Night Rain 丨 Tao Ling: The water of the Sichuan River flows for a long time

The River flows for a long time

Tao Ling

The river water filled the baptistery

Water is more holy

- Madame Blancinen

1

My family lived in an alley on the wall of the city, in the west, more than a hundred meters to the east to the lively street. There is a tap water shed built at the intersection of the street, and residents of several nearby streets come here to pick up water. The old man of the dragon who sold water did not know what kind of disease he had, nor did he know when he got it, he spoke unfavorably, and his hands were shaking non-stop all day. The people who bought the water called him "shake the wind" behind his back. But his hands are shaking, which does not affect the opening of the faucet when selling water.

A kind of white water is often released in the water pipe, and everyone thinks that it is the reason why the water plant put too much bleach powder, afraid that eating it is not good for the body. The old man of the dragon used his shaking hands to write a line of chalk on the wall that could not see the trembling marks: White water is soda, which is produced by high pressure. It's definitely the same thing, I just added punctuation and have been imprinted in my head for decades.

2

Towns along the Sichuan River are built on the mountain, the slope is large, the groundwater flows away, and there are few wells in the city. The hometown county chronicle records that from 1964 to 1989, there were only four tap water sales points in Yunyang County, and the vast majority of people used water to pick up in the river. This has been true since ancient times. More than a thousand years ago, the poet Du Fu once lamented: "Yun'an Gu water slave sorrow." "The gist is that Yun'an (Yunyang's old name) slaves carrying water and selling them are very hard.

To carry water into the river, the way back is all steep slopes and long ladders. In winter and spring, the water dries up, and the riverside exposes a wide beach or rock pile, and the road to carry water is longer and difficult. During the Republic of China period, there were many "bucket stacks" along the river wharf in Chongqing, where 10,000 or 20,000 coolies from neighboring rural areas lived, carrying water for a living and providing for their families. There was a poor man surnamed Huang in Wushan County, who fled to the neighboring Hubei Badong in the early years of the Republic of China, and had no food or clothing, so he had to carry water to sell in the county town, and one pick was three generations.

There is a special dock for carrying water along the river, called the water pier. The streets and alleys near the water wharf and the streets that must be passed into the city have been wet for many years, and they have been named "Water Alley". The towns along the Sichuan River carry water for a living, become an independent industry, and establish industry associations, autonomy and self-discipline.

When the riverside water carrying business seems ordinary and ordinary, xu Beihong, a master of Chinese painting who lives in a water town in the plains, is surprised and sighs, and when he came to Chongqing for refuge during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, he created the Chinese painting "Ba Ren Drawing Water Map" with the theme of the scene of coolies carrying water by the river. Seventy-two years later, the painting was sold for more than 170 million yuan.

When I was young, my father often nagged me with a sentence: "People do not wake up and suffer losses, and red and white are happy and widows carry water." "In the past, when people who did red and white happy events, they had to hire people to carry water, usually looking for those mu ne's strength people. My father said that if he did not study well, he would only be able to carry water in the future.

3

In the past, Chuanjiang Radial Beard liked to eat "he slag", also called vegetable tofu, even slag. After grinding the swollen soybeans, cook them with juice and residue and green vegetable leaves, which is delicious, economical and affordable. The small restaurant at Chuanjiang Wharf sells "bean blossoms", which are finer than the slag and are one grade higher. Grinding out the soy milk to remove the residue, heated and then lit up with brine solidified, white as snow, eat tender and tender, dipped in red oil pepper seasoning, is a classic and perfect match for the next meal. So far, many large and small restaurants in the Chuanjiang area have used it as a signboard - so-and-so bean flower rice.

The bean blossoms in the small restaurant have always been soaked in the original juice cellar water, and diners come and scoop them, calling them "living water bean blossoms". Otherwise "wake up" and don't eat well. Wake up, the local dialect, Chuanjiang people understand, probably means that the solidified bean blossoms spread out and changed the taste. The original juice cellar water refers to the soup separated from the soy milk after the brine.

Once I went to the newly built river street in Mudong Town to play, and saw that the riverside restaurants were written with "river bean flower", so I euphemistically asked the tour guide whether the word "river" was not it? She had a good word: "We don't need well water and tap water in the wooden cave, we use the river water to make bean blossoms." "The original intention is to promote uniqueness, but those who know it do not think so."

Sichuan river fishing boats have a front cabin for temporary fish farming, and the bilge must leave holes to merge with the river water. Fishermen call it a "living tank", not a "river tank". Nor do northerners pronounce "live" as "river."

