Pile of Stones

I began to learn about China in Miss Montgomery’s sixth grade class. We read a book about Chinese people living in America called The Year of the Dragon and Jackie Robinson. We watched National Geographic specials and read Chinese poetry. The unit culminated in a final project for which I decided to make a model of the Great Wall. I checked out books from the library that showed photos and used them as the basis for constructing my model. My mom helped me make thick play dough with salt, flour and water and on a piece of thick cardboard I fashioned mountains and a neat little wall with several guard towers. After it dried, I painted it green, brown and gray. I was so proud of it!

Today, 14 years later, I visited the Great Wall. The area accessible from Beijing is a popular tourist spot. The base of the wall was crawling with people making it hard to find a space to walk. The walking was tough, the stone steps are uneven, and some are worn to the point of being slick. Parts of the Wall were very steep, I had to put my hands on the stairs in front of me and climb with all fours. The air was thin and cold. Elizabeth has an injured ankle so I walked alone. I walked and I walked until the crowd thinned out. As I approached each guard tower, I could see the next one which inevitably did not look that far away. I walked through six guard towers until I reached the highest point and the end of that part of the Wall. At the top there were only a few people scattered here and there within my range of sight. I walked alone on the wall. The cloudy day felt ancient and the stones were cold and stately against my palm. I continuously marveled at the incredible task of building such a huge wall on steep mountains without modern machines. Many people died during construction. Incidentally, the Mongolian army surmounted the wall and invaded Beijing. The wall, the only human-made structure visible from the moon, failed to fulfill its purpose.

As I walked, random thoughts floated in and out of my head… the human desire to defy nature… the challenge of protecting an ancient city… a ruler’s willingness to sacrifice lives in order to fulfill some goal… It seems that history repeats itself and as Ecclesiastes says, there is nothing new under the sun. As I walked alone on the highest parts of the Great Wall of China, I felt like a very small part of the cycle of history. Very small, but a part nonetheless.