Mourning the loss of the rural soul

Linda Collins Straits Times 22 Jul 12;

I staggered from the time-travel capsule known as an airplane into the self-contained city known as Changi Airport into a bubble on wheels called a taxi.

It whisked me along the highway past a sea-city of container ships on one side and a shimmering city of office towers and hotels on the other. The highway of this super city unfurled seamlessly like a ribbon of welcome. (It was after rush hour).

Newly returned from the boondocks of a remote rural area of New Zealand, I was a slack-jawed yokel, craning my neck this way and that as the bubble/taxi sped along.

I marvelled at downtown Singapore's utopian reality of shiny homages to mammon and pleasure. I marvelled at the people toiling diligently in their offices, so close to me as I passed them, above it all on the unfurling ribbon of welcome.

And I recoiled from who I was at that moment - an outsider from farmsville, easily impressed by Bright Lights, Big City.

This person was a slacker self, an open-faced, chatty, easy-going self, useless for life in the fast-paced metropolis, a self to be sloughed off once I was not above it all but in the fray and earning a buck.

But that was the future. For this bubble moment, I was seeing Singapore through the eyes of a hickster, not a hipster.

By the year 2050, tens of millions of other people will have experienced such a bubble moment, of a rural self suspended at the moment before that self must change and adapt to survive.

It is estimated that by then, 70 per cent of the world's population will live in cities. Already, 60 million people worldwide move into cities each year in search of jobs.

The figures of rapid urbanisation and massive migration emerged at the recent World Cities Summit held in - where else? - that city where the future has arrived, Singapore. In fact, in the three-day summit, Singapore was named the Asian city best prepared for the future by a magazine published by Britain's Financial Times Ltd.

Experts discussed issues such as infrastructure, water and environmental matters.

But what of that intangible thing - the loss of the rural soul? It is a soul of ancient seasonal rhythms, that puts the being into human. It seems there is no place for it now.

No wonder I felt a stranger in a place that has given me a job and a home for well over a decade.

I was in a fug of dislocation. Some might say, what do you expect, after being in a backwater with 31 million sheep? Singapore's founding father Lee Kuan Yew says of New Zealand in the book Hard Truths: 'I think it's not an exciting, happening economy. Yes, they grow the world's best grasses, good for horses and cows and sheep. But a dull life.'

It was a dullness without stress, however. A dullness where life's simplicity was not an inferior way of being, but gave the chance to enjoy nature and one's fellow man.

The South Island farming village where I stayed (population: 443) certainly lacked infrastructure - the wooden bridge to access it was built in 1896; there is only one shop.

In winter, when I visited, life revolved around fire and food, in an elemental survivalist way.

The main task of the day was lighting a fire in our woodburner stove and feeding the flames to keep warm. It involved sorting wet wood from dry wood, of kindling sticks from logs, of sparky pine from solid-burning cedar. Of the precise way to rip a newspaper to best generate flame to start the fire.

Then, there was visiting a blood- splattered chamber of horrors to choose the parts of a beast that a few days ago was munching grass in a nearby field. Answering the butcher's charmingly unhurried inquiries took another hour.

At first, this activity was a novelty, punctuated by the relief of darting to a laptop or smartphone.

But as the days passed, the pared-down life took over. I weaned myself off the addiction of the status update. The winter-shortened days of rural existence exerted their own rhythms of connection. I awoke at daybreak to crowing roosters and a paralysing cold that defied double-glazed windows.

Night came swiftly. At 5pm, I would huddle on the balcony and watch wild ducks slip across the sky under the cover of the dying light.

But here I am now, back in the city, needing to earn money to pay for two weeks of rural escape. I'll don the face of the 21st century city dweller in a keyboard-fixated hurry, and re-enter Singapore's happening economy alongside the five million others competing for a slice of the pie. And feel a little less of a human being, in the process.