Heavy stone

All week, I've been listening to the chink, chink, chink of chisels being hammered into rock. First a rock wall forty feet under my kitchen/porch was excavated, much of it by hand; now, workers are chiseling in near unison on huge blocks of stone to build some sort of retaining wall around all of it. The chinking goes on and on, from dawn til dusk. Brutal as the labor must be, the workers laugh and chatter easily enough, almost like goofy school boys.

Perhaps most striking to me is the contrast between two very visible power systems in Beibei: the human powered and the fossil-fuel powered. Over and over, I have been reminded that the human body is capable of doing amazing things. I see tiny women shouldering huge baskets along with their raggedy stick brooms up and down the city sidewalks; I see small wiry men clamoring up and down hillsides like sherpas with heavy construction loads. To the side of big buses and trucks are three-wheeled carts laden with fruit or furniture or recycled goods, being pulled behind wrinkled old men on foot. Striking as well is the contrast between one of the most ancient professions, stone masonry, and some of the most high-tech research imaginable being conducted just across Tiansheng Road at Southwest University.

These photos show men laboring to make room for more cars and motorcycles. Far below, you can see that a small wooded area between two apartments has been razed to make room for a tiny parking lot. The rock retaining wall under construction is supporting the area topped with the new parking lot. Even if most of the woods was razed, trees occasionally are left standing in the middle of parking spaces.

The stone mason's mallet, chisel, and straight edge
 are all within easy reach. No pnuematic tools here.

The chinking is rhymical, almost musical--distracting,
but not nearly as distracting as the blaring TV from
the upstairs apartment.

On the other side of the lane, these men shovel dirt into a cart,
barely visible, and will haul it off somewhere far away.