Walking Laoshan:

Stone posts and mountains

Qingdao to Yanzhou by train, the hard seats, tables between them, two facing two on one side, three facing three on the other. 76 yuan then a 5 yuan bus to Qufu, to Confucius.

Coal stacked beside the tracks, loaded into cars, wood pallets and bundles of wire in pink wrapping. Old tracks next to the new. Crumbling stone walls and empty guard houses, floors rotted to the dirt. A concrete block factory, piles of white powder, dust, dead rivers wide, wide, wide with saplings growing in the middle.

The Mao’s balu blew up these tracks when the Alaska (a U.S. battleship) first arrived cutting the city off from the mainland.

Stone posts like picket fences, single spires with holes in the top and two-pronged forks stabbing the earth.

What kind of trees are these that grow along the spires?

Farmers toil small plots, less than 50 yards across, tiny squares of green. The long cornfields have gone brown, the little green squares flanked by long tracks of tilled dirt –dead cornfields encapsulate the green. The houses are long rows, brick and block with red and black shingles. A beaded umbrella on its side, a thousand and one sparkling colors sparking in the sun – a cemetery – a dozen people clustered around a plot and stone. Someone, I imagine, is crying.

Solar panels and water heaters on roofs, big cranes in the distance behind bigger power lines, long lines, the row houses being replaced by 20-story tenements. The buildings go up five, six, seven at a time. Corn husks and stalks are piled high and burned next to baby skyscrapers.

The young girl across from me, her cellphone rings … Avril Lavigne? Tell me … Why you gotta go and make things so complicated?

The man next to me points at my brown liquid in a clear bottle. “Kailua?” He points. “Kailua?”

“Coffee.” I point. “Coffee.” The worst kind: instant, soluble, in a Nalgene bottle, the hot water gone cold.

There is no real coffee here, only tea.

And mountains. Mountains jagged at the coast. There things turned. Three days ago things turned.

I chipped my tooth sucking the end of a pen in a taxi. The shit-ass smell of my business hotel bathroom beat-out the air freshener. A 512mb camera card, a day’s worth of pictures – historic Tsingtao architecture – lost. Lines were crossed with my guide on the way to Laoshan. I spent two-hours sitting on a curb outside Lucent Technologies in a cold wind. This, the guide made very clear, was my fault.

We took a cab to the gate of Laoshan, a famous Taoist mountain and National Park. I wanted to hike in. “We cannot walk!” the guide shrieked. “It is more than 8 kilometers!” We took a 75 yuan taxi less than six miles, the road like Route 1, Cambria to Big Sur – mountains at war with the sea, cliffs and humble stone bridges. The cabbie raced it, fishtailing around corners, talking and laughing with the guide, Chinese pop music blaring through static on mildewed speakers. I thought I saw a fishing village where the cliff subsided to beach, but couldn’t be sure. Everything blurred …

Things did not improve. The time, 2:30 in the afternoon, made going to the top of the mountain impossible, the park staff said. There was, however, a temple here for 15 yuan, another there for 10, and a nature trail, “very beautiful waterfalls,” for a few more portraits of Mao. Everyone wanted more Mao. Impatience hung like clouds on the summit. Answers to my questions were prefaced: Of course, what do you think, impossible.

“I just want to go in the woods.”

“You cannot go to the top,” the guide said.

Expectations, I kept telling myself, are a bitch.

The last bus left the mountain at five. We had a few hours, I told everyone, to muck around in the woods. We walked up the wide stone path in silence. Ten minutes up a deer path broke off the main trail. It wound around to the sea, the picture below a tiny fishing village. The path switched-back, more inclined.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” my guide said.

It was no-more steep than the up-ramp in an airport parking garage.

“It’s not safe,” he said.

We argued about times and buses and my frustrated expectations. I went up and he went down. Twenty feet up-trail, a large dog was chained to a wall outside a small shack. It foamed and growled and barked. I went down the mountain too.

I spent 20 minutes looking for the guide. I felt bad. He, after all, had showed me how to ride the buses of China, but when I could not find him I was not disappointed.

A pretty girl once told me a story where the protagonist walked from Nashville, Tennessee to Oxford, Mississippi after a late-night disagreement. I decided to walk back to the city.

The road curled atop cliffs, down valleys and over boardwalks by the sea. Half way back young army recruits goofed around in the sand. “Where are you going?” asked one of them in painfully constructed English, wearing a blue uniform with a tiny red star patch on the sleeve. “To the city.” His eyes widened and he smiled. “It is three, zero.” He held up three fingers. “Thir, thir-ty.” I made a muscle with my right arm and pinched my bicep. The group of them just about died laughing. They got in a big army truck, four-feet off the ground and matte green, made to take a trailer, but empty except for troops. They waved goodbye from the back window.

I saw the fishing village and men in tattered suit jackets carrying bread and leeks along the water. I saw old women sweeping dirt paths with tree branches. I saw fishermen with wrinkled brown hands mend nets with a bone pick. I saw the sun drop low over the mountains.

Six or seven miles later I was out of the park and standing at a bus stop. It was 5 p.m. The 104 picked me up and dropped me off at the hotel. The walk was everything the climb was supposed to be. I just didn’t expect it.

The 12th century Taoist poet Qiu Chuji wrote of this country, Three Sides Sea.

On three sides
Big Sea
clasps summit city,
Below crouches
golden dragon-turtle
Above
heaven stretches,
Day and night
surf breaks
spews out snow,
In crimson coral clouds
transcendental spirits flit.