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Sunday, January 18, 2004
Estremera: One for nature
By Stella A. Estremera
Spider's Web
"Now what?" I groaningly thought; the images of turtle eggs and hatchlings, huge rescued turtles, overnight beach watch, and flying foxes still fresh in my mind. It wasn't any of those. This time it's bigger. "A beached dolphin," was how Sir Leo described it then, and it was just over a kilometer from where I live.
IT was almost midnight and I was busy in the kitchen preparing some food for the following day for lack of anything else to do, and that thing called insomnia, when my cellphone rang.
Emergency! My mind raced. But the ringtone was generic. Not the office, not mom, not any of my siblings, not even the police. No need to panic.
"Happy LA," my cellphone read.
"Now what?" I groaningly mumbled; the images of turtle eggs and hatchlings, huge rescued turtles, overnight beach watch, and flying foxes still fresh in my mind.
It wasn't any of those. This time it's bigger. "A beached dolphin," was how Councilor Leo Avila (a.k.a. Happy LA) described it then, and it was just over a kilometer from where I live.
"Wait for me!" I said, rushed to turn off the stove and cover my barely-cooked chicken curry in the making, hastily put on a relatively presentable shirt, a pair of shorts and sandals and rushed out... to a dark, deserted road. Darn! No taxis, no jeeps, no tricycles and trisikads... and then... a lone habal-habal. Thank God for small mercies.
I arrived at the area Sir Leo described and after seeing the people milling around, the second thing I noticed was the "sewery" smell in the air.
Ducking under a barbed wire fence to the beach, the stench became even stronger. But less than a hundred meters away in the shallow waters of an ebbing tide were several people and a huge mound that must be the "beached dolphin".
I waded through what can only be described as muck. It wasn't just sand and silt, it was something slippery and dark and stenchy, and yes, itchy, and it went up to my mid-thighs. Eeeooowww!!!
Eeeoowing and yukking, I still stayed for over an hour in that eeky, dark waters, dodging the huge waves of black, sticky water that the creature's giant tail was splashing at us, and watching the menfolk try to push the creature back to the sea as the tide ebbed on fast.
By past 1 a.m., the rescue operation was given up. Water level that was up to mid-thigh when I first waded in was already just above my ankle at over a hundred meters away from the shore. The tide has ebbed and there was nothing that can be done for a two-tonner creature at that time of the night.
"I'm glad it's midnight," I told Sir Leo. "Otherwise, you could never make me wade through this!"
At around 3 a.m., after some coffee and further discussion at a 24-hour bakery at Matina Crossing with Sir Leo and local environment personnel, I finally reached home.
Confident that I was all alone that night and that the high fence and gate shielded me from anyone's sight, I hurriedly removed my clothes and sandals as soon as I locked the gate. I then dumped my soiled, stenchy clothes in a water-filled basin. No way will I bring you inside the house, I mumbled to the clothes as I made sure the lot got fully soaked in the basin by spraying them with a hose and tamping on them with my foot. What followed was a long bath that saw me almost scrubbing my skin off with a loofah and anti-bacterial soap.
The retrieval operation (the creature was already dead by then) continued the following day. I opted out, preferring to remember the creature when it was till breathing and battling all those menfolk, and yes not wanting to know what it was that I waded in the night before. As is often said: Ignorance is bliss.
Meeting up with friends made on that midnight to visit the creature (that by then has been identified as a beaked whale and not a dolphin) in the cold storage of Polar Bear Freezing and Storage Company at the Davao fishport Complex last Friday, funny stories were exchanged afterwards.
I wasn't the only one who was cringing from all those stench and muck. For one, Doc Domingo, the vet and hito expert, who was among those wading and pushing that night, stripped down to his briefs when he entered his van to drive home to Los Amigos in Tugbok district.
"Buti na lang walang checkpoint," he said.
Funny, ironically funny.
It seemed the whale was teaching us a lesson.
Whatever her specie is, no one can tell yet. Whatever she died of, no one too can tell yet. But one thing for sure, she chose that particularly mucky, stenchy place to beach in as if saying, "I'm dying, get me now. But in order to do so, wade into the muck that you have made my world become."
So, there we were, eeoowing and yukking when the very reason why we were was the making of our species, not the whale's.
E-mail: ikik@myway.com
(January 18, 2004 issue)
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