It was one
fine afternoon during KKN when Pitra, Risya, Syihab and I went down to the
beach in Batulawang to do some seaweed hunting. One of the members of our group,
Ana, was currently starting to do her fair share of workload as part of her KKN
duty by teaching the female townsfolk how to make seaweed dodol (it’s some sort of traditional cake, not unlike
pudding, but.. It's too much of a hassle for me to go into details, please kindly google it yourself), but since she practically got no
time to do anything other than look for, make sure and double-check that every form
of cookware needed was present and ready for use together with the housewives from
all over the town; we decided to give her a helping hand and took it upon us to
look for the seaweeds instead (besides, we had nothing better to do that day!).
As soon as
we arrived, Mr. Baharudin, a seaweed farmer in Kemujan, had been waiting for us. It had been a week
since he'd asked us to join him in seaweed harvesting and we'd excitedly said we'd
take him up on his offer. He already had 3 boats prepared for us (the story
about the seaweed farm in Kemujan is coming!). He wasn’t alone; there were also
two boys coming along with us: Firman and Ferdi.
Mr. Haerudin
was on the same
boat with Firman, his son; while Pitra, Risya and Syihab took the same boat
(which worried me so much because none of them had any idea how to ride a boat) , and I went along with Ferdi, Mr.
Mamat’s son, one of the seaweed harvesters. Well, just a friendly
reminder that this is not a
story about seaweed farming, it’s a story about Ferdi—just like the
title says, and it's a very short
story.
It took us
about 20-30 minutes to ride about 500m-1 km to reach the middle of the sea
where the seaweeds were growing. While he was rowing the boat, I tried to have
a small talk with Ferdi. At first, he seemed like a quiet boy; but
when I started asking about his experiences heading seawards, he couldn’t stop telling me his unforgettable
moments on the sea, as if they were still clearly visible in his memory.
He got his
boat a year ago when he had been in second grade. It once had belonged to her
father. He couldn’t tell how happy he had been when his father had passed down
that small, blue boat to him. “At that time my father was building a new boat,
a bigger one, with machine attached to it, right there.” He pointed to a boat that was under
construction on the beach. “Then he gave me this boat. I was
really happy, I couldn’t believe I was trusted a boat, it was like a
dream. Now I have my own boat
and I can ride it whenever I want!”, he said enthusiastically. When he was younger he used to go to
sea with a piece of board (yes, board!).
But he couldn’t do that any longer since his body was getting bigger.
Ferdi is from the Bugis tribe—a tribe from Sulawesi that is
famous for their unbeatable sailing capability. No wonder if his father had introduced
him to everything about sea, boats, fish and sails since he was very young. In
Batulawang, Kemujan, where the people are mostly Bugis, it was like a daily
scenery to see the kids playing with boats. Some of Ferdi’s friends owned boats
just like him, some of them not yet. On sunny days, they frequently went to
sea. Once they arrived in the middle of the sea, in one of the safe spots to
swim, they took off their shirts and jumped into the sea after throwing the anchor
down, playing with the fish and the corals.
Ferdi knew a lot about seaweed farming; the types of
seaweeds that had ever been planted in his father’s plot; the maps of seaweed
farms of the entire beach, from south to north; the pest-y fish that could danger the seaweeds,
and he still remembered those who had donated seaweed fields to his father. He
also told me the safe spots to swim and the kind of fish that could give you two-month
bedrests, and the myth of an old ship that is banned for visit.
The story that amazed me the most was when he told me the
time when he had almost sunk. It happened in the middle of a gale. He had been
all alone, just him and his boat, and he had happened to be far away from the shore.
The wind had been deadly fas and robust, propelling him further away from
reaching the shoreline. He tried so hard to row his canoe as hard as he could,
but suddenly the wind hit the canoe and it got stuck on the coral down under. He
had no choice. It was impossible to reach the beach by swimming. And he
couldn’t ask for help since there was no one around. Inevitably, he dived down
into the sea and then swam back up to the surface to take another deep lungful
breath, repeatedly doing this routine, until he succedeed getting his canoe
back. Just by listening to him I could imagine how frightening it must have
been, and not to mention he had been just a 7-year-old boy. But from the look
on his face while telling me the story, I could see how proud he was to be able
to save his own life, with all of his own courage he had won against his own
fear.
He told me that one day, he wanted to be a great sailor;
better than his father. He had a dream of building his own ship, a big ship
with machine; to conquer the ocean, and to go on a voyage to places he's never been
before.
cheers
--
Ayu Diah Cempaka
Q tnggu kisah petualanmu yg lain diah
ReplyDelete