An Ocassional Night

A Beach an A Night

It was a colorful evening on that beach : purple sky, orange sunlight, and green sea. Grass and sands and huts mixed it up with its green, white, and light brown color. I hopped out of the motorcycle, and along with my friends we jumped in into one of the huts in that beach – Sayang Heulang, Pameungpeuk, Indonesia.
Inside the hut was everything. I noticed bags, broom, sofa, table, playing cards, guitars, even rice, grilled tunas, forks and spoons, glasses, all were scattered pretty bad on the wooden floor, like sardines which is being harvested. And still, I can add some more to keep everything messier : dusts, thermal bottle, plastic, and banana leaves. And although banana leaves was considered an unique thing – a substitute for dining plate, I thought it messed up every things. The hut was, in a gentle way to say it, a happy gathering. One or two guys tried to fix it up. They swept the floor, and they put all things in order. Another celebrates the gathering by throwing their bags into the floor. It wasn’t my first time experiencing messy environment. In fact, almost every tourist my age is messy.
I stepped out of the hut, and made my walk to the sea line. The wind breezed strongly, as if I was on a hill storm. Clouds filled the sky, and I couldn’t see the sunset clearly. Was everyday on this beach always like this? I wondered.
“No,” a local person, Tri, answered my question. “Even if it is the time for the sea line to arise, the wind was never been like this before.”
I noticed that Sayang Heulang was a name of a beach when I reached Pameungpeuk, a small region southern of Garut, which is well known for its beautiful beaches. I never know that Pameungpeuk has many beaches – in fact, I thought Pameungpeuk as the name of a beach, not a region. Due to the bad weather, I was curious to go to the beach, enjoyed the wind, sometimes far out on the ocean, high tides showed up. I thought that it would reach the beach, but it never was.
Our hut was surrounded by others. On ours left and right was a restaurant. It wasn’t so deserted, I thought. Whenever we felt hungry, those restaurants can serve us any food. Far to the north, there were other huts, as so to the south. Motorcycles and cars appeared sometimes, leaving their tracks on the sands. The only road was sands on this beach, and rocks and dirt on the entrance which I noticed by the existence of a ticket box and trees surrounding the road itself. Outsiders have to pay Rp. 5.000 to enjoy the sunset, or the winds, or swim, on the beach, and Rp. 3000 for the local people.
Not for long that night appeared on the beach, and it was dark. The sky was black, as what exist in crayons, markers, and I even thought that the sky was painted by board markers. There were no stars seen, no moonlight, and lights from the huts didn’t give any solution to reveal the darkness. I see night sky in my entire life. I remember on the city the sky was rather grey or dark blue. On my mother hometown it was dark blue filled with stars, but seldom had I seen the one that was black, and it was never been as black as that. I lied on the grass, and I couldn’t tell whether the sky was near in front of my face, or far beyond the universe. Everything was empty, and everything was black. What I noticed then were chuckles and laughter, and guitar strings, and songs that came out of my hut.
Local people usually do the fishing on the night, but I wasn’t sure that they went on that day due to the strong wind. Not until I saw what resemble torchlight for me far on the sea. At first, I thought that it could be ferry ship or else. But this beach has no harbor, thus eliminating the possibility for it to be lighthouse, too. If I was an extremist, I could refer it to be an UFO.
“Yes, they are fishermen. They went fishing,” a local said to me when I asked what the torchlight was.
“Isn’t it dangerous to go fishing on this bad weather?”
“I guess,” He answered “But things wouldn’t be as bad on the sea as it is here on the beach,”
People there refer fishing activities as ngobor, which literally means “lit a torch”. They gone fishing at night and each of boats would use torch light as their source of light. I wasn’t sure though, whether the fishermen really use torch to guide them. The beach isn’t located on a remote area: I guess even people on the remote area nowdays know what flashlight and petromax (kerosene powered lightbulb placed on a special tube) is, and they knew how to switch them on. I wondered, then, that ngobor wouldn’t be done by torch nowdays. The fishermen must be using something more modest, and ngobor, I guess, is what the tradition made. That is, the word ngobor was invented long time ago when the fishermen still use torch when gone fishing, long before flashlight and petromax is familiar among them.
Somehow I wondered how my life would be if I had born as a fisherman. Perhaps I have to face the strong wind and the black sky – something which I terrified most on the beach that I wondered whether I was on the afterlife just by gazing the sky. I imagined standing at the ship’s starboard side on a stormy night. Lightning strike the ship and the tide shake it. I could end up died on the ocean, or landed on a deserted island, like Chuck Noland on Cast Away.
The cards were passed, the guitar strings were picked, and the song was sung once I back to the hut. As tourists my friend and I talked about everything: college life, daily life, everything. Some of them make fun with their girlfriend. “That was a disgusting view,” said Tri who, among my friends, a local people. It was uncommon in Sayang Heulang, as so as in Indonesia, to flirt with their partner in front of public. Sayang Heulang is not USA, or English, or France or Germany, whose people can flirt whenever they like. We as outsiders are supposed to respect the hosts – one of which is by not flirting in public.
“I am ashamed by what my friend was doing. Perhaps I would be judged as a person who doesn’t respect my culture,” she added. Indeed, flirting in front of public was impolite to the people. Yet this day thing seems to have changed. A couple would flirt anywhere in big cities like Bandung, Jakarta, or Surabaya. Values and norms in Indonesia have changed.
Thievery was a hot issue to be discussed in Sayang Heulang. That night, our friend motorcycles’ were parked outside the hut’s bamboo-fence. Rizky, my friend, also a local, warn us to get our motorcycle inside the fence. Otherwise, it would be on a verge of being stolen. Inside the hut, where our friend resided, and laughed, and chat, he announced:
“Guys, would you please take your motorcycles in? I’m afraid it would be stolen.”
But until everyone went to sleep, no one put their motorcycles inside the fence, so Rizky and I had to watch it for the entire night. When everyone slept inside the hut, we had to deal with the strong wind on the front yard of the hut.
No security officers guarding the huts that night – there were people passing by, but you couldn’t really tell whether they were officers or just local people, or even a group of thieves. Thieves would say they were the security guards or fishermen, and what we need to believe when dealing with that kind of situation is trust, which sometimes fail us. We have to defend our belonging ourselves.
“What a jerk,” Rizky said. “I really don’t want to wake up the entire night just to babysit these motorcycles,”
On some occasion I saw a car passed by. It went north, and faded. Then it appeared again, from north to south. I care not a thing on the car until Rizky told me something:
“Watch the car. They could grab the motorcycles, put them into the car,”
“How could?” I asked.
“It is a new trick used by thieves. The backseat of the car has been modified so that only the front seats exist, thus leaving more room on the back. They drive their car near the abandoned motorcycles, and bingo, the motorcycles’ gone,”
“They carry the motorcycles inside the car?”
“Yeah,” he ended the conversation. After heard what he said, I went into the hut, picked a thermal bottle filled with warm water, a bedog – sundanese for machete, and a glass.
“Just in case,” I said.
Rizky then told me not to go outside or inside the beach at night. The entrance was a suitable place for thieves to hunt their target. I thought so, since the entrance was covered by bamboo trees and surrounded by bushes, with no light.
Spend the night while guarding the motorcycles was not an easy thing. We wanted to sleep, yet no one put eyes on the motorcycles. But I thought that, after all, most teenagers are always like that. They are rebels, they don’t want to be controlled, and they are free. And so, spending that night on Sayang Heulang beach was everything. It was frustrating, curious, and full of discovery, and adventure.

