I was born in a small village in Mengji Township, Ningjin County, the first acquaintance with crickets, was in the 1980s, when I was a teenager, during the summer vacation, I saw two old people in the village catching crickets (we call crickets locally), one called Yan Baoshan, the other called Duan Minglun, I remember at that time, they were about sixty years old, he was both tall, two sideburns, a bit of a pot waist, just one light, one heavy. Duan Minglun still had a bit of an ear back, and the children all called him nicknames behind his back.
Every autumn, they catch a lot of clams, put them in large and small jars, and personally go to Tianjin Wei to sell them, according to the old people in the village, they can sell a lot of money, as to how much no one knows. From the smiles on their faces when they returned to the village, people guessed the answer, big bags and small luggage, all strange small foods, and daily necessities, which made the people in the village look at it and everyone was envious.
Catching clams is not an easy task, and it is necessary to have special tools, they use the copper wire removed from the old radio, woven into a cylindrical shape on the top, and the bottom into a clamshell cover for the horn mouth, and make a handle with thick wire. Bamboo poles of uniform thickness were bought from the market and sawn into small pieces, with bamboo knots in the middle and empty ends. Because of the hot weather, they all wore straw hats, inserted the handle of the clamshell into the collar behind their necks, carried a rag bag on their shoulders, containing more than a dozen bamboo tubes, to the wheat straw stack in the village yard, and stepped on it with their feet, and a lot of bugs came out at once, large and small, which made people dazzled, and their eyes were very clear, that was the oil gourd, this was the Taoist hat, and the monkey, they wanted the cockroach, as long as they looked at it, they knew the size of the clam.
A group of us children, following behind their butts to watch the hilarity, only to see him step on several feet, suddenly looking happy, covering a cockroach with a clam, and when the clam climbed to the top of the cover, he blocked the bottom with his palm, and then quickly took out the bamboo tube, carefully packed the cockroach into the bamboo tube, and then blocked the bamboo tube with grass, and the bamboo tube was placed in the rag bag. A series of movements down, very skilled, completely without the appearance of sixty years old.
Later, the people in the village, unable to resist the temptation, have joined the ranks of catching clams, I am not far behind, let the third grandfather help, there is no copper wire to weave a clam cover, let the father buy a bamboo pole from the market to make a bamboo tube, the mother sewed into a bag with old fertilizer bags, and then brought a father to break the straw hat, everything is ready, I followed them, imitated their appearance, covered one and asked, they will explain one by one, this is the oil gourd, that is the Taoist hat, what kind of clam, the clam has to take off the shell seven times in life, Adults do not call before they are off, so we also call adults "call".
Experienced people can know the size, advantages and disadvantages and even what kind of breed it is based on the sound of the cockroach. There are many varieties of clams, from the color points, there are black, white, blue, purple, yellow, red and other varieties, if you add insects, there should be hundreds of species, the knowledge of clams is very deep, with a lifetime can not finish learning.
Although the first time to catch the clams, but also the harvest is not small, at that time caught dozens of clams, Tianjin merchants came to our village to buy, I sold two or three hundred yuan, the family are happy to blossom, at that time two or three hundred yuan is equivalent to a year's income of the family. For my family, this is also a huge amount of money.
Later, when I grew up, I learned that Ningjin crickets have a long history, and it is said that during the Ming Dynasty, it was a tribute, when the imperial court sent people to Ningjin to live in Zhao Tieguo Village, Youji Township, and the land near Chenzhuang Village in Youji Township was classified as the origin of tribute crickets. It is said that when Emperor Huizong of Song passed through Ningjin, the trapped horse fell under the car and broke his cricket jar, causing his favorite crickets to escape into this place, and Song Huizong lamented that in eight hundred years, the worm king would be born. If so, eight hundred years later, in 1991, Ningjin held the first International Cricket Culture Festival.
Ningjin people are brilliant, crickets are brave and good at war, well-known in Kyushu, and the annual cricket merchants, the north and south of the world, gather here, and the crickets become the treasures of local farmers to increase their income. There is a good story in the local area that "february is rich in 10,000 households, and one centimeter is worth thousands of dollars".
Today's Ningjin, not only produce crickets, but also vigorously develop the cricket cultural industry, prepared to build a cricket culture happy valley, Ningjin people are in a new posture, welcome visitors from all directions, cricket-loving friends, may wish to come here to visit, drink freely, together to talk about the indissoluble relationship of Ningjin crickets!