Country Driving [62]
AFTER HECANGCHENG I TURNED for home. Highway 215 heads south out of Gansu, and I followed the road to the border of Qinghai Province. At the boundary, a pass stood at an elevation of twelve thousand feet, and after that I was in the high country of the Tibetan Plateau. There were no more forts, no more signal towers, no more Great Wall—all of it had been left behind.
The road was newly built. It consisted of two lanes, surrounded by high desert landscapes of rock and dirt, and periodically the monotony was broken by a sign: “Danger! On This Slope It’s Easy to Fall Asleep!” At one location the government had suspended a small sedan above the highway. It was smashed almost beyond recognition; the front end was crumpled flat and the remains of a door dangled in strips of steel. Painted across the back end were the words: “Four People Died.” The whole thing had been erected on spindly poles, fifteen feet off the ground, like some gruesome version of a children’s treat: a Carsicle.
At the next bend in the road, a sign noted that fifty-three people had died here. A billboard presented the speed limit like options on a menu:
40 KM/HR IS THE SAFEST
80 KM/HR IS DANGEROUS
100 KM/HR IS BOUND FOR THE HOSPITAL
Along that road I saw two truckers who had broken down. Both stood beside All-Powerful Kings, waiting for their partners to return, and both refused a ride. One trucker had already been there for two days. He asked if I had any food or water, and I gave him two bottles and the last Oreos from my stash. Other than that the road was empty. To the west, snow-covered peaks rose to over eighteen thousand feet.
For one hundred and fifty miles I saw almost no signs of human habitation. There weren’t any gas stations or shops; the landscape was so barren that nobody had bothered to carve propaganda into the mountains. The first town I passed had been recently razed. It had the look of a former military installation; the buildings were arranged in neat rows, and at one point there must have been a couple hundred people living there. But now it was abandoned—roofless walls stood stark on the plateau, lonely as the traces of some lost empire. Not far beyond that, a pair of empty dirt roads branched off the highway. One headed east, the other west; a signpost gave the names of military-sounding destinations. A left turn led to a place called “Build.” A right turn went to “Unite.” I took a deep breath and drove straight through.
BOOK II
THE VILLAGE
I
THE YEAR THAT I RECEIVED MY DRIVER’S LICENSE, I BEGAN searching for a second home in the countryside north of Beijing. Empty houses weren’t hard to find—occasionally I came across whole villages that had been abandoned. They were scattered across the front range of the Jundu Mountains, in the shadow of the Great Wall, where the farming had always been tough and the lure of migration was all but irresistible. Sometimes it felt as though people had left in a rush. Millstones lay toppled over; trash was strewn across dirt floors; house frames stood with the numb silence of tombstones. Mud walls had already begun to crumble—these buildings were even more broken-down than the Ming fortifications. Whenever I saw an empty village, I thought: Too late.
I hoped to find a place where people still farmed, their lives tuned to the rhythms of the fields. I had a vague idea of a writer’s retreat—somewhere I could escape the city and work in silence. For a while I searched near the Hebei border, on the far side of the Miyun reservoir, where the roads were still dirt and most vehicles were two-stroke tractors. Sometimes I traveled by car, sometimes by foot; I carried my tent and sleeping bag. I used the Sinomaps to track roads that ran alongside the crenellated symbol of the Great