Baler, Philippines, November 23, 2015

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I met my friend Doug Ottke in Manila. He was working with the Peace Corps and met me when I landed at the airport. He and I played football together at Earlham College and had been roommates during summer training camp.

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We took a bus to Baler late yesterday.

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We got in after dark and walked down alleys and side streets before eventually getting to the ocean. Ottke had instructions from the owner of a hotel that we should walk down the beach until we came to a river. Cross the river and his beach hotel was on the other side. Easy to cross, he had said. You can walk across.

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As we headed down the beach, I carried a big backpack and was walking in bath sandals that mostly worked on the dark sand. It looked like volcanic sand, but everything was muted, we only had half of the moon for light. Hotels, beach resorts, stores, and mostly a long line of seawall passed to our right as we headed south on the beach. On our left the ocean roared with row after row of great waves, crashing and rolling and splashing. Everything was brown and black except the foam of the waves and the light of the moon. We passed the shape of three or four guys, huddled around a motorcycle, smoking pot.

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"Hey, man," one of them said in English, and we waved and kept moving. 

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Now and again, someone walked past through the shadows, a silhouette going from here to there. Where were they going? What were they doing? 

We passed a stretch of beach littered with plastic wrappers and trash, shockingly white in the moonlight, like the underside of a fish. After the field of trash there were coconuts and then limbs and branches, twigs and sticks poking out of the sand.

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From quite a distance we started to make out the river. This was no stream, but at least 100 yards to the other side, wider in places. It did not look like something that you could walk across. We followed a spit of sand out to where the breakers were coming in to our left, and the water rushed seaward from our right, whipping past in a sort of rapids right in front of us. Beyond the fast water there was a still area, and then a spit of sand coming from the other side of the river. If we crossed it would be here. In a few steps and I went from ankle deep, to knee deep, to waist deep, and backed out. Waves rolled in from the other way and made things suddenly deeper.

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We settled on a test run. We left my sandals, and Ottke's backpack and shoes on the spit of sand while we did our recon. While we were talking over what to do a rolling wave rushed through and picked it all up and scattered everything while we waded around frantically picking things up, squinting in the dark. I lost my footing and fell backwards, bouncing right back up again but dousing my backpack in the process. We regrouped, talked it over, and made a concerted stab at crossing.

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Since my first trip to southeast Asia I had been packing a lawn and leaf trash bag in my backpack in case of rain, or in case the backpack got put on top of a van or bus, so I put the backpack and bath sandals in it. I hoisted it on my shoulder and smelled wood fires as I stepped into the rushing water. Barefoot, I could feel the bottom, first thick grained sand, then mostly shell, and finally gravel and small stones getting a little bigger with each step. I was in up to my knees just long enough for me to think that I may have found a way, the water cruising through so hard I had to lean toward it. Soon it was to my waist, and now the force of the water and I were locked in a battle. I had to push my weight to keep my footing. Were there crocodiles in this river? I figured the water was moving too fast for a shark attack and I almost started to laugh. Then I was up to my armpits and feeling with my toes while the water carried me a little more seaward with each step. I bounced along like an astronaut on the moon. The foam front of a wave rolled in one way while the water rushed the other way, and I turned back. Ottke did the same. I had the backpack on my head, still wrapped in the trash bag and I didn't bother to put it on properly. 

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Soon we were walking back to the center of town to find a new hotel, now we were the dark shapes in silhouette barely visible in the brown and black. We passed a few others, but this time it wasn't until we were nearly back in the lights of town that anyone noticed us.