Reflections in a Rice Paddy (Philippines 2019)

Seasoned surf travelers know the motif:  the jungle road to the coast; the isolated village mired in poverty; the headland girdled by peeling surf.  Eager to wash away the grime of travel and put our surfcraft to its intended use, we forget, in our adrenaline ambition, the way our arrival provokes uncomfortable dichotomies.  The pursuit of frivolous pleasure, on a piece of foam and fiberglass worth perhaps half the yearly income of a 3rd world villager, stands in stark contrast to the locals' daily subsistence lifestyle.  In the somber, disparaging expression of a woman tending to a rice paddy, I perceived exactly this dynamic. It haunted me as I approached the headland for a closer look at the waves.

I knew the feeling from my prior travels.  In 2004, on a trip to Siargao, while surfing a reef not far from Cloud 9 (which we derisively labelled "Crowd 99"), my friend Q and I watched a pump boat approach us at full power and then swerve at the last moment, its crew of fishermen shouting obscenities and contorting their bodies in mock imitation of a surfer's stance.  Five years earlier, conducting a dockside errand on Pohnpei (my home for a year), I received a similar rebuke from a crew of Chinese sailors, an incident I included as a diary excerpt in Islands on the Fringe:

 a maritime montage rolls past my driver's side window.  Aboard a Chinese fishing junk, which smells of bilge water and diesel, a crew clad in stained khakis dangle cigarettes from their mouths and regard me with a curious mixture of envy and hate, as though the sight of me and my rattletrap sedan represents a fantasy life they envision with jealousy.

As a remedy to the feelings of guilt that arise from such incidents, surf travelers typically bequeath gifts of T-shirts, sandals, hats, or other token trinkets (modern versions of the European explorers' glass beads perhaps?) intended to help the locals, or at least bring a smile to the face of a kid.  Somehow, though, I doubted the rice paddy woman would let a token trinket smooth our disparity in life circumstance.  I had no pretensions she would ever see me as anything other than a rich American (and perhaps an ugly one at that).

And so to the surf.  Off the tip of the headland, a smooth, clean, perfectly tapered righthander rose repeatedly and took a bow, appreciated by no one but me.  I noted only one flaw in the performance:  the waves, chest high at best, seemed a bit sluggish. . .

Off the headland, a perfectly tapered righthander. . .

But then the tide started to drop, and the waves, rewarding my interest, spun with added enthusiasm.  The sets I initially judged as chest high proved overhead, and for an afternoon of solitary perfection, I found myself momentarily detached from the sorrows of the world, immersed in the blissful state that occurs when instinct and adrenaline channel perception.  Later, back on the beach, I made a halting effort at the local Ilocano dialect to exchange greetings with a kid who had ventured out to the headland to watch me ride a final wave to the shore.

     He smiled at me and I gave him a t-shirt from my pack.

Somewhere in Northern Luzon, 2019