Moving

One phrase has stayed in my mind since moving from Shanghai to Pengshan- moving upstream.  In Shanghai, the water was a dark, thick, murky green with a nauseating smell that increased its potency when someone came through on a small boat and dredged the muck below.  I still wonder what he was doing.  In Shanghai, the water wasn't water; at least it wasn't the water I know.  What fish you might catch would never be dared eaten, no filter could make it drinkable again (or so it seemed).  The water was a receptacle for waste that needed to be moved.  I stood on the Bund, leaning against the railing and watched barges pass, filled with coal and logs and metal containers and who knows what else, all moving along the river.  I looked down and saw: soda bottles, candy wrappers, cigarette butts, iced tea bottles, plastic take-out containers, all floating downstream.  The river only served to transport things now.  Gone were the days of people drinking from its banks in cupped hands, of eating from its harvest.

Looking out to the east from atop Emei Shan as the sun rose, I thought again of the murky green road-once-river.  I thought to the day before, when I played in the clear pools of the high mountains, of how the water was so inviting to swim in.  Many people, young and old and in between,succumbed to the temptation; I saw people drinking water off the cliffs as they dripped in the warm afternoon.  We reached to the headwaters; we moved upstream. 

Simon Winchester wrote that to travel upstream in China was to journey back in time.  The farther you went, the less technology, modernization, and pollution had their hold on the land.  In three quick weeks I found how true his words are.  The rivers take the burden of modernization here, as well as the air.  Our college is not at the headwaters; the stream running along campus is the same uninviting murky green; we are somewhere in the middle of the river's course here near Chengdu.  But were are close to some headwaters, close to the mountains.