Capers With Carroll

Even as Sichuan suffers from a 6.4 aftershock to the 7.9 May 12 quake, a 5.5 quake has killed eleven and injured over 4,000 in Colombia. Compared to the magnitude of the Chinese quake, the 5,000,000 homeless, and a death toll that may reach 80,000; or even compared to the aftershock, which destroyed another 270,000 homes; this Colombian quake may seem inconsequential. Yet the size of a quake is academic when the boulders rushing down a hillside are aimed at you. Some of the dead in yesterday's quake were swept from the highway pictured below by landslides. I took these photos in 1989, very near the epicenter of the new quake. The taxi I was riding from Bogota to Villavicencio was stopped while crews worked to clear a rock slide from the highway. That may not look like a major highway, but it carries all the traffic between the nation's hub and the eastern llanos.

I had about two hours to study the topography. Farmers had tiny plots of cassava or corn, planted on hillsides that showed the scars of previous landslides. They built brick and cement houses with corrugated Eternit (a composite of asbestos and concrete) roofs to shed the torrents of rain that fell there.Even when the earth sits still, just the rain has the power to bring down great portions of these hillsides. It is hard to even imagine those mountains in a 5.5, or a 6.4, or a 7.9. To the rescue teams, the numbers make a difference, but to the people living downhill, it is all academic.

On March 12, my daughter Slowlane tagged me with a print-based meme. In turn, I tagged my new son-in-law, my soon-to-be daughter-in-law, and John Hales, who wrote the book I used for my response to the meme. Now the dust has settled. On March 29, Son-in-law responded with a discussion of the Biblical implications of the number forty, from Teologia do Novo Testamento. When I saw John at school, and he said he doesn't have a blog. Today Daughter-in-Law-Designate ties together 奢白，炫放无暇钻光, a Japanese comic book, and a definition of manslaughter. Then she tagged jeorgesmith. I thank each of those who contributed to restoring Karmic balance here at Capers, and we turn our eyes to The Dry Wash.

This picture merges the images from two paintings I have in my living room. I am very fond of Chinese mountain paintings. Or perhaps they are river paintings. Yet before I went to China, I took them to be highly stylized renditions of the landscape. After all, I have divided much of my life between the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, the Andes of Colombia, and the Alps of Switzerland. I thought I knew mountains, and the rivers that run through them.

But as rescue teams continue to pull survivors out of rubble nearly a hundred-twenty hours after the first quake (and while aftershocks continue to rain down more rubble), and while teams rush to inspect the hundreds of at-risk dams in the quake area, I have an image in my mind of the photograph I didn’t manage to take. Our train from Kunming was racing toward Zhaotong amidst dramatically eroded limestone on our left, when suddenly on the right, a two-second break in the embankment revealed a straight drop of thousands of feet into a great valley, cut by a slender little river. The far side of the valley was nearly as steep, and dotted with giant boulders.

I think of the houses at the bottom of that valley, and a 7.9 earthquake.

China’s limestone provides some of our planet’s most dramatic scenery, cut away by water, shoved at precarious angles by earthquakes, and turned green by ample rains.
At Jin Dao Gorge, in the rural hills of Chongqing Municipality, we hiked several miles between cliffs that were sometimes so close together a person could touch both sides at the same time. Add to that scene the river rushing beneath us. In the quake area, the rubble of collapsing hillsides has plugged similar gorges, creating lakes with the potential to rupture the impromptu dams, flooding hundreds of already suffering people in their paths.

In China, deaths by flooding and mudslides happen almost every year. Earthquakes that kill in the thousands happen several times each century. But the Chinese have responded to those conditions with a remarkable resilience. One of the things I noticed most during my time in China was the degree to which individual people had thrown themselves behind the national goals set forth by the leadership. Where in the United States we are often a nation of individuals, each pulling in our own direction, my impression of the Chinese was a billion and some people working as a team.

