My life is a beach

Filipinos love to think that anywhere in the Philippines, one is only less than half a day away from the sea. And why not?

Very few of us, though, are aware that this archipelago of 7,000-plus islands had come by way of a complex interplay of volcanic and tectonic events millions of years ago. This story was masterfully presented by Dr. Lawrence R. Heaney of the Field Museum of Natural History of Chicago in an intensive course on Philippine biogeography in October 2007 at the University of the Philippines Diliman.

Dr. Heaney capped his talks with a YouTube video of these hard-to-describe movements and upheavals that created this country from under the sea and from chunks of land from Australia and, hold your breath, the ancient China-Taiwan land mass! Professor Robert Hall of the Royal Holloway University of London put together the video.

Filipinos thus have beaches in their DNA. Our lives, culture, and history have bits of beaches in them.

It was in the rustic coastal town of Aringay in La Union where I first saw the light of day many decades ago. Its western flank is the West Philippine Sea.

Aringay boasts of nondescript, unpretentious gray sandy beaches, which in my younger years were WiFi-free. Those of us who settled in Manila in the mid-1940s dream of seeing again such beaches, which allowed us to be away from it all, away from the grind, grime, and crime of the city.

As a zoology undergraduate in UP Diliman, I had the rare chance to go to this magical place — Puerto Galera in Oriental Mindoro, with its lovely coves and enchanting beaches. This then little-known paradise has a sea connection with the world-acclaimed Verde Island Passage. The strip of sea between Batangas Bay and Verde Island is hailed as “the center of the center of marine biodiversity.” Foreign marine biologists have come and gone, fully convinced of its unrivaled richness and significance.

In the summer of 1961, I was in the field zoology class of the best and brightest group ever of third-year zoology students who descended on Puerto Galera. The parade of living invertebrates we came upon on the beaches and shallows were unbelievable. Life was on full display — from protozoa to sponges, flatworms, annelids, mollusks, echinoderms, and chordates. The tiny floating animals in the marine waters, called zooplankton, were all over. They dazzled us especially during moonless nights when the zillions of microscopic dinoflagellate Noctiluca lit up the surface of Puerto Galera Bay as our boats parted the water.

In the mornings, we strolled on the sandy beaches and saw flotsam of bits of seagrass, roots, shells, and pebbles. One time, we came upon half a dozen collapsed sails of deadly Portuguese-man-o’-war washed ashore.

The next summer, 1962, I skipped graduation rites in Diliman to work as a research assistant in a Sigma Xi-funded research on the primary productivity and respiration rates of sea urchins and sea stars, again in Puerto Galera.

In the 1970s, I was back for more of the same thrills and frills in that same place, as a teacher of the field zoology classes in five summers (1973, 1974, 1975; 1978-1979).

In those summers, I taught the awestruck field zoology students that there were more kinds of invertebrates that could be found in rocky shores than on sandy beaches. Rocky habitats offer more ecological niches and stability. Sandy beaches, though, had the allure of fascinating ghost crabs and the charm of hermit crabs.

There was a time when a band of half a dozen daring undergraduate students, males and females, enticed me to chaperone them for a night of clean fun and camaraderie in an isolated beach in the outskirts of Puerto Galera.

Take me to that white sandy beach by the baywalk? Can anyone build sand castles out there when the bay is one big poso negro that teems with deadly coliforms and fish gasping for air? Can any beachcomber ever hope to come upon even just a single ghost crab or a hermit crab out looking for a shell? Pandemic-weary Filipinos can only make fun of and make puns on that dolomite sand of a beach.

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Augustus C. Mamaril was an exile from January to September 1993 in the then Royal Holloway and Bedford New College (renamed since). In the 1980s, he almost ended up in jail in Pensacola, Florida, USA, for trying to uproot sea oats on the beach, but was restrained by Samuel P. Faulkner, his fellow graduate student in Mississippi State. He is relieved that he has been relieved of online teaching in the Institute of Biology of UP Diliman. In 1960, he met 15-year-old Macy Diaz at a beach in Aringay. They got married in 1967.