The tour guide and the young restaurant owners on River Street may not know that in the past, the water of the Sichuan River was heavy with sediment, especially during the flood season, it was as turbid as yellow soup, and the water quality was not very good. When I was a child, adults used to go to the river to fetch water, and first took the alum and stirred it in a bucket. After a while, the sediment sinks to the bottom, the water is clear, and after decanting, only the clear water is picked up and returned. Adults say that alum should not be stirred more, otherwise the water will have an astringent taste.

There is a Jiangsu Nantong xu xinyu, whose father served in Sichuan for many years in the late Qing Dynasty, and he lived and worked in Sichuan for nearly twenty years. His father died of illness in office, and Xu Xinyu sent the bones back to his hometown. In the third year of the Republic of China, he entered Sichuan again and served as the director of the Marine Police Coaching Institute in Wanxian (now Wanzhou District, Chongqing). On the way here, I met Li Xingba, a Guangxi native who also served in Sichuan. In the Wuxia Gorge on a day's boat trip, Li Jun chatted idly: use the water in the Three Gorges to grind ink and write on paper without immersion. The water of the Three Gorges is a little heavier than the water of other parts of the Sichuan River. In order to confirm the authenticity of the words, Li Jun immediately filled a bucket of river water in the Wuxia Gorge. When the boat arrived at Fengjie City, he took another bucket of river water. Weighed by a scale, the difference between the two buckets of water is more than forty two. This is more than mud and sand, and the writing does not soak the paper after blending with the ink.

4

The ancients said that drinking the water of the Sichuan River is easy to get a local disease of the big neck, that is, a gall tumor on the neck of the person, commonly known as a gall bag. The incidence was especially severe in the Song Dynasty, to the extent of "ten people and nine galls", mostly women, and gradually weakened in the late Qing Dynasty. Zigui County is a frequent area of Three Gorges gall disease, and people with big necks can be seen everywhere. The people who entered the gorge from the downstream saw the working women in the countryside there, who looked very special: they used to wrap their heads in cloth, insert shiny silver noodles, carry children on their backs, and hang a lump around their necks.

During the Southern Song Dynasty, the literary scholar Fan Chengda appointed the envoy of Sichuan to Chengdu Prefecture, and the clear point was that the governor of Sichuan Province and the mayor of Chengdu were also the mayor of Chengdu. He took a boat up the river to take up his post, and when he passed by Fengjie, the maid accompanying him drank the river water directly because of her thirst, and a few days later she began to have a fever. After another day or two, my neck swelled up. Later, when I arrived in Chengdu, it took more than a month to slowly reduce the swelling. More than a dozen people in the group had this situation. When Fan Chengda passed through Chongqing, he saw that the city was built on a huge stone rock, and in the summer it was sweltering like charcoal, and the mountains and water had poisonous gases, and the gas evaporated by the water was even more poisonous. People are therefore prone to gibberish, and women are more numerous.

Fan Chengda returned to Beijing two years later to report for duty, and when he passed by Fengjie again, he learned that Zhizhou and Tongju of Fuzhou (府治奉節) did not drink river water, but drank mountain springs, which came from mountains more than ten miles outside the city.

The toxicity of the rivers and rivers has not changed completely after seven hundred years. In 1876, when the Japanese sinologist Taketojin ichiro traveled to Sichuan, he wrote a poem called "Chongqing Fu", which said: "Panshi Qingcheng towers in mid-air, and the river comes to embrace the atmosphere." The mountain wind is poisonous with hot water, and I am in the rain of wild smoke. ”

5

In July 1982, a major landslide occurred in the chicken steak east of the old town of Yunyang, and the meat factory was washed into the river. For post-disaster reconstruction, it is planned to be located in the upper reaches of the city. The county environmental protection office disagreed, saying that sewage discharge affected the city's water supply. The leader of the preparatory team instructed me to write a report, and there were many reasons for defending, and the one that impressed me the most was that "the Yangtze River has a strong ability to purify itself." At that time, I thought, "self-purification" is not the meaning of rapid flow away?

During the Ming Dynasty, a strange thing happened in Chongqing City that has not been encountered again, and the specific time is clear. In the fourteenth year of Koji (1501), in the middle of the night on May 2, it suddenly seemed as if the sky was about to light, and the outside of the castle was shaking. It is definitely not the moon, the light is reflected from the bottom to the sky, and it cannot be light or fire, and the energy is not so large. In ancient times, the city gate was closed at night, and the people could not go out, so they climbed the city wall to watch, and the river glowed and reflected. The next morning, people found that the river water was as white as soy milk and did not dare to drink it. It took three days for the river to clear. This is considered "self-purification", right?

