In Continuum.

Vertical Descent


Perhaps I won't need a bad grade or a broken heart to activate my contingency plans after all. There are other reason why I may want to move overseas and away from this country which I have been living in for the past sixteen years. There are times when you get sick of what you see outside your window - the concrete jungle made of cement and steel - and the hills beyond in the horizon becomes the pot at the end of a rainbow everybody seeks. At least that is how I feel as I stand on my balcony sometimes, looking out into the seemingly endless columns of houses, stretching out as far as the eyes can reach until the lights resemble the distant stars and the moving headlights of cars like ants with little torches.

There is a hill just to the East of my house, far away and distant. You can hardly see it on a cloudy day, but there it is on a sunny one when the clouds clear and the sun is shining from the right direction. It rises above all others in the horizon, standing there like a stubborn king, unmoved. I've always wondered what hill that is, because it can't be one that belongs to Singapore, geographically speaking. Most of the hills are located in the central area of Singapore, which is why it becomes so puzzling to see one in the East. I flipped through maps a dozen times, trying to find out the name of the hill that I see on a sunny day, but to no avail. Perhaps it may be the last paradise, an untamed land still untouched by any civilizations known to man, save for the natives who already dwell in the hills and amongst the trees. The last utopia right in the horizon, off the shores of Singapore, just waiting for the first foot to land upon the beaches.

But of course, what are the chances of that being true? After all, if eighty percent of the island chains on the Pacific have already been discovered, named, developed and taken over by men, how is it possible for this stone giant off the shores of Singapore to not have been given the same treatment? However, you cannot blame me for such childish and naive thinking, especially when the place that you live in is getting increasingly unbearable and intolerable. The cranes bringing in more steel rods everyday, the trucks pouring out more sand for filling and more rocks for breaking. The workers still toiling under the sun until dusk, and the sound of heavy machinery overpowering everything else around the estate. As my eyes followed the trail of smoke that rise from each and every one of those machinery, I pictured the little molecules fighting against the ones that belong to the cleaner air. The black army versus the white army, wielding microscopic sword at one another to claim their share of the air. Of course, the black army's population increased with every gust of air pumped out of the exhaust pipe. And soon enough, the air was clouded with the black army, and they slowly invaded the air upwards towards the nineteenth floor where I live.

There is going to be a day in the new future, whereby everybody is going to be armed with an oxygen mask of sorts. We are going to look like that as we walk on the streets, and nobody is going to wear white because it will get dirty too easily. There will be no such thing as a sunny day or a starry night, because the skies are going to be covered in poisonous fumes and smog. Some countries are already halfway there, while others are still trailing behind. But very soon, we are all going to live in air tight boxes all day long, or maybe even transparent bubbles to prevent us from breathing in harmful gases in the air. Our environment is going to be so badly polluted that people will be paying to get to Mars, even if it may kill them in the process. It's going to be death either way, so a new planet is going to provide us with new opportunities - not to live, but a new planet to destroy once again.

Driving along Paya Lebar Road, my father tried to pronounce every road sign there was to read with his perfectly spoken broken English. It was a strange mood I was in yesterday, and I blamed it all on the weather and the pre-birthday syndrome. Anyhow, there I was in the backseat and staring out of the car window at the cars that parked next to ours at the traffic lights. We waited forever for it to turn green, and the next traffic light almost immediately turned red again about a hundred meters down the road. Road works were underway, and the roads were greatly changed in that area of the country. Everywhere were fences, blocked our construction sites, new buildings being built from scratch, cement-mixers rumbling through opened gates, foreign workers painting the walls of the new mall, just everything was pretty much in motion there. Before my eyes, I saw the country booming, growing at the speed of a five year old boy. It was astounding, almost unbelievable that such a sight was just ten minutes away from my house, but there it was - digging, drilling, building, destroying.

Driving around the corner from my old high school, the construction of the new railway line was just about completed. Still, the damages were already done to the place I used to know, the stretch of land before the old Outram Institute was dug up to make way for new roads, the trees that used to line the pavement in front of the school were also chopped down. One of them, the great big tree that used to provide shelter for me and my friends at the 158 bus stop across the road was also chopped down, and it laid there in a puddle of murky water, with a giant crane right next to its rotting branches, dying.

It is part of how they promote Singapore as a tourism spot as well. Other than calling this country a "Lion City", they also try to promote just how 'green' this place it, in relative to all the urbanization happening everywhere. And they have been doing well over the years, keeping up the good image by having parks and woods built around urbanized area. However, that hasn't been the case in towns away from tourist spots, like Paya Lebar for example. Everywhere is being urbanized there, fields being taken over by construction and trees being torn out to build more roads. The rapidity of it all becomes suffocating, even for a person who was just passing by the area in the backseat of his father's car. I was sitting there in the car amidst the traffic, feeling a knot in my throat and the air suddenly heavy. It was a tough sight to swallow, to see the greenery that once was, lying there in a puddle of murky water - the coming of a concrete future.

It might be just me, but I am saddened by the sight of dead trees on television or before my eyes. Because they almost always go through the slowest death possible on a living thing. I don't think there is a slower death than one suffered by trees all around the world, since they do not die the moment they are chopped down from their roots. These trees are merely the result of our vertical ascent and descent, into the sky and underground with our buildings and underground railway stations. We seldom stop to think if we are the lord of the lands or are we merely in intruders. Which may have been why I cheered so loud when I watched The Two Towers for the first time, when the Ents pulled down the dam and flooded Isengard. It felt good to see nature fighting back literally, and to have our filth washed away into a great cavern. After all, such things are not going to happen anytime soon in real life, so why not cheer a little bit louder when it does somewhere else?

The problem with this whole vertical descent is that it is not going to stop anytime soon. Compared to the cost of blowing up old buildings to build new ones, it is indefinitely cheaper to clear trees from a green field and build houses over it. After all, you still have the problem of resettlement when it comes to clearing old houses, and it is not like we have a lot of land left in Singapore for you to build temporary flats. How far out into the ocean is the Singaporean government going to reclaim, before Indonesia or Malaysia becomes seriously offended, and decides to launch a missile into the air space of Singapore? This man-made destruction is not going to end, and more trees are probably going to be axed in the name of - urbanization. Sooner or later, humans are going to be the murderer of ourselves, and there is nothing we can do about it but regret at the very end. It may happen to my children, or the children of my children, so on and so forth. But that is going to happen for sure...

Unless I activate my contingency plans and move to Mongolia. Maybe tonight, or even tomorrow. But it may just happen some day, with my bags packed and my heart set. Instead of see my country being buried underneath thick layers of sand, I may prefer to go horse riding in the plains of Mongolia, even if it may sound ridiculous right now. Who knows, humans may turn to envy those nomads in the days to come. At least they are still going to get stars in a century's time.