No one saw him disembark on an overcast night, no one saw his parau (sailboat) sink into the horizon, but he wasn’t missed. The truth was that the obscure man was presumed dead because he hadn’t returned from Bataan after it fell. Nauseous and bleeding he had somehow dragged himself to safety. He had somehow survived malaria, heat, dehydration and dysentery, only to be captured by the Japanese and then somehow escaped the death march. He’d survived in spite of everything, while most of the men that he served with hadn’t escaped execution or hadn’t endured the harsh march or lived to tell of the harsh treatment those who made it received afterwards at their destination, Camp O’Donnell. He escaped the humiliation, the torture, and the hopelessness of it all. As soon as he could, the escapee stretched out in the bottom of his stolen boat. He needed to sleep and heal now that he was free. He was awakened by the sun around noon. He saw without astonishment that he already felt better and that his wounds had begun to close; he closed his eyes and slept some more, not out of exhaustion but because of determination. He knew he had to sleep, sleep as much as he could, so he shut his eyes and slept some more, trusting the wind would take him where he hoped he’d find other men (and perhaps women) who had refused to surrender. He had stolen the tiny boat knowing that it was what he needed for his invincible purpose. He knew that down south, in perhaps Mindanao or Cebu that he’d find the contacts that he wanted to find, but he knew that his immediate obligation was to sleep. Towards midnight he was awakened again by extreme hunger. A pot of cold rice, a few mangos, and four or five jugs of fresh water were all of the provisions he had with him and he knew that that wasn’t enough to sustain him, so he planned to fish and to catch rain water and forage and solicit favors whenever and wherever he could, and when there was no rice he’d settle for camote, cassava, gabe and green leaves.
The passions that drove him were basic, though not universally shared by everyone. He wanted to be free; he wanted to be free and live a life based on integrity but under the Japanese he knew it wouldn’t be possible. The struggle to survive had exhausted him and challenged him to his core. If someone were to ask him if he had a plan, he wouldn’t have been able to answer them. The small confined world of the small boat surrounded by a vast, desolate ocean suited him, because it offered him a temporary refuge, a safe haven, and a hiding place. The nearness of islands also suited him, for they’d provide him with the few necessities that he’d need to survive. Once he had the sustenance that his body needed he planned to spend as much time as he could resting and sleeping in his tiny boat. And if he slept, he could also count on dreaming.
Each time he went ashore in search of something to eat or drink, he faced reality; and since there was a paucity of food, of course, he didn’t want to take anything away from people who were already starving. Over time he learned how to convert buri trees into a meal. After heating slivers of buri by the heat of sun he would pound the wood to separate the dry sap from the hard, knotty vascular tissues, in hopes of producing a reddish looking flour, which when cooked in a pan along with slices of coconut flesh tasted like a million! The man, both asleep and awake, dreamed about food and was never very far from the horror of hunger. He also sought a state of mind that would allow him to go for a very long time without eating.
Consequently he became extraordinarily weak. That was when he had no choice but to do one or two things. He would gathered seeds which he hadn’t known before were edible and cook them for food, or if he felt brave enough to enter an occupied town with a string of fish he would barter the fish for corn meal. In the best of times one’s appreciation of corn meal or buri flour may never rise to the level of love and affection, but to someone who can’t obtain anything else to eat, they (as it did for him) quickly become delicacies. One afternoon (now his days and nights all ran together, now he was so weak that he remained awake for only a few hours each day) he saw an illusionary ship off on the horizon. He became afraid then that he’d become too conspicuous and had attracted the attention of the enemy. So he hid below the gunwales of the parau. He wasn’t long disconcerted then before he realized or imagined that the ship had been a figment of his imagination. Nevertheless, he tried to outflank it. The man emerged from sleep that day confused and couldn’t really be sure whether he had seen an enemy ship or not or whether he had simply dreamt it. All that night he suffered from insomnia. All that night he lay there afraid that he’d been spotted, and he tried to exhaust himself, but scarcely managed a few snatches of sleep. He tried not to think about food and had scarcely had enough to eat all week, when he felt like jumping overboard and drowning himself. In this state his eyes burned from tears that ran down both of his cheeks.
Randy Ford