The Department and Me

Thursday, as I sit myself on a hard, plastic chair, and began to write, I remembered my friend told me that there is a possibility that the department I belong to is unsafe - there is possibility to be closed. The issue about this department, for which I have studied for almost three years, which is on the verge of being closed, is exaggerating. In fact I didn't really understand why it has to be closed, but the reason mainly due to hard accreditation.
I didn’t surprise, however. This department, although it has did its best to assure its students to learn and to live, allow their students to work off from what this department taught. I recalled when I was on my walk on a shady plafond; some of my friends gave me news about the alumnus. They were work as an administration boys or girls, some as salesmen or salesgirls, others continued their study, and the rest remained unknown. I didn’t know for sure, and I didn’t have any chance to proof it. In fact, it was a matter of believe or not.
One thing that I got from the conversation was that it was really hard to get a suitable job for us in Indonesia. We often heard that Mr. Santoso, an agricultural expert, has made his living by selling porridge, or Mr. Iwan, an architect who worked as a journalist. There are more Santoso or Iwan if you are willing to count – honestly you will not want to count them. I began to think that getting a suitable job now days is as hard as finding a needle in a stack of straw. More and more company coming, more and more people born and raised, yet more and more unemployed occur and people has no chance to live: they work what they were not willing to.
I stranded here, in this room – a medium campus dormitory cabin consists of four students, which two of its guests had already missing somewhere. Sunlight went through the windows just beside my seat, as I kept thinking about why should people born to be something, or rather, why some things big in people’s mind are fixed to be the same thing at all: businessman, merchants, company worker, or else? I would rather see the life of local people farming rather than watching how businessmen work.
Aside from that, I felt abandoned if this issue was true, but then what? Our friends and I were fated to get stuck into this department. If the reason to close this department was because the jobs gained by its alumnus really didn’t match with the department, then it all should goes the same for agricultural department in IPB, or forestry or Russian Literature department in UNPAD, or archaeology department in UI, or else. To be honest, I can think about that later. I feel that the best thing to do right now is to focus on what I want to be, and what I want to achieve. Even if later it is closed, I will regret no single thing, as this department is what bounded me and my friend for so long, thus enable me to do many things: went to a library, cruelled by lecturer, place hope, place worry, and place fate, and even write this piece of damn literature. Sometimes I feel no future for me, but isn’t tomorrow is still a mystery? Why should I sad or angry or worry about every things? I just need to do my best to survive.
I looked out of the window. The sunlight touched my eyes, and I began wondering what my life would be. Is it hard? Or is it full of happiness? I don’t know. I looked everything around me - chairs, beds, floors - and I thought that I should do something else rather than wrote all the time.

