Hawaiian monk seal

NAS Barber’s Point in Hawaii based naval personnel before it was decommissioned in 1998; services joined the Kaneohe Marine Base on the windward side of Oahu.

Still known as Barber’s Point after the Captain Barber of a capsized ship headed for the Orient in 1796, the NAS airport has since acquired its Hawaiian name Kalaeloa, used as an alternate to the Honolulu International Airport.

My Canadian daughter celebrated her birthday this weekend at the White Plains Beach on Barber’s Point, a surfing location for beginners, and a previously limited access beach available only to military personnel.

We were impressed with the state of the park and the rainbow ethnic groups using it, the tidiness of the facilities and the care the users exerted to keep the place clean, but it was the big fat Hawaiian monk seal lying on the shore that held our attention even as our young ones tested their swimming and surfing skills on the water.

Known to native Hawaiians as ‘Ilio-holo-i-ka-uaua, “dog that runs on rough water,” it is an endangered specie, an earless seal endemic to the Hawaiian Islands.  They are solitary animals, thus its endearment to this secular monastic.

The female of the specie is bigger and heavier than their male counterparts and this one in the park, properly cordoned in her space from gawking and picture-taking beachcombers, looked like she might be pregnant as well.  Members of the specie are known to molt their hair and look like halo-head monks, the reason the German archaeologist who named them gave their current moniker.

A monkish looking Jerry Tan of our island, perhaps an endangered specie among the gloom-and-doom cynicism of current economic prognosticators, Mr. Tan of this paper’s parent company had the temerity to promote a Saipan Air launching in July this year to serve clientele from Narita, Nagoya, and Osaka.

We have on various occasions promoted our islands to friends and colleagues from Japan, Korea, and China (Shanghai, Beijing and Dong Bei) but our contacts have been wary over the seeming high cost of the trip through international carriers. I am sure Mr. Tan has done his homework with the numbers, and with knowledge of the affordable charter flights from Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing (we were by chance onboard Beijing’s inaugural flight), he is either playing pied piper to the Japan market, and the Korea connection, or he knows something that we don’t.

Recent incidences of local mistreatment of visitors haunt our promotions but Mr. Tan’s previous stewardship of the MVA might have given him some insight into how we can turn the pristine beauty of our natural resources to our economic advantage. Mr. Tan has a three-year timeline for the Nippon market. Maybe he might incline his tested business acumen to the Hanggul and Zhongguo markets as well.

The airline announcement, like Tony Pellegrino’s air cargo, is simply a first step, a necessary one but hardly the decisive one. What is critical is what we do to be more welcoming to visiting travelers, to take pride in who we are and what we create with our lives, how we keep our environment to be conducive to good health and pleasant ambiance, attractive to a world grown weary from the blight of industrial pollution, urban congestion, and contemporary insanities. Fructifying the land and waters through productive means native to our population for our own basic support goes without saying.

We do not have monk seals to protect from harm but we shield the diminishing school of sharks in our waters. We initiated the Marianas Marine Monument, though we have yet to appropriate the enormous educational and economic potential of a protected national marine park in our neighborhood.

Not unlike the illusions of our time, we long for instant messianic salvation from casinos to fill our government coffers even when we know that Nevada, Atlantic City, Singapore, and Macau hardly have anything to commend to the hosting of the gaming culture into our neighborhoods. We already know the incalculable social effects of poker machines on our islands. Life in the fast lane and of easy money has mesmerized the core of the Marianas soul.

We also like to play the blame game.

Still, the power innate in the Chamorro and Carolinian, the creativity shown by the Filipino and the Taiwanese, the Zhongguoren and the Hanggul Saram, the Nippongo and the Hindu, the Bangladeshi and the Pakistani, the varied groups and individuals from Southwest Asia, Americas, Oceania, Europe, Africa and the rest of Micronesia, await the paradigm shift that transcends current practices of rivalry and envy, competition and opposition, into cooperation and collaboration.

In the CNMI, ethnicity is challenged but it is not in danger. It is rather in the process of reformulation. It is the human soul that pales at the edge of oblivion. Pellegrino and Tan, et al, were once aliens to these shores but have made it their home. Might we learn to reach out to our neighbors like kin, and to the visitors as beloveds?

The endangered monk seal lounged on Hawaii’s Ewa Beach shore this weekend, and when I walked away with my rumination, I heard it belch, “Nah!” We might want to prove it wrong!

Jaime R. Vergara (jrvergarajr2031@aol.com) is a former PSS teacher and is currently writing from the campus of Shenyang Aerospace University in China.