Montauk Point

21 May 2206(moved from Yahoo!360)-As far as I could remember I had always been exquisitely curious. I incessantly asked the question most of my adult siblings and parents eventually got tired of answering so I decided early on to find out the answers for myself. In our daily childhood routines of the maids giving the kids baths at night, Mely, fondly recalls, that when it was my time for bath I would mysteriously go missing in between undressing and entring the bathroom door. She and my grandmother would find me following ant lines and finding out where they headed to in single file. So perhaps it was this perpetual quest for an answer that made me go into a life of science. I did Zoology, then Medicine, then Pathology. The same curiosity lead me to the UP Mountaineers and my later work in northwestern Palawan. But for some reason, I get waylaid in this thing called life work and forget what it tis that i truly love doing; asking the question and answering why. Bob, a long time mountaineer and medicine colleague, shares the same itch which he channels into biking, climbing, and running. For him, all three were his means of answering basic questions like what lies beyond what one can see.

As I prepare to leave New York, the questions come back and the need to find answers in the remaining legal time that I have comes to fore. Last week a few of us leaving New York after graduation decided to see places we hadn't seen before. I volunteered Montauk Point; the farthest point of Long Island as it juts out into the Atlantic Ocean beyond the impossibly rich communities of the Hamptons into proletariat fishermans territory. As we reached the light house, one of my colleagues wondered, "What's so special about this place?" I couldn't quite answer his question. But as I stood on a rock facing the ocean met by a brewing storm in the horizon, there , as if experiencing a Hiroshi Sugimoto photograph, was the horizon where gray sky and dark ocean met. Nothing but empty space and boundless time. The most beautiful thing.