Country Driving [158]
In Lishui, during this early stage of building, it was especially easy to wander around. Government officials and police were almost never seen in the development zone, and people assumed that if you were there, you must have a good reason. They were friendly and they were open; everybody had arrived from somewhere else. When I wandered around, I never asked permission in advance, and I visited anything that interested me. I talked my way onto the catwalk of the city’s half-built bridge, two hundred feet above the Ou River, and I visited countless construction sites. Once I stopped to chat with some workers who were drilling the foundation for a new factory; they had just taken a break to drink some beer. After we talked for about fifteen minutes, they handed me a jackhammer and begged me to try it out. That was my personal contribution to the Lishui Economic Development Zone: half a foot of drilled earth, the workers laughing while I tried to make sure the damn thing didn’t hit my shoes. But who was in charge of all this?
On the doomed mountain, I finally reached the top and saw the man with his plastic bags of dynamite. He introduced me to Mu Shiyou, who was organizing today’s demolition. Mr. Mu was sixty years old, round-faced and balding; he had the lilting accent of the Sichuanese. He was originally from Luzhou, a town on the Yangtze River, but in recent years he had settled in Zhejiang, where there’s a high demand for demolition crews. He carried government-issued identity cards that testified to his skills. They were pleather-bound, and one was embossed with gold characters that said “Zhejiang Province Demolitioner.” I liked the sound of that—Mr. Mu was fully licensed to blow up Zhejiang Province. Another card was labeled “Zhejiang Province Demolition Equipment Safe Worker.” “This means I’ve never had an accident,” Mr. Mu explained.
He assured me that today’s blasting wasn’t at all dangerous. Before the big event, they were blowing up the smaller boulders, and periodically I heard an explosion and then a whistling sound as chunks of rock flew through the air. Every time this happened, I ducked instinctively, and Mr. Mu laughed and told me not to worry.
“I’ve been doing this for thirty years,” he said. “I used to work on some of the nuclear sites in the west!”
That helped put things in perspective—getting hit in the head with a rock was nothing compared to a twenty-megaton blast. And it was somewhat reassuring that Mr. Mu wore a hard hat, although it would have been even better if he had offered me one, too. I followed the man as he clambered down the hillside, collecting wires from the buried dynamite. He spliced them together, taping the leads and connecting everything to a spool of white wire. He carried an electric detonator in a sack over his shoulder. The smaller blasts were finished; most dump trucks had already left the site. After a while, the foreman blew a whistle, which was the signal for the final vehicles to depart. The yellow Cat excavators crawled away, until all of them were parked in a row at the edge of the site, facing outward. They looked like big animals hunched over, their rumps turned toward the doomed hill.
The whistle blew again—this time the warning meant that everybody had to leave. The workers headed to the edge, until finally it was only Mr. Mu and me. He finished splicing the leads and began to walk away, playing out the white wire as he went. Fifty feet, one hundred feet, two hundred. The site had grown so quiet that our footsteps crunched in the dirt; I heard birds calling up above. This was the closest thing to silence that I’d experienced in Lishui