Surrounded by a desolate, Martian-red expanse of bulging desert, a gleaming new Jiayuguan City has arisen on ancient ground that has been continually inhabited since around 1375, 120 years before Christopher Columbus bumped into the Americas on his way to India. Everything looks brand new. Civic auditoriums, government buildings, parks, stadium and sports center, statues, row after row of lofty apartment complexes, office towers, shopping districts, the broad boulevards lined with shade trees and lit at night with graceful light fixtures I’ve never seen anywhere except in urban design catalogs. Workers were everywhere, staining wood trim, laying paving tile, pouring cement for curbs and sidewalks, planting flowers and trees, all as if getting everything ready for buyers impatient to move in, but when I was there, the city looked hardly lived in yet. I’m used to scuffed up, bruised and bluesy cities; I really don’t know how to act in a brand new one. It was the old ground that I was interested in. I rode the magic green #4 bus out to the fort built at the narrowest part of the Hexi Corridor at Jiayuguan Pass (guan in Chinese means pass, so writing pass is redundant, it should be written Jiayu Guan . . . thanks Wikipedia!), bought a combo ticket (which allows you to visit the fort and some additional historic sites) for 130 RMB and walked up the hill as lazy fockers passed me riding the 10 RMB shuttle. I was glad I did, as I was able to capture the photograph below of some workers grooming the landscaped grounds. I want to get this out of the way: the fort has been refurbished. Though parts of the original 1375 fort remain, it was rebuilt in the 1980’s, and some aspects of it are very much indeed Disney-like, with the camels rides and the shoot the arrows at the straw man targets and the pay the monks in the chapel to burn incense for you, etc., etc., but if you ever wanted to see exactly what an ancient Chinese fort at the ends of the world looked like, this is absolutely, holy, holy, ground. Through these massive fort gates, those banished from China were forced out, into the Barbarian lands, never to return. Imagine that walk. The army personnel stationed here were the ones who had fallen out of favor, had pissed off some member of the ruling class, or maybe were too honest to hold their tongue, or fell in love with the wrong person, or got too many horse parking tickets, or went bankrupt, or went temporarily insane, the misfits, the rouges, the scoundrels, the malcontents, the ne’er do wells, the incompetent, the piteous, the malformed, the failures, the freaks, the damned and the doomed, all collected here, within these walls, on the absolute edge of flat earth nowhere. And though the fort can get crowded with tourists, if you view the photos I took, you can see that you can find deserted parts along the walls where you can sit and wonder about what life was like here, and feel the ghosts of those that served here, and those that died here, and those that dreamed here. I sat stunned for hours, looking out far away, across the desert, to the snowcapped mountains and beyond. But I’m getting ahead of myself. There is an area where you can try on the armor of the period for the purpose of taking souvenir photos, and I good naturedly took part, donning the armor, the boots, the helmet and the armored waist protection, but when I hefted the spear, felt it’s weight, centered myself, then reeled back to aim and throw it, time opened. Some riffle in my DNA lit up and I realized the aura of the fort and climbing the wall were already imprinted on my mind, and I grew unsteady for a moment, then threatening, and the people around me began to back away until I blinked my way out of it and lowered the spear. Scoff, laugh, believe, but this was as real as my childhood. And it’s happened at other times. A few examples would be the first time I saw Colorado, or the Turnagin Arm outside of Anchorage, Alaska or the Central Valley in Costa Rica. How many other places are there for me to find? Is it morphic resonance, or morphic remembrance, or synaptic ping-pong, past lives reawakening in recognition, what? I hefted the spear again and I swear a blizzard of imagery unfolded, blazed and evaporated in a blink of an eye. And that’s when I took it all off, left it piled in a heap, climbed the walls of the fort, sat, and stared out into the long desert shadows. High above, snowcapped mountains were strung beneath a blue sky where dingy clouds hung like Halloween sheet ghosts. To the west was the “First Fire Tower under Heaven.” A freight train rattled across the lonely distance just beyond the range of the fort’s cannon. So little had changed here, beyond was nowhere and the wind blew melancholic notes in brown tones of sadness, hope and despair for the nomads, the travelers, the spirits, with me silently bearing witness. This fort was full of ghosts. After I had pulled myself back through time, I hired a taxi to drive me to the Overhanging Great Wall. Built in 1539 and refurbished in 1988, it climbs on a 45-degree angle for half a kilometer up into the Hei Shan (Black Mountains), and features two watchtowers with a sweeping view of endless flinty desert.
