Two-wheel rides are heaven. I first learned to ride the bicycle as a boy of 10. There were no diminutive BMX models when I was learning so I have to steal my father’s bike, the all-metal full-scale adult version, every morning for about three days and learn to conquer the fear of falling flat on my face and probably break some bones, too. Those were early morning exercises on fortifying your terrified inner self against the likelihood of failure, which was real, of falling down hard from a moving object and being seen by someone you know and been laughed at as a result, which was worse.

I got to learn it rather quick, after many falls and cuts and bruises, of course. This was in rural Leyte when Neil Armstrong had just stepped on the moon and my paternal grandmother would tell me that nothing of the sort has happened, the radio reports notwithstanding. I was still in grade school when mornings were all about arithmetic and the properties of air and water interspersed with recess and goofing off with a few friends at the neighbor’s guava trees. Or the papayas, whichever was ripening at the moment. We would always be hollered at by the irate property owner and run off with the prized fruit sated by the thought we ate someone’s labor for free. We were idiots then.

But there was one thing most of my friends had since learned that I still hadn’t and I would look at some of their bikes and their riding skills with envy because not only didn’t I have one of my own but also because I was incapable of riding one even if I were handed one to ride on. But one late afternoon when classes had been dismissed and everyone was done watering the ornamental plants and our individual vegetable plots had been weeded and fertilized, someone allowed me to ride his bicycle. Balancing yourself on that thing for the first time was not easy, of course and we resolved to do so again the following morning when we had more time than wobbling then falling, wobbling then falling like there was not tomorrow.

The terror of the first assisted run was just sheer I will spare you the details. The many cuts and bruises were similarly deep, but the exhilaration I felt when I realized no one was no longer holding the bike for me was just awesome. That friend and I would subsequently go boating in his canoe that same Saturday morning to celebrate my success and that same canoe would flip over and left me clinging to its undersides and keep my head above the water. All I could see was this wide expanse of fast estuary waters flowing inland as the tide built, the mangroves to our left a good hundred meters from where we were and the shallow water pier to our right even further than that. The strangest thing was that I, who had not learned to swim at that point, was not afraid of drowning at all. I was still euphoric from having done well on a two-wheel contraption, I guess, nothing, not even a potential drowning event, could take away the joy of having conquered that metal terror of a few days.

A few days later, I would learn to swim the same waters just a few hundred meters from where the canoe overturned. One other friend pushed me off the pier while we were enjoying the sights and goofing of like usual and everyone gave instructions for floating in the water with ease and shouting themselves hoarse while at it. The thing about drowning is that you are so busy keeping your nose above the water you don’t care for anything else. I did not hear the insincere panic instructions and I certainly did not want to listen. Seriously, from those bastards? When I finally got solid ground beneath my feet, I actually went back to the deep end of the pier and swam again my friends shouted themselves silly. Then it was on to diving from platforms around that pier of ours. Summers were about diving head first from batil outriggers, which were about a meter off the water and then from the pilot’s house, which was a good five or six meters. And bicycle races, of course, from someone’s house to the airport where DC-3 aircraft from Philippine Airlines land promptly at 7 o’clock each Monday, Wednesday and Friday of the week.

As an adult I would sometimes get to swim in pools, some of them in luxurious places, paid for by generous hosts happy to have your company for a weekend or two. I haven’t really swum that much in the intervening years, preferring to swim in salty waters that to my mind are much healthier and certainly infinitely more hygienic than pools. A good friend about a year or two ago invited me on a weekend of cliff diving and the 10-year old in me said yes.

The trip first took me to the airport, then an hour-long car ride and then 15, 20 minutes by pump boat. I had a choice of diving from six meters, which was chicken. I tarried there a while, thinking I could do 10 meters, but secretly doubted my own courage to jump head first that high up from the blue sky overhead down to the deep blue cliff water below. It did take me a while, likely an hour when I finally took the eight steps to the edge of the 10-meter platform and stared at my torment below. I’ve heard of Korean men failing to keep their arms close to the body as they fell and hurting their shoulders they have to be evacuated and sent to the hospital kilometers away. I’ve heard of girls losing their undergarments as they hit the water from that height and the chuckles and sometimes salacious stares some of the non-resort personnel give on such incidents. But I was thinking only of my own dive. This was not the batil pilothouse of my youth, certainly. This was my own neck, of course. But I closed my eyes and dived, head first.

I would not take the 15-meter platform, you silly.