The Moonscape is the view off of my apartment’s balcony. Depending on the rain and the amount of earth-moving equipment, it can look like a moonscape, a big sandbox, or a series of puddles.
Within a few days of moving in (when my vocabulary consisted exclusively of “hello” “ten” and “vegetable”), I was attempting to ask about The Moonscape. It was the elephant lurking just out my window. From a neighbor who mercifully spoke English, I found out that had I moved in a few months earlier I would have been overlooking a beautiful, peaceful golf course (his words). Apparently it was a course only for important Royal Thai Air Force Generals and thier buddies (its on government land adjacent to the airport), and he had never seen anyone playing on it. This explanation accounts for the large lake, and the airfield-looking towers.
I started wondering what future use was intended. What could account for the insane amount of digging, undigging, redigging, flattening, trucking in of topsoil, and re-undigging, that seemed to occur every saturday morning at 6:45?
I asked the woman at the front desk what my backyard was purportedly going to become. “A golf course,” she answered matter of factly, “it should be finished next year.”
Have no fear, the irony was not lost on me. Had I lived in this apartment for any period of time except for exact time that I did, I would have overlooked a golf course. I was living in the inter-golf-course period, like a brief pause between ice ages. I came to love the moonscape, and it was infinitely more enjoyable to watch a man trying to navigate a big puddle in a miniature boat than people playing golf. Plus, there was the added benefit of the tower, which offered a friendly perch to countless local birds, where I dreamed of building a fort, imaginging the tin-can telephone linking up to my balcony.
Had I lived in one of the golf-course-ful eras, I would have missed out on watching a landcape evolve before my eyes as I ate my breakfast each morning. Hills migrated, birms rose from level ground, channels appeared and were filled in, rises flattened out: that which may take years and years of rain and wind happened in a few months, and I had a front row seat.