Stainless: 1. Perspective

This is something that's surely occurred to me before, in my previous trips to the Philippines, but I'm only noticing this now. It has something to do with perspective. It's like this. Guam, in sheer size and area, is much smaller than the Philippines--I think it is smaller then even just Luzon, the northern island--but in some way it doesn't feel smaller. I look around in Guam and I always see green and blue--the plants and the sky. I am always cognizant of the space not just in my vicinity at the moment, but of other vicinities. When I drive to work and go on the Route 16 overpass, I see Micronesia Mall from far away, and the ocean and the hotels beyond that. When I go to Kmart, I see not just Kmart but the jungles around Kmart and the cliffline upon which Chalan Pasaheru, Route 10A, was built. When I go to the beach in Tumon, not only do I see the hotels lining the beach view, but also Tanguisson and Two Lovers' Point, from miles away.

The same is not the case in Manila. You take the jeepney to Lawton, and all you see are the other sweaty faces riding with you on that jeepney. Try to peer outside the jeepney's open windows, and what you'll see are the facades of houses, businesses, and the people inhabiting the street right at that moment. You walk the street to RFC, and all you see is the street. Unless you're right at Real Street, you won't see that Jollibee or McDonald's that you know is just a minute's walk away, and even if you did, chances are you're looking at the large signs these businesses had to erect in order to compete with all the other signs all around them. In other words, you can't see Espana from Lawton, and you can't see E. Rodriguez from Espana.

Now, am I saying that this is a bad thing? On one hand, I do fear that the military buildup that is being planned for Guam may have the effect of "closing in" our vistas so that our perspectives cease to be open. Already I observe that once those four towers at Oka are built, they will be an inescapable sight for miles around, even as you're going towards the intersection between Routes 1 and 10A on that final stretch of road near Kmart. Now guess what you will see when you are standing at the Hospital parking lot, near the towers. That's right, the towers. Just the towers. Even since before the towers were built, you couldn't see the ocean from the GMH parking lot anyway, even if you tried, but now, with the towers in the way, you wouldn't even consider the possibility.

But perhaps this "closed-ness" that makes the very messy but functional public transport system in Metro Manila possible. Because the only landmarks available to them are the ones in their immediate vicinity, Filipino commuters soon learn to recognize them even within the confines of a jeepney where you have to hang down your head to see out the window. Perhaps they do not see their daily commute as a two-dimensional map, but rather as a linear ordering of landmarks that they consult as they ride the tricycles, jeepneys, and buses in their route. Because their vistas are closed, every intersection comes to look different. I think back to the time I dropped off a friend in Liguan Terrace. I dropped her off all right, but it took me 30 minutes of driving around to realize how to get back out to Marine Corps Drive. Why? The houses all looked the same at night, and the only landmarks I could find were faraway ones, in this case the tall trees that grow from some of the houses. Since the trees were far away, they look similar even when viewed from entirely different intersections.

I decided that an amorphous, market-driven public transport system would not take off in Guam, simply because of our lack of immediate (as opposed to large and faraway) landmarks. I'm pretty sure you've heard of Bear Rock, but what about Pacific Plaza? Would you be confident in getting dropped off at Pacific Plaza if you knew that there was another place called Pacific Place? (There is, by the way.) What about Baltej Pavilion? Sounds familiar, right? But where is it, and how could I use this information to get where I want to go?

This is when I realized that the tension between open vistas and closed vistas is a tension between the picturesque and the efficient. In fact, I did not set out to write this post the way you are reading it; I was supposed to say something about how Filipinos compensate for this lack of perspective with open minds. But that seems rather New-Agey and quite like that bit about the white woman Margaret Mead telling the Pacific Islanders from the outlying islands what they are really like in her book when really, in the opinion of the islanders, she really doesn't know what she's talking about.

So I am glad I instead talked about public transportation, as this is a topic that engages both my political and mathematical proclivities. For many reasons, Guam will greatly benefit from a public transport system. But how will it be accomplished? Perhaps this talk about getting the commuter thinking about his or her route as a series of landmarks in closed vistas might help quite a bit.

Thoughts?

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Hayley Williams, B.O.B., and Eminem, "Airplanes".