Beyond Marrs

Our plane descended through towering, anvil-shaped thunderheads, and the hazy glow of urban lights started peeking through intermittent flashes of lightning. Ada gripped Mom’s hand tightly, and I remembered that we don’t come from thunderstorm country. We were all beat down tired from a marathon of long haul flights, airports, and jet lag. Coming in scratchy over the intercom, the Korean Air staff let us know that we would soon be landing in Singapore, and to remember that there was no chewing gum allowed (I later learned that while it is not illegal, its importation and sale is heavily restricted). Violations of this law could carry a hefty penalty in a country that has a reputation for strict laws, many of which are aimed at maintaining order, cleanliness, and public safety. In light of this new information, we all stuffed our mouths with our remaining sticks of Doublemint gum and chucked it in the trash, thanking the flight attendant for the reminder.

It was a bit of a whirlwind preparing to leave home, and somewhat bittersweet. In the weeks before stepping on to our boat in Jakolof Bay, the Varied Thrush returned, we watched hundreds of honking Sandhill Cranes make their way across Kachemak Bay, and the evenings took on the sights and sounds of summer. We had a long list of homestead, work, and personal tasks to complete before we were in a good place to shift gears for an entire year. It seemed like every day was a rush to complete a checklist of tasks, whether it be preparing a document or completing an interview for work, working on finishing siding on the house, or organizing a veritable sea of logistics to make this all work. We love our home, we truly love our work, and we love our life in Seldovia. We aren’t running from any of it. This trip represents over a decade of dreaming, scheming, and re-working what was possible for us – what is important to us. We have wanted to take the kids to Asia since we learned about Ada’s pending arrival while sitting on a rotted out porch of a plywood shack at Nushagak Point, Alaska. 

This trip is a gift, wrapped in privilege. We want our kids to have an understanding of the world around them, and how they fit into it; to understand that sometimes “beautiful” and “ugly” are all wrapped up and entangled with one another; and that they have the ability to do hard things—not just endure them, but embrace them. Becoming addicted to comfort can be stifling, especially for young minds that ought to be learning about how amazingly capable and pliable they are if they only take a moment to let it all in. I want them to know that what separates us all, geography aside, is paper thin. Most importantly, we want them to understand that there isn’t just one “right” way to live in this world—there are many.

It has been a bit surreal to start this journey, and an interesting personal footnote to begin with a brief layover in Seoul, South Korea. Almost 20 years ago I spent a day in the city on my way home from Southeast Asia, with fatherhood far beyond my imagination at the time. We spent a few short hours there, walking around the Bukchon Hanok Village, sandwiched between Gyeongbokgung and Changdeokgung Palaces. As we happened to arrive on Buddha’s birthday, the palace complexes were closed, but it was intriguing to stroll through the narrow alleyways and take in the traditional Korean households and shop fronts.

After another 6 hour flight, we arrived in Singapore during a lightning storm and have started our trip in earnest. Singapore  is both a city and a country, and in more ways than one, is unlike anywhere else we are likely to encounter this year. While it shares weather with its neighbors, the comparison stops there. Singapore is one of the most densely populated places in the world, 22,000 people per square mile, and is also one of the cleanest. There are heavy fines for littering, ambitious urban greenery initiatives, mandatory recycling programs, and waste-to-energy incineration. We couldn’t help but notice how few waste bins there were around the city, and we wondered if there was a healthy dose of enforcement by fear. This all brought back a recessed memory of an American teenager in the 1990s who was sentenced to be caned for violating vandalism laws.

All that aside, we found Singapore to be an intriguing convergence of histories, cultures, languages, and cuisines. It’s an ancient trading port and former British colony, and today is a modern banking hub and marvel of efficiency and cleanliness. On our first day, we strolled along the immaculate promenade below towering skyscrapers of all the major banks of the world, sauntered through the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple in Chinatown, and marveled at the cleanliness and order of it all. We have started our journey in an alternate Asian reality, and I can’t help but wonder how these two young ones are going to wrap their heads around the differences between Singapore and Kathmandu. Time will tell.

We didn’t have a lot of time here – three or four days – and in the beginning we spent much of our time in and around Marina Bay. We visited the “Super Trees”, which are essentially these hulking, man-made forests of steel, seeded with creeping epiphytes and various species of trailing tropical plants. At the top of the centrally located tree, we lingered long enough in the 105 degree heat to peer across the Singapore Strait into Indonesia. That night we lay on the ground and watched a light show with thousands of others. 

After we departed the Super Trees, we spent some time at another marvel – a 2-acre indoor cloud forest, housed in a 200 foot tall glass dome with a 115 foot waterfall. This conservatory has 7,000 plants spanning 135 species, and is meticulously curated with an army of workers and an extensive system of automated misting apparatus. It is a wholly separate environment from that which exists outside its walls, much like Singapore exists in suspended reality from the rest of Asia. We loved every minute of it.

On our final day we decided to let the kids navigate us to Little India and Kampong Glam, Singapore’s Malay-Muslim Quarter. We found it fascinating that within a few blocks of one another, we were able to visit Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist temples, and the Sultan Mosque.

It all seemed to exist intertwined with one another, with the appeal of a cultural crossroads that reminded me of Sarajevo. Singapore was a unique place to begin this year of ours, in part because it will surely prove to be so different from our other experiences, so utterly separate from the rest of the continent. If you only visited its airport, an audacious spectacle in and of itself, you would come away amazed how unique this place is when compared to the rest of the world. And there it sits, just offshore at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, an island in more ways than one. This is Singapore.