That’s a pretty impressive quality, when their stated goal is to develop the world’s strongest economy. Amidst the tragedy of all the fallen schools, in some of those very remote mountains, one of the things I will guess is that a high percentage of those children were studying English each day, because fluency in English (and several other of the world’s languages) is a national goal, as a stepping stone to building their economy. Every English-speaking traveler to China comes back to tell of being surrounded by young children who want to (or their parents want them to) practice their English. For example, that is how I met this cutie, at a butterfly park near Dali:
My friends in China continue to tell me they are safe, and that their families are safe. I am still waiting to hear from Wang Mu, a resident of Chengdu with whom I’ve carried on occasional correspondence since meeting at a tourist stop. (He wanted to practice his English.)

Eunice, my former student, reported that at the time of the quake, her class at the Sichuan International Studies University (SISU), in Chongqing, was lining up for their senior picture. It is a language-study university. The quake disrupted them for about an hour, but then they took the picture.To me, this picture demonstrates both resilience and teamwork. I compare it to my own country, and wonder how many groups of students here are studying Chinese, or how often visitors from China are mobbed by school children wanting to practice their Mandarin. We are a nation with an earthquake beneath our feet, waiting to happen, and when it hits, I am afraid we won’t have the languages to address it, whether it be Chinese, Portuguese, or Punjabi. China is hurting right now, and I hurt with them. There are 5,000,000 personal tragedies (just the number of homeless). But the quake is only going to disrupt them for a short time. They are like a stream rushing down a narrow gorge, all the molecules headed in the same direction, cutting away at every impediment. Something I’ve learned about mountains: It is often the interplay of earthquakes and rivers that give them their character.

(I would like to credit the photographer for the SISU class picture, if someone can send me the name.)

Milestone: This evening, I will have the last meeting of the last class in my four-year study program for the Master of Fine Arts Degree in Creative Writing (Fiction), at California State University, Fresno. I still have one very big test to take (probably in July), and my thesis to complete. The thesis is a rewrite of the first eight chapters (about 120 pages) of Friday 10:03. The class that finishes tonight has studied The Modern Memoir. Each student will read a portion of memoir they have written, and I will read from this very blog, History of my novel. So with today’s entry, I am multitasking.

This series begins here.

In the picture, the skinny guy with a full head of hair is me, on the day I left for Europe, almost thirty-six years ago. The beautiful girl is Vicki. In my backpack, I carried the opening chapters of my novel, which I fully expected to revise and add to, while I hunkered down in Paris and turned my five years of classroom French into something useful. 

However, my flight took me only as far as Luton, thirty miles north of London. I hiked those thirty miles and checked into a bed and breakfast. Then, since I now had an address, it made sense to write to Vicki and my parents, let them know I’d reached England safely, and then stick around long enough to hear back from them. I guessed that might take about ten or twelve days. I spent a couple of those days poking around London, and then decided I probably had time for a round trip to Ireland. I joined the Youth Hostel Association, rode the Tube to the end of the line, and stuck out my thumb. I spent a couple of days at Stratford-on-Avon, took in a Shakespeare play, and then caught a ride all the way into central Wales.

My ride let me out with the instructions to walk to a bridge that crossed a gorge, and that on the other side I would find a Youth Hostel. Unfortunately, the walk was a great deal farther than she described it, and I found myself in pitch dark and the middle of someone’s pasture. I rolled out my sleeping bag, but spent a fitful night, afraid that I was trespassing on someone’s property.

However, at sunrise, I discovered the closest dwelling had long-since been abandoned. My over-night nest had actually been quite a safe place. My map indicated that I was still a several-hour hike from the closest paved road, so I began to walk, nibbling wild blackberries and enjoying the beauty of the morning.

In fact, the rapid change from the uncalled-for anxiety of the dark hours to the pleasant discoveries of the morning, caused this agnostic to first ponder the existence of God, and then to lean in favor of that fact, and finally to praise the God-Who-Might-Be-There.

Within a couple of minutes, I came upon a small cluster of houses. A well-dressed, middle-aged woman came out of one of them and asked me where I was headed.

“Aberystwyth,” I replied, naming the major city along the central Welsh coastline.

“Then come in and sit. I’m goin’ to Aberystwyth in half an hour, and I’ll give you a lift.”

And she did, though first she gave me a cup of tea.

At this point in the story, I can’t divulge how this fits as a link in why it’s taken me almost forty years to finish writing my novel, but it does. I’ll pick up the story next time.