China -- Revisited 2013 [#16]

Into the Mountains

On January 1st we headed for our first visit to "the village"  to see the old China, or at least what remains of the old China in the rural areas.  After a cold night, we had breakfast of broad noodle soup with pork meatballs at a restaurant literally around the corner from the Zhang family "town" house.

We drove to the village via the mountains, which is, we might say, the long way to get there. As I have noted earlier, leaving the town means literally and abruptly driving into open space; the houses end and the gardens or meadows or hills begin.  We drove up into the mountains to walk about and eat lunch -- and then back down to see the village.

There are several points of interest in these mountains. The first is a dam that serves to conserve water for the villages and towns like Lehu in the valley.  Edward's father had built an aqueduct to bring water down from this mountain reservoir into the family's village to provide them with sufficient, clean water. The stream in the village is polluted and subject to seasonal fluctuations, so it is neither reliable nor healthy. The water level in the reservoir when we saw it was abnormally low, creating a rather alien landscape with its denuded embankment.

Although we stopped at the dam office and went inside for tea (of course) with the officials there, who were friends of Edward's father, the only pictures I actually took at the dam are the picture of Edward and Yujia pointing at a map (included in post # 4) and this photo with its high vegetation line.

Driving away from the dam, we glimpsed a "big Buddha" on a mountaintop in the distance, which I photographed from the moving car. My original intention in taking the picture was just to bring the Buddha close enough to see it -- as I was unable to make out more than a white bump with the naked eye.

There was so much enthusiastic conversation about this Buddha, I thought it might be a destination.  As it turned out, this picture was as close as we got.  If memory serves, its distinction, in addition to its size, is that it depicts a female Buddha, which is rare.

What we saw instead was a mountain forest area famous for several very old species of plants and animals. The identification that appeared in English on the sign is red vertebral forest; the lengthy explanation was in Chinese.

We were told that there were pangolin native to this mountain, although we did not see any. The pangolin is a small mammal with a snout reminiscent of an anteater and a kind of plated armor like the armadillo.



The only wildlife we actually did see were ducks, paddling in one of the shallow stream beds that carry run-off down the mountainside.

We parked at a shop that sold tickets to the trail.  It also served meals and sold various dried roots, herbs, mushrooms and other fungus, berries, seeds, greens, and so forth. Anything edible and vegetable that could be grown or found locally and dried was there in zip-lock plastic packages. My understanding is that these are primarily for soups, which are ubiquitous in that part of China. Many of these dried vegetable items are spread out on sidewalks, parking lots, and road pavements to dry in the sun.

The mountain trail is a concrete path along a rock-strewn stream bed. It is a pretty easy walk for maybe half a mile.  When the path began to involve climbing rock steps along the side of the stream, it was decided that we had gone far enough; so we turned around and walked back to the parking lot.

One of the prehistoric plants that grows here is a fern tree with huge, familiar looking fronds and a trunk that resembles a palmetto. It was a bit off the path, but I would estimate the trunk to be about six feet high.

The stream gorge that we walked along provided a number of convenient photo ops to demonstrate our presence.




















Back on level ground again, we found a number of ducks hanging to dry. I made an immediate connection between these ducks and the ducks we had seen in the stream.  Fun today, food tomorrow.


 Unknown to us, Edward's mother bought two of the ducks from the rack I had photographed near the shop where we bought our tickets for the mountain trail.


 We also saw -- but could not approach -- a couple of traditional houses that would have once belonged to landowners.  We were not able to get a clear story, but I gather these had been abandoned for decades -- perhaps since the turmoil of the cultural revolution that began in the mid '60s. We saw other, more elaborate landowner homes on our visit to Guangzhou.

 

From the mountain shop we drove twenty minutes to a village restaurant for lunch. Just after we pulled in, a bus pulled in behind us and unloaded its twenty-five to thirty passengers, many of whom went into the small restaurant. Others stood outside near the road where we were standing to let the sunshine warm us.

After considerable conversation between Edward's father and various other people -- the bus driver, the restaurant workers, passengers -- we learned that Edward's father was buying lunch for the whole bus.  It was a rather astonishing gesture of generosity.  He went around handing out cigarettes to the men and chatting with them in the same way he had in Lehu the day before.

We were astonished not only by this act of generosity but also by the poverty of the people living near the restaurant. Many of the houses were half-finished new construction, which meant they were concrete and brick shells with no windows or doors and with construction rubble in the yards. We were told many new homes had not been completed because money had run out. The region is poor. Times are tough here. Small children from the house next door were running around barefoot on the broken brick and construction trash in very cold weather.

Out of respect, I did not take pictures of those children or their parents, or of the young woman -- maybe 20 years old and mentally disabled -- who crawled out of the house on her hands and knees and began to make her way out to where the crowd of travelers was standing while lunch was being prepared. When we were called in to lunch, she was still on her hands and knees in the middle of the road.

I did, however, photograph an old man who came marching down the road from the village. He was wearing an old army uniform, complete with arm bands, cap, medals, insignia, and a leather pouch. He carried a flag that was Buddhist rather than military. His face carried a look of serious, if inexplicable, purpose.  Under his elbow he held a yellow megaphone constructed of a plastic bottle such as we might use for orange juice. He had cut off the bottom and taped a handle to the side.

He, too, was clearly living in an alternate reality.

Just as he started to deliver his rant, Edward's father came out to him. After a brief conversation, the old soldier tucked his megaphone under his arm and marched back into the village. Edward told us later that his father had given the man 100 yuan, a considerable sum for an old veteran on a pension, and asked him to forgo the speech.

After our lunch of soups -- black bean, chicken, vegetable -- and white rice, we drove to the family village for our first look.  Here, too, we were impressed with the generosity of Edward's father, what he has built, what he has done to improve village life.

Edward's father is a complex man. Although he remains in many ways a mystery to us, he is as man who possess great awareness and responsibility. Like China itself there are many stories to tell here, and they are intertwined in ways that is hard to reflect in brief accounts. The family village deserves at least one story of its own.