Morning run: two sides of this Beibei mountain

My running shoes are not yet laced up, but it's early enough that I can run anywhere without self-consciousness. I am, you know, a conspicuous runner in these parts, and although I’m used to being stared at, I don’t necessarily like it, especially if staring keeps people too preoccupied to step out of the way.

When I step down my four flights of concrete stairs, and up the path from my building, I can go one of two ways. Going up the hill eventually winds back behind this cluster of apartments to a mountain path that goes back about three quarters of a mile, overlooking a tributary of the Jialing River far below. The path used to push back farther along the mountainside, but now an avalanche of dirt and rubble from higher up the mountain has closed it off.

When I used to run beyond the part that's now closed, I never came upon more dwellings. And yet the very existence of the path--worn enough that somebody was walking on it, keeping the ever hungry vegetation in those parts from overtaking it-- made me suspect there must be dwellings ahead. And now, with all this rubble virtually cutting it off, I  wonder whose life has just been cut off. As it is, some of the peasants who live close to the cut off carry water to their dwellings in buckets on either end of bamboo poles over their shoulders.

This mountain path was my running route of choice if I wanted to avoid the crowd on campus or the public that's thick along Tiangsheng Road. But just yesterday I discovered an alternative route. 

If I go down my four flights of concrete stairs, and then head down the hill from my building, I find myself on a busy city street with the gates to the university on the other side. If I turn away from the university, toward the vegetable vendors, and then loop back up the other side of my mountain, I see a completely different world, one where caterpillars and bob cats are methodically dismantling it. Instead of one kind of crane swooping gracefully through the sky, rigid industrial cranes swing from atop one skyscraper after another. Sometimes ten or so can be seen at once.

Looking up from the foot of this still unpaved city street, unfinished skyscrapers loom in the distance. I still see laborers, but not ones balancing vegetable baskets or water buckets on bamboo poles. Instead, they're laying bricks and sweeping the dust of this strange new world. This young worker, clad in high heels, looks like many a college student cruising the Yonghui market area not far away.

So my dwelling is literally at this East/West crossroads:  If I go one way for just five minutes, it feel like I've set the time machine dial for 1500; if I go to the other way, for no more than five minutes, it indeed feels like we fast forwarded almost half a millennium.