the surface, and a group of teenage boys were jumping off.  I am, it should be noted, absolutely addicted to jumping off of shit into water.  Given the choice, most days I would choose it over sex, drugs, and even rock and roll.  So, of course, I had decided, even before Michael asked me, that I was going to jump.  We climbed the steep riverbank and reached the base of the tree, a meter in diameter.  

The other boys had been scaling the trunk as easily as tying a shoe, but I saw now that the first branch was a good eight or ten feet up, and until that point, the trunk was smooth without a single feasible foot or hand-hold.  Michael saw this too, and tried to dissuade me.  "You might fall," he said in Tagalog (mahulog, a word I learned from an Eraserheads song).  At this point, however, it was too late.  A motley crowd had assembled to see if the Amerikano was really going to jump.  A few dozen yards down the river, a group of women and girls washed clothes in the river, but their attention was fixed on the tree.  Similarly, some middle-aged men sat gawking, drinking beer on the opposite shore, and then of course were all the boys--some above me in the tree, some on the shore, some in the water.  Fuck it.  I'm in.  I wrapped myself around the tree, bear-hugging it, the way I remember doing it as a child, and shimmied (yes, shimmied) slowly up the trunk.  A few seconds later, I had reached the branch, and though it took me awhile to figure out how to turn the one hand I had on a branch into more solid footing, I eventually found myself perched comfortably, though out of breath, on the large arm of the tree which hung enticingly over the river.  The hard part was over, and I stood up, walked a few feet further and jumped.  As I surfaced, I shook the water from my hair and saw nothing but grins all around.