White-haired blizzard
Text/Guo Zhitao
I lived on the dam as a teenager because my father worked on it.
Nature adjusts the cold and warm with the change of climate, the end of autumn is not over, the green leaves under the dam are full of branches, the dam has long been the northwest wind cold blowing people, the branches have long been bare. In my memory, there are years when the snow fell on the 15th day of the eighth month of the old calendar. It is common for snow to fall around the beginning of winter, especially after the beginning of winter, and in some years it snows for 40 or 50 days in a row. I remember when I was a child, the people on the dam didn't sweep the snow because of the continuous snow, and there was nowhere to sweep it, so they used shovels to open a sidewalk at the door of the house.
In spring and winter on the dam, it is windy for eight out of ten days. In the winter snowy days, the wind stirs the snow, the snow is accompanied by the wind, the sky is flying, and the heaven and earth are chaotic, forming the unique white-haired wind and snow on the dam. People from other places are not familiar with the place and cannot distinguish between north and south, and every winter people freeze to death.
White-haired snowstorms are often blowing day and night, the wind is roaring, the wires are blown by the wind, the snow on the road is frozen as hard as iron, and the feet crunch when they step on it.
There is a bird on the dam called the sandgrouse, the pigeon is so big, it weighs half a catty, I don't know why it doesn't rest at night, and flies with the wind. In those days, there were broadcasting wires, the pole was more than a room high, the sand grouse did not fly high, the wind and snow were full of wind and snow to see clearly, and the sand pheasant hit the wire and died with a head injury. The next day, people went to the power line for dozens of meters to pick up the sand pheasants that had been killed, took them home, removed them, cooked them, and opened the meat.
Although there is a white hair wind and snow almost every day in winter, the people on the dam are used to it. At that time, people were poor, there were no serious warm clothes, there was no shirt inside a cotton shirt, and there was no cover outside. In order to keep out the warm pants, tie them with strips of cloth at the foot and tie a belt around the waist.
The children rubbed the horse's tail into a set, pierced an eye on the wooden board with an awl, wrapped the horse's tail with a small cotton ball and planted it in the eye of the board, and planted more than 20 sets on a wooden board. One child took two or three sets of covers, a shovel, and two bags of wheat in his clothes pocket, shoveled snow in the fields on the edge of the village, buried the covers in the soil, and sprinkled them with wheat, and many children hid in the corners of the houses waiting for the birds to eat. A group of children has more than 20 sets of sets, and they can lasso dozens of white spirit birds and Zhenzhen head birds in a while. In the evening, the children took the condoms and the pinched birds home, and the adults washed the dehaired and disemboweled, and put them in a pot to cook and beat the teeth.
After a day of activity outside, the wind-blown snow fluttered on the ground, the pants and shoes under the knees were frozen hard, the shoes were like iron, and they rattled on the road. In the evening, the adults bake the children's shoes at the mouth of the stove, and the pants are baked on the kang.
The pot on the dam is connected to the kang, and the mouth of the kang hall is two feet large, and a bundle of wheat straw can be filled in at once. At that time, there was no coal stove on the dam, and the home heating depended on a kang, so the kang on the dam was hot on all sides, and the belly was scalded.
One side of the water and soil raises one side of the people, and where they grow, they adapt to the environment. On the dam in the sixties and seventies, the winter was thirty-six or seven degrees ordinary, and the adults wore a white stubble leather jacket when they went out, and the cattle herd was called a cowherd, and they wore a large leather jacket with a placket inside, a large leather jacket with the top of the foot outside, leather socks on the inside and outside, felt boots on the outside, and a fever hat on the head. (A sheepskin is cut in half, the leather board is pasted together, the inside and outside are wool, and the upper part of the shoulders and back is tightly stretched)
When I was fifteen or sixteen years old, my mother was sick and needed to go to the town more than ten miles to buy medicine, so I found a little friend named Erping to accompany me to buy medicine, wearing a small cotton jacket and a cotton hat with hare skin sewn on it. After buying medicine and going back, the oncoming northwest wind swept the white-haired wind and snow, and he couldn't open his eyes, and walked forward with his head down. The biting cold wind and frozen face are like the pain of ten thousand needles, and the neck is like the pain of a knife, and now I think about it that I didn't freeze to death back then. Because people often froze to death in the winter on the dam in those years, transportation and communications were backward in those days, and outsiders walked on the road in the snowy day and could not distinguish the direction and quickly froze to death. Before the reform and opening up, in winter, if you don't wear a leather jacket, cotton shoes and a leather hat when cutting the ticket, you are not allowed to get on the bus. Hire a car to go to the dam, how much no one goes, because the car performance was poor, gasoline, engine oil was not good, the water tank did not have antifreeze, and the water was added, and the car turned off while walking, and it could no longer start. Zhangbei County south of Yehuling, also called wolf nest ditch is the only way to go to the dam, the highway of the year circled and climbed, every winter hundreds of cars, tractors were frozen on the half-dam road, the next year when it was warm and then to drive.
Later, my family moved to my hometown under the dam, and one winter when I went to the dam, my friend scraped together a few tons of noodles, because he was not allowed to buy or sell things because he was not allowed to buy and sell things because he was fighting speculation back then. Two big tractors pulled noodles, braved the white hair wind and snow at night, walking on the wolf's nest ditch half dam, the tractor behind us suddenly turned off, and several people got out of the car to prepare to push the cart to start again. I was wearing a dogskin jacket and a fur hat, and my body was piercing and cold, and my head looked like a freshly shaved cold. The wind was blowing and he couldn't stand it, and he grabbed the rope on the car with his hand, and as soon as he let go, he would blow into the ditch. The tractor in front entered the store, and when he saw that the car behind him didn't get down, he knew that the engine was turned off, so he pulled the trailer and dragged our tractor into the store.
When I was young, I didn't sleep in the basket and didn't go out of the four doors, I didn't understand the outside world, and I thought that the whole world was blowing white-haired snowstorms in winter, but now in retrospect, white-haired snowstorms and snowstorms are the "specialty" on the dam.
About the Author:
Guo Zhitao lived in Zhangbei County before 1976. Participated in the work of writing materials in the Mengjiapu County Coal Mine, and worked part-time in legal proceedings. He served as the director of the office and the deputy director of the mine. In 2012, he was integrated into Ulju Mining Company to write materials and retired in 2017.