Upstream, Xuzhou Prefecture (present-day Yibin) sent people to find the source of soybean milk water, and searched for the Muchuan area, which could no longer move forward due to the barrier of lofty mountains and primeval forests. The local elderly said that this had never happened. The reason for the soy milk water is not known after all.

6

The ancients believed that if you drink the water of the Sichuan River for a long time, you will have a swollen bun on your neck. There are also ancient books that record that the water of the Sichuan River can cure diseases, and it is not known whether it is true or false, but the characters involved are true. The Northern Song Dynasty politician and thinker Wang Anshi suffered from phlegm fever in his old age, and Mr. Tai Hospital said: Use the Water of the Three Gorges to brew Yang Envy Tea, and after taking it, you can get rid of the root of the disease. Zhongxia is Wuxia, and Yangxian is the ancient name of Yixing, Jiangsu. Wang Anshi was old and his children were not around, so he asked Su Dongpo to help him, saying: You are from Sichuan, and you often have relatives and friends from your hometown, please help me bring a tank of Wuxia water as a medicine guide. Not long after, Su Dongpo personally led someone to carry a wazu gorge river water to Wang Anshi's mansion.

Wang Anshi asked people to carry the clay pot into the study, personally opened the sealing paper, and asked the book boy to cook it with a silver hammer specially boiled water. Then, he took out a white porcelain bowl fired in a fixed kiln, put in a spoonful of Yang Envy tea, and waited. The water of the Gorge River burned to the extent of crab eyes, that is, like crabs bubbling in the water, the water temperature was about seventy or eighty degrees, and Wang Anshi quickly poured it into the bowl. It took a long time before the brown color came out.

Wang Anshi wondered, "Where did you get the water from?" ”

"Wuxia." Su Dongpo answered.

Wang Anshi asked again, "Is it the Middle Gorge?" ”

"Exactly." Su Dongpo answered yes.

Wang Anshi laughed and said, "Didn't you tease the old man?" This is the water in the gorge. ”

Su Dongpo was horrified and had to tell the truth. It turned out that he had only been concerned about enjoying the scenery of the Three Gorges all the way, and also conceived of the proposed "Three Gorges Fu", and when the ship arrived at the Xiling Gorge of the Lower Gorge, he suddenly remembered the matter of wang Anshi entrusting him to fetch water, and hurriedly asked the boat owner to turn around and go back. The owner of the boat was embarrassed and said: Since the guxia river beach is dangerous and urgent, it is very difficult to go back to the reverse current. The Three Gorges are connected, and the water in the lower gorge is also flowing from the Middle Gorge, what is the difference?

Su Dongpo had a point in thinking about it. So, I took a vat of water from the gorge. He didn't expect to be seen by Wang Anshi, and he was very puzzled and asked, "How did the teacher know?" ”

Wang Anshi said with confidence: "The Supplement to the Water Classic" said that the water nature of the upper gorge is too urgent, and the lower gorge is too slow, but the water nature of the middle gorge is not urgent or slow. Use the Water of the Three Gorges to brew Yang Envy Tea, the taste of the Upper Gorge is strong, the taste of the Lower Gorge is light, and the water of the Middle Gorge is suitable. Today' water, brewed for a long time to have a brown color, of course, is the water under the gorge.

After hearing this, Su Dongpo was ashamed and embarrassed, and quickly got up and apologized to Wang Anshi.

7

The mountain springs drunk by the officials of Kuizhou were introduced into the city from the mountains and called "jianshui": bamboo poles were cut down, the knots in the middle were pierced, the heads and tails were interspersed, one by one, and the water flowed from the pipe. During the Han Dynasty, the brine boiled in the Sichuan River Basin was transported from the salt well to the stove room by this method.

Fengjie Jianshui first appeared in the Three Kingdoms period 1,800 years ago, when Zhuge Liang, the shu Han chancellor, was stationed in Yong'an (fengjie old name), saw that there was no spring well in the city, organized manpower and material resources, dug a well in the back mountain, and drank the water into the city. The people called it the "Fountain of Righteousness." This is probably the earliest urban tap water supply project in the Sichuan River.

Bamboo poles are easy to crack, and they are often broken by stones rolling down the mountain and leak, and later generations switched to wooden troughs. In the second year of Song Shaoxing (1132), Zhang Yue, the governor of Kuizhou Prefecture, changed the water diversion pipe to a tile tube and laid it underground, making it less likely to break and leak. The mountain spring is drawn from the Jianzi Mountain and the Three Forks Creek outside the city, more than ten miles away, and on the way it encounters ditches and rocks, and the tiles cannot be laid, and wooden troughs are still used. When the residents' water consumption was at its peak, the amount of water was not enough, so Zhang Yue dug three wells in the city to store water, known as the Huimin Well.

