In the late afternoon, I finally had the chance to make a getaway from people I do not know, do not wish to see or talk to, and people who profess their 'guan xin' in platitudes of annual ritual. With my brother, I headed out to the coast where the afternoon sun blazed upon the westward shore. The drive brings us down a hilly road with hazardous loops and a view of the river that is increasingly clear thanks to the growing number of processing plants that hug its bank and feed the flow with particulated effluents. By the wayside, strolling groups of Bangladeshis and Nepalese, guestworkers who toil for a bonus of national ingratitude, sought to thumb a ride to town from drivers heading their way. We pass by vegetable farms, furniture factories, durian plantations and a hillside of graves, each grander than its father's.
At land's end, a recently built seawall, probably much too low for the highest tides, affords a view of the exposed flats and a lush grove of mangroves, which appear untouched by none but the waves of these shallow straits. But a small bridge fords a creek that separates the woods from the wall, giving access to the fleshly abundance within the mud. Saplings stand in regular spaces on the flat below the ledge, suggesting that their value as bulwarks against storms and the slow scraping of the sea is recognised and some measure of atonement has been sought for the trees that were sacrificed for this pier.
Thousands of fiddlers have assembled. Their numbers are so great that the colony extends far from the soft mud up to the pebbly ground within yards of the buildings. The enlarged claws of countless males wave in asynchrony, while giant mudskippers duel with dorsal fury. A pile of construction debris by the creek serves as a hideout for several water monitors. Overhead, a pair of lesser adjutants head to a halt on the mangrove canopy. Taller than a child, these cousins of the marabou are still not uncommon sights here, soaring in loose aggregations above the increasingly tilled and tamed river with its shorn fringe of nipahs. In Singapore, they are a hazy memory, the bane of birders who must wrestle with a near century of non-breeding and the irritation of sightings that stem from either free-wheeling zoo animals or foraging visitors from Johor.
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