Only Us at the Beach

 It was a long time ago that I had know Pameungpeuk: a district belongs to Garut Region, West Java, that is well known for its beaches. And it was a place that I long admired. I had never got any chance to go there but this holiday. So that was it. My friends and I went there, December 26, 2010.
We took off from Cicaheum bus and minivan station, Bandung, and after six hours of hilly road trip inside a mini-bus, we landed Pameungpeuk. If by any chance I could bail out the bus in the middle of the trip, I would, since the trip took us across the topside of a mountain, that there were several other mountains visible from inside the bus: a pink SSPJ mini-bus, with the sign of Mr. Smile painted at the outside. Covered by thin white mist, the mountains stood left and right and stretched from near to far and then faded at the far distance. There were plants below the mountain, planted by local farmers, spread blocks by blocks below the mountains through far distance, and faded. The trip itself was hard and scary, though. The road was always curving left and right, up and down, passing buildings and plantings, and it was broken in some places. We would end up at the bottom of the canyon if anything bad happened. Fortunately, it didn’t.
We stayed with Rizki, a friend of ours who offered his house as a free bungalow for three days. His house was located in Cikelet, a sub-district of Pameungpeuk. It was there, in Cikelet that the bus made stop, not far from the Chief’s house, revealing that the stop was not an official bus stop. Cikelet was a sub-district which road is still resembled the old days: stone and dirt. Some houses were separated by plants and trees. There was a river passed by, and the houses were built lined along its current. So there were we, at Rizky’s house, spent the night quickly hoping to catch the sunrise at the beach.
The next day, we went to the beach when the sun had arisen, means that we were late to catch the sunrise. There were several beaches in Pameungpeuk district: Gunung Geder (Means Mount Geder), Santolo, and Sayang Heulang (Means Eagle’s Nest). Rizky took us a walk to Gunung Geder beach, while I sometimes took the pictures of the silent main road, the plants on our left and right, the rice fields, the sky, and my friends. The road was good at the moment: it was thin in wide, covered with asphalt, and on some spot you could see a banner or two.

After half an hour walk, we arrived on the beach. There were white sands lined up to the sea in Gunung Geder beach. I took several pictures, when I realized a unique thing: there was no one but us at the beach. There were no lifeguards, no boats or fishers, no restaurant, nothing. There were only us and the white sands lined up to the sea, with trees and grass about 50 metres away from sea lines.
“I feel like if this is our private beach,” a friend of mine, Rusdian, said while getting ready to play in the wave. He put off his T-shirt, and so does Jefry and Fahmi, my companions. I didn’t put my shirt off, I don’t get used to it. I’d rather wear it and get it wet.

hat morning, all of us played in the wave but Rizky. “I don’t bring any reserve clothes,” that was what he said when I asked him why he didn’t join. He watched out for us from the far distance, and sometimes warned us not to go too far to the sea. Southern Java Seas was well known for its deadly waves. By the new year of 2011, two tourists were swept away by the waves of Santolo beach-one missing, one found dead.
Sometimes I took pictures. This empty beach has many spot which would be good to be photographed. The waving sea, the white sand, and the clouds, there were all in the right order to be a nice picture. The wind breezed at a constant speed, and a bit strong. Sometimes my friends played with the sands, too. They wrote their names in the sands or built a sandcastle, despite their age.

I noticed that there were tiny holes in the sands.
“Those were nests of keyeup laut,” said Rizky while pointed out at one keyeup laut who made its appearance. Keyeup laut is Sundanese for tiny sea crabs (Keyeup=tiny crab, laut=sea). The crabs were only about 7cm in length, with less than 3cm in tall. They made their appearance on that morning, running across the sand and past the wind which begin to breeze strongly. Those who played in the waves also found sea snails.
Rizky showed us-who were wet and uncomfortable because of the sea water that stick into our bodies-a place for us to clean ourselves. It was the pond. There was a pond just a hundred away from the sea line. Amazing, I could say.
“It’s basically the stream of the river that went into the sea,” Rizky said pointing me the pond. It seems that the stream became a pond due to the land contour. As I walked myself down the pond, I could feel the water streaming into the sea. The water on the pond was warm, but the stream was cold. The differences could be recognized as I walked myself deeper.
The beach has nothing else to be explored. For those who wanted to have a meal, they can do it at the gazebos which stood far from the sea line. From there people could still see the beach. It was funny to think that there were no restaurants or vendors in Gunung Geder, or outskirt of it, as the beach offered people a good place to pass the time. Among every beach that I had visited, this one is the quietest beach. It’s probably because the place hasn’t been built that made it quiet. Also, the ticket was cheap. Visitors only need to pay Rp. 2000,00 to get into the beach.
It was almost mid day that we went back to Rizky’s house. We walked along the sand. Empty, but beautiful.