I’ll always remember Ina’s expression when she looked out to sea through the train window on our trip back to the east coast. She patted my head and tapped on the windowpane, murmuring things to me about the sea as the Pangcah people know it.
She said that the original ancestor of our village was the sky god, who lived in Arapanapanayan in the south. By the fourth generation the sky god had six great-grandchildren, the youngest of whom was a girl named Tiyamacan. The sea god took a liking to Tiyamacan, but she was not willing to marry him and hid herself from him wherever she could. The sea god became angry and raised a flood. That sea god would not take no for an answer.
Tiyamacan’s Ina, Madapidap, missed her daughter very much. She turned into a seabird and flew up and down the coast calling out to her daughter. Her father Keseng climbed the mountain until he found a spot with a view of the sea and turned into a snakebark tree fern. Later on, her eldest brother Tadi’Afo, who had fled into the mountains during the Deluge, became the progenitor of another tribe. Her second brother Dadakiyolo went to the west and became the progenitor of the aboriginal people there. The third son Apotok went south and became the ancestor of some communities away down south. Lalakan and Doci, the fourth and the fifth children, sat in a long wooden mortar and floated on the floodwaters to the summit of Mount Cilangasan. The two of them had no choice but to become husband and wife and continue the family line.
At first, brother and sister kept having bestial offspring, a serpent, a turtle, a lizard and a mountain frog, but no human children. The brother and sister — no, the husband and wife — felt very, very sad. One day they received the sun god’s blessing and had three normal daughters and a son. They gave them the sun’s surname. I can’t really remember the details, but the long and the short of it is that one of these kids ended up moving to our village and becoming our ancestor.
Ina said, people will always run around trying to find a place to call home — a place they like and where they can make a living. If you live on this side of the mountain a landslide might force you to the other side. If you live on the plains, other people might force you into the mountains. If you live on an island sometimes you might be able to go to another island. I think Ina knew what she was talking about.
At the end of the year I calculated how much money I’d saved and realized I already had enough to buy a piece of land and start building the Seventh Sisid. I finally left the business a year later.
It was hard at first. I had no one to help me, and I had to figure out lots of things on my own. And I discovered something really interesting: when I opened, many people came once and never returned. Guess why? You got it, they were all my old customers. Maybe they weren’t used to seeing me somewhere sunny and bright.
I sometimes thought that he’d come in someday, order a cup of salama coffee or something, and sit at the Lighthouse, without me being able to recognize him, because whatever he did he wouldn’t take off his shirt to show me his back. After all, just like I said, I only remember his back. I know every mole and polyp on his back, and the color of his skin. But all I know is his back.
If he had come in, I would have sung the songs on the CDs for him. I would have stood behind him and sung those songs for him.
Part VIII
21. Through the Mountain
Detlef Boldt looked down at the island from the plane. It’s been more than thirty years, he thought.
More than three decades before, when he was a feisty young man, he had participated in the biggest TBM (tunnel boring machine) design the world had ever seen. TBM was a game-changer in tunneling technology, offering an alternative to the traditional drilling and blasting method. Detlef had made a short trip to the island to attend a specialist meeting as a TBM consultant. He did not meet too many people during his short stay, and he only let his old colleague Jung-hsiang Li know he was coming back. He just wanted to enjoy a quiet trip with Sara. Yet the trip was not purely for pleasure, or at least Sara didn’t think it was.
Sara was a marine biologist with an enduring interest in Norway’s coastal biomes; it was off the coast of Norway that she’d met Detlef. Detlef had been invited to consult on a private methane ice DIP (development investment project). Several of his best students, all specialists in drilling techniques, were on the project team; naturally they asked their old teacher to come on board.
The survey boat Detlef was on was operating in waters just off the continental shelf where Sara happened to be leading a protest against a whaling vessel. Detlef, taking a none-of-my-business attitude, watched the situation unfold with detachment. He was a man who believed in professional competence, and appeared rather condescending, as if he were standing in judgment over the protesters.
The protest boat wasn’t large. The “Don’t Massacre the Giants of the Sea” banner they were holding up flapped in the frigid wind, and with Sara’s red hair billowing out in front, it was really an arresting sight. Whether by accident or design, the whaling ship changed course and ended up scraping the protest boat. It was just a scrape, but the difference in tonnage was so great that the protest boat couldn’t absorb the impact without tipping. The protesters fell into the water, and, because it was so close by, the survey boat offered emergency assistance. Luckily, the protesters were wearing life jackets. They all seemed to know very well how to survive in such a situation, which gave Detlef the impression that the protesters had let the boat go over on purpose. Then, when the redhead, soaking wet, was being helped onto the ambulance, she gave Detlef an unwitting glance, which gave him the “irrefutable” (a term that cropped up frequently in his technical reports) sense that something had hit him.
Detlef came up with some excuse to visit Sara in hospital, and soon they went on a date to the seashore. As they looked out across the seemingly icy waters of the Norwegian Sea, the lights in the distance were like flickering embers. The couple talked about everything under the sun: from the ecological consequences of methane ice extraction, the whaling industry and changes in coastal shellfish ecology to poetry; Sara used to share her enthusiasm for Keats and Yeats.
One time they got into a disagreement about whether Norway should continue whaling. Sara said, “The reason you think it’s no big deal is because you’ve never seen a minke whale bleed to death right before your eyes.”
“But many whalers are whalers because that’s what their forebears have always done.”
“Yeah, but aren’t there lots of whalers whose forebears weren’t whalers. I mean, can’t people’s occupations change? Can’t tradition change?”
“Perhaps,” Detlef said. “But you’re also against methane ice mining.”
“I am,” said Sara.
“But it’s a resource. The exploitation of this resource isn’t going to hurt anyone.”
“Not going to hurt anyone? Depends on your definition of ‘anyone.’ Methane ice is different from petroleum. As you well know, scientists now believe that it forms when gas migrates from deep within the crust along faults until it precipitates or crystalizes upon contact with ice-cold polar seawater. Which is to say that methane ice deposits are actually part of the ocean floor. We really don’t understand how much damage extraction might do to the Arctic region. It could well alter fragile landforms and microclimates, couldn’t it? Maybe no people will die, but other life-forms won’t be able to adapt to such dramatic environmental change.”