You can walk the walls and climb the towers and wonder what the soldiers saw when they stared out across the endless expanse. Did it create poets or dreamers or merely boredom and suicidal impulses? What did the already marginalized, banished, unfortunates see here, imagine here, mythologize here? For me, this was the fascination of this place. Again, I sat and stared for hours, imagining. There is an alternate way back down and it is even more intriguing. You get to see what the walls looked like to a marauding force and how completely impassable it was. Back at the fort, I watched the sun go down and then tried to flag down a taxi, though they were now as rare as brevity in a speech by Fidel Castro. When one finally came by, I stood in the street, making it stop for me. But the driver was stubborn and wouldn’t go where I pointed, insisting that my hotel was in the opposite direction. Impasse. I pleaded but he was adamant, so I bolted and walked back towards town, then remembered the bus and stood by what I thought was the bus stop, clutching a one yuan note for the fare. Suddenly, in the twilight, the last angel appeared. He was wearing a military-like blue coat and a long yellow scarf, and looked to me like Billy Pilgrim. Saints, spirits, gods, and wise men all appear in the most common of disguises. He was motioning around the corner and I figured out that where I was standing was not a bus stop. I followed his direction and found a Muslim woman wearing the traditional scarf, also clutching a one yuan note. Her smile confirmed I was in the right place. I saw Billy Pilgrim up on the corner, watching for an approaching bus. Buses were coming in the opposite direction, and the last stop on the line was up the street at the fort, but none of them came back around. I was starting to get worried. But Billy had abandoned his watch and come to reassure me, and though I didn’t understand what he was saying, he was looking in my eyes as if he knew me and was saddened that I didn’t recognize him. But he did reassure me and I continued waiting. Then, a bunch of rowdy boys appeared and milled around the bus stop, scaring the woman away, fighting with each other and scowling at those of us waiting at the stop. I wasn’t concerned, in my time I had run with a lot worse, but in a flash Billy was there, chastising them, and pointing to me, and urgently barking out commands. It was so weird. The leader came respectfully up to me and tried to explain something in badly accented English, while Billy eyes shot them all through with lightning bolts. I nodded as if I understood, in order to keep the peace, and Billy retreated back up to the corner to resume his bus watching vigil. Out of nowhere, the woman had reappeared, as if some kind of order had been restored, and as I was trying to decipher all this, suddenly Billy was waving frantically from the corner, and in a sweeping blast of green light, the magic #4 bus came careening around the corner like a torpedo of possibilities. Billy danced on the corner, we boarded in triumph, the driver put it into gear, and we all went, very gently, into that good night. And now, as I think of Jiayu Guan City in western Gansu Province, Martin is helping a stranger while his brother is saying, “beautiful life, beautiful food,” the dolphin leaps up at night in a geyser of colors, people are slowly moving into the gleaming apartments, my bus friend is blowing a kiss out the window of the magic #4 green bus, the clouds gather and rain rumbles out across the bleak plains, spirits wander, nomads travel the Silk Road, Billy Pilgrim keeps watch, and, out in the desert the wind blows the Great Wall . . . away.
2 Comments
Sparky
9/3/2012 06:44:27 am
So visual and poetic. Poets write such lovely prose. You're giving Jim Harrison a run for his money!
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Jude
9/17/2012 11:00:30 am
Billy Pilgrim... I do believe you both have "come unstuck in time." Great story telling.
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