Flipping My Perspective: A Visit to Clementi Forest
Nature was my safe-haven. Then I had to share it.
Wrapped in the arms of morning mist that faded in the pale, cloudy sunlight, we marched in loose formation like a beleaguered company of soldiers in a war movie. We had nearly as much gear on us — half-liter water bottles, big black boots, sunglasses, rucksacks — basically, everything short of rifles and helmets. We looked comically out of place in the streets of Singapore, given a wide berth by joggers and commuters, but upon turning the corner the city seemed to disappear — replaced by the gaping maw of Clementi Forest, the destination of this class field trip.
Let me back up a bit — Clementi Forest, for those who don’t know, is a rarity in the land-scarce, highly-developed island of Singapore. It remains unused and undeveloped — just sitting there, an island of nature in the residential heartland of the city. In 2019, the government decided that Clementi would finally be put to use and zoned it for residential development. This sparked public outcry in support of the forest for its environmental importance and rugged beauty. For Quest — the research class I’m going on this field trip with — I am to survey the land for its biodiversity.
As my classmates and I rubbed the sleep out of our eyes and applied our mosquito repellant, I had reservations about this trip. We were walking down a dirt road now, past the gate of trees, and I recalled the stories Tom — one of our teachers — had told about his own trip to the forest. The week before our trip had seen torrential rains (par for the course in the tropics) that churned the soil into a thick, chunky, sneaker-swallowing muck. This was but one peril of the forest, along with stinging insects, a lack of footpaths, even wild boars. And to be doing group work in these conditions?
At first, my reservations proved true: when we reached a narrow lane off from the main path that cut through the thick, dense foliage, Tom stopped us and had us divide into our predetermined groups. I was with Scottie, a good friend of mine, and Ahana, whom I didn’t know well. We were to find a 1x1 meter plot of land — demarcated by a piece of string only — and count the living species we found in it over thirty seconds. Once we had selected a little plot of land to survey, Scottie — in typical Scottie fashion — took the net we were to use for finding insects and killed quite possibly all the living species that may have been in that 1x1 square. We laughed it off and he said he’d be gentler — but I still had an unshakeable feeling of dread about this project.
I must confess that only half of me was at Clementi — one foot in the jungle, and the other in the forest I grew up with in my hometown. The first eight years of my life were spent in rural Pennsylvania, in a little town surrounded by deep, dark, deciduous forests where I spent many solitary hours whenever I preferred the company of the rivers and trees to my family and friends. It was a safe haven for me, where the noise of home and school were drowned out by birdsong and babbling brooks. I have always been an individual first — hesitant to bend to the will of the group, comfortable in solitude — and as we hiked through Clementi I kept comparing my sweaty, stressful surroundings with the safe, solitary bliss of that forest in Pennsylvania. My concentration was broken by Tom’s voice: “All right, team! This is the first spot where you can do some real surveying. Let’s set up a couple of transects and get our random number generators ready!”
Welcome to the jungle.
Branch-scratched and dripping with sweat, I pulled at my end of a kilometer-long tape measure until I heard a panicked “wait, stop!!!” about 25 meters away. Whoever had the other end of the tape had overshot and now needed to reel it in. Then they needed to straighten the line we had made. As I shuffled left to right, backwards and forwards, following the invisible hands of my measuring partner, I practically felt the mosquitos sinking their needles into my neck (the only exposed part of me.) Finally, Tom found me and took pity, telling me to tie my end to a stick in the ground and find my groupmates.
Sure enough, Scottie was calling my name. I followed his voice until I saw his waving arms, and then ran toward him. Little did I know there was a sturdy root just ahead of me, buried under the dead leaves littering the forest floor. Of course, my foot caught on the root and sent me into a triple-somersault toward Scottie and through our sampling spot. I was uninjured but totally disoriented, barely aware of what was going on until I saw Scottie’s hand offering to pull me up and his face in the widest grin I had ever seen. “That was awesome!” He told me. Jenn — another one of the teachers — came by to make sure I was alright, and then made a favorable comparison to Bruce Lee. From that point onward, the trip had ceased to be about schoolwork. We collected our data, but that was secondary to the fun of it all. We laughed and joked, we helped each other over difficult terrain, we strategized over how to cross a flooded river without getting too wet — it was a tour de force of teamwork and bonding. And I almost forgot about the forest of my childhood.
Soon it will have been a month since we went to Clementi, but if you stopped by the Quest classroom you’d think it happened yesterday. We imitate Scottie’s overenthusiastic insect sweeping, we reminisce about how deeply the mud stained our clothes, and the story of my somersault has been told and retold so that it’s barely recognizable — it has become a cartwheel, an aerial spin, most ridiculously a backflip. That trip may have been to gather data on biodiversity, but the real learning had nothing to do with data collection. We were together in the miraculous wilderness of Singapore, horsing around and helping each other up when we fell — making memories. As for what I learned, I still value my individuality, but the Clementi trip put the natural world in a new context for me. One where nature serves as the backdrop for community-building and solidarity. Even Clementi Forest itself, a green island in Singapore, is unto itself a community for the life within (provided Scottie didn’t kill all of it.) The value of nature is in its inclusivity — anybody can enjoy it, and so we should all enjoy it together.