It is more convenient for the residents of Fengjie City to draft water, but the water is guarded by officers and soldiers, and it costs money to buy it, so the poor people have to still go to the river to pick it, which has not reduced the burden of the people. On the contrary, the government has added more than a thousand strings of fiscal revenue every year.

In the first year of the Song Dynasty (1165), another New Zhizhou from Fengjie City arrived, Wang Shipeng of Wenzhou, Zhejiang. He believes that the use of the name of "Righteous Spring" to lead water into the city should follow the word "righteousness". Therefore, the maintenance and reconstruction of the water project with public funds exempted the people from the money to buy water. To this end, he wrote the poem "Yiquan": "The official fee receives the barrel of bamboo, and the people sell water money." "蠲, the meaning of removal, exemption; selling is buying and selling." Wang Shipeng was worried that the later officials would not sell this account, and he also wrote: "The long envoy Yiquan is constantly famous, and the Mojiao people pay for a penny." ”

Time flew by, and four hundred years later, Zhang Tingbai, the Taishou of Kuizhou, not only continued to pour water into the city, but also built ten new wells, named Limin, Wende, Wugong, Hualong, Yangcui, Tongji, Zhuxiang, Yangqing, Taiping, and Liurun, all of whom were called Zhang Gongjing, and the water used by the people of Fengjie was wider. But within a few years, the well was completely silted up and abandoned. After Xu Zongyi, a native of Quanzhou, Fujian Province, succeeded him, he sent people to clean up the silt of seven of the wells, and then entered the city from Zhai JiaBa and Houjiawan outside the city. In order not to stain the well water, Xu Zongyi built thatched huts on Hualong and Yangcui wells to cover them. After that, the local officials of Fengjie repaired the bamboo basket many times, which is recorded in the local chronicle.

By the end of the Qing Dynasty, Fengjie City still had nine drinking wells and eight reservoirs, which were connected to each other, and the residents drank water and the city firefighting were all beneficial. However, during the Republic of China, bamboo baskets, wooden troughs, stone pipes and well ponds were all silted up and destroyed, and residents still picked up river water to drink.

8

When I was a child, I went back to my grandfather's house in the countryside for the first time with my parents for the New Year, and I saw the plastic pipe with the thickness of the little finger thumb draw well water from the rock in the back mountain and flow into the rectangular stone jar of the stove house. My third father, who is a private teacher in a primary school, told me that this is called jianshui. The stone jars are placed interestingly through the holes reserved in the earthen walls, mostly in the house and a small half outside the walls. The water in the plastic pipe is left to flow freely all day long, and the cylinder is full, overflowing from a small hole in the mouth of the stone cylinder outside the wall, flowing into the eaves ditch, and then into the winter paddy field in front of the door. Outside the wall, the three aunts used a small half-stone jar of water to pan the red amaranth, washed the potatoes, and eventually returned to the field.

The first time I heard the third father say "JianShui", he didn't take it seriously when he was young, and then he didn't know how to write "Jian Shui", thinking that it might be "picked up", or maybe it was just the vernacular of his hometown. "笕" is not a common word, I don't know if the third father will write no, I have not asked. I can't ask now.

Really, teenagers don't know "knack" and will write two sideburns to happen.

In the past two or three years, I have experienced life in the countryside of northeast Chongqing, and I learned that the "human and animal drinking water project" has long allowed farmers to use tap water, but some scattered households in Suffoon are still drinking water, and the host said happily: My water is very clean, I don't believe you taste it, it is still sweet!

9

When I was seven or eight years old, I once played wild outside, and when I came home, my aunt was washing clothes in the yard, and the wooden basin on the ground was filled with dirty soap and alkali powder water. She pulled me over, washed my hands and face with her washed clothes, and said with disgust: Look at you! It was dirty like an oiler.

My hands and face were rubbed by the coarse cloth clothes, and I shouted, "This water is dirty." The aunt immediately replied, "Dirty? Only the hands are dirty, and there are water dirty hands. ”

10

In the pre-Qin collection "Pipe", it is said that water: all things are inseparable from life... The origin of all things, the patriarchal chamber of all beings, the product of beauty and evil, the virtuous, and the foolish. Translated into the vernacular: There is no one who does not survive by water... Water is the origin of all things, the root of all life, and beauty and ugliness, virtuousness and inferiority, stupidity and ignorance, and brilliance are all produced by it.

11

The strange Sichuan River is a historical river with a long stream. I was a stream of water in the river, and soon it was gone, and the river was still full.

(The author is a member of the Chinese Writers Association)