Country Driving [69]
“But I can’t,” she said. “You know why? Because I get carsick!”
Recently she had taken motion sickness pills and made the journey to Huairou, to visit family. That was her first trip to a settlement of any size, and I asked her what she thought. “Not bad,” the woman said, and left it at that. She had grown up in a village across one of the mountain passes, a long day’s walk from Sancha. When I asked what Sancha had been like in the old days, she spoke bluntly. “There’s nothing interesting about this place,” she said. “Living in these mountains, at the bottom of a deep gorge—what can possibly happen here?” The only topic of conversation that interested the woman involved her children and their shortcomings. They had left Sancha for the city, and they rarely returned; young people are like that nowadays! They’re all so selfish! Nobody cares about old people! These complaints seemed to make the woman happy—stretched out on the kang, resting her crumpled feet, her face became peaceful as she decried the thoughtlessness of the young.
People in Sancha sometimes still traveled long distances by foot or donkey, especially if they headed north. The village name means “Three Forks,” because the main settlement is located at the junction of a trio of valleys that fan northward. Each valley contains a footpath that leads to a high pass: one trail to the village of Chashikou, another to Haizikou, the third to the Huanghua Zhen road. All of these routes cross an old section of wall made of dry fieldstone. This part of the ancient Chinese defense network wasn’t built with brick and mortar, and the date of construction is unknown; texts from the late Ming dynasty simply refer to it as lao changcheng, “the old Great Wall.” A couple of miles north of the fortified passes, in the valleys of Haizikou and Chashikou, there is yet another stone barrier. This region was heavily fortified—the distance between these three parallel lines of Great Wall is only five miles. Sancha lies in the middle, with one Great Wall to the south, and two more to the north.
Wei Ziqi had relatives in Chashikou, beyond the second barrier, and sometimes he set off in the morning and hiked across the pass. If he had to carry a lot, he saddled up a donkey. In the afternoons, when I was finished writing for the day, I went for long hikes along these routes. They were rocky trails, winding through the orchards, and they passed the ruins of remote settlements that had been abandoned. Along the path to Haizikou, there was a place where people had been gone for more than a decade, and the stone foundations of their homes had already been overgrown by young walnut trees. Grindstones lay in the weeds beside the trail—the last relics of the labor that once shaped this terrain.
There was still one man living on the route that led toward the Huanghua Zhen pass. Of all the trails, that was the least traveled, and the pass could be hard to find during summer months, when the brush came up. Until the 1990s, this valley was home to two small communities of houses. They were named after the families that lived there: one settlement is known as the Land of the Mas, and the other is the Land of the Lis. By the time I moved to Sancha, the Land of the Lis was completely abandoned—a half dozen buildings stood empty, their paper windows torn and flapping in the breeze. But an elderly man named Ma Yufa remained in the other enclave. Local officials had offered him a room in a retirement home down in the valley, but Ma refused to go. He still farmed,