I’m referring to the famed “Coconut Bent Tree” overhanging the Maasin River in Pilar, my wife’s hometown on Siargao Island. For years, it provided succor and entertainment for both tourists and locals. Now it is no more, brought down by the literal weight of that considerable burden.
“It is with great sadness [we announce] the well-known [tree] has reached its end,” Pilar’s department of Tourism, Culture and Arts said in a recent social media post. “Pilar is thankful for the resources given by the Almighty… to preserve the ‘Coconut Bent Tree’ that… gave livelihood to the community.”
In a separate post, a group called Litik Maasin River-Siargao addressed the former shrub directly. “Everything has a limit,” it said. “Thank you for the time you were here with us, for helping each of us… We will try to continue what you started. We will miss you so much Coconut bended tree.”
No one knows exactly how or when the tree’s unique abilities got discovered. I have no memories of it from my earliest visits to Siargao in 2006. But sometime after that, as the island attracted more tourists seeking adventure, the tree became a familiar fixture dangling rope over water, the perfect place for visitors pretending to be Tarzan.
“Nothing lasts forever,” photographer Janos Andanar recently re-captioned a 2018 photo. “Good thing I took a picture… before it became famous.”
The hanging coconut tree miraculously survived 2021’s Typhoon Odette that devastated the island, causing billions in damage. Among the storm’s casualties were the iconic Cloud 9 pier—on which I proposed to my wife—and the island’s once-luscious tropical rain forest at Sugba Lagoon. But the tree bent over the Maasin River stood firm, doing its part in recent months to help attract and entertain the returning flood of tourists.
It may have been that exertion, in fact, that hastened its demise.
The famous tree’s death, cultural organization Lokal Lab Siargao declared in a post of its own, is a “wake-up call” regarding development. Tourists, the post continued, must “be more conscious and responsible. We learned that there was a no-climbing sign put on the tree recently, yet… some tourists continued to climb.”
The irony, of course, is that any enforced climbing restrictions would have considerably diminished the tree’s vaunted tourist appeal. And therein lies the rub: the eternal tension between tourism’s economic benefits vs. its potential environmental damage.
Ivy and I had our own tussle with that tension back in 2018. It happened at Magpupungko Beach, not far from the notorious bent tree, where she and her family own property. All her life, my wife has dreamed of building a modest resort on the 7000-square-meter lot now in her name. And as the swarms of tourists began arriving, we figured it was time.
But to build a cabin, we had to remove trees. Specifically, six coconut trees that had long provided shade, beauty, and, occasionally, the refreshing taste of buko juice sipped from the shell.
“For me, it was all about the trees,” I wrote in a book called A Tooth in My Popsicle launching this week in Manila. Though we had been convinced of the necessity of removing those trees, neither Ivy nor I realized how hard it would be. “We found out one morning,” I continued, “as the eager crew of tree cutters arrived to do its work. For a while, I watched with a sinking heart as those loyal, long-serving trees began to fall. Then retreated to a nearby porch to grieve. Finally, Ivy, unable to watch any longer, came and sat down beside me. With tears in our eyes, we hugged and promised to cut no more trees.”
Bottom line: I understand the pain at Maasin River.
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David Haldane’s latest book, “A Tooth in My Popsicle,” is available on Amazon and Lazada. A former staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, where he contributed to two Pulitzer Prize-winning stories, Haldane is an award-winning journalist, author, and radio broadcaster with homes in Joshua Tree, California, and Northern Mindanao, Philippines. This column appears weekly in the Mindanao Gold Star Daily.
