Alone in Winter

This first journey into Shennogjia would yield vanilla-flavored Decasnea, Viburnums that tasted like cherries, multiple Akebia species with their tapioca-like pudding, but end abruptly with my arrest by police and the three-day interrogation that followed. I had been caught trying to enter a cave sixty feet off the valley floor. My camera dangling from the bush where I had set it on a timer. Two Jeeps had arrived with military honking horns and yelling for me to descend. Xia hid innocently out of sight with our collection of seeds. My three days in jail would cause a separation from Xia for the following months.  I had no way to check on his whereabouts.

I was put in a jeep and driven for hours, winding down from ShenongJia’s peaks. By nightfall, I was put into the cell of an old unpainted police building and the lights were turned out. The next evening three Cadres had arrived and questioned me.

One of them fumed while he slammed a large red book, which must have been 3,000 pages, onto the table.

“This is the law of China! “

“Why have you broken the law of China!?”

He lifted me and shook me, his face contorted and flushed, spraying spit in my face,

“Why have you not read the law of China?”.

The three Cadres used an old typewriter and spent hours preparing a paper, drinking tea, coughing up phlegm, and smoking incessantly.

The next morning, they returned and read from a thin, nearly transparent, paper document, detailing my crimes. They told me my choice was to sign the confession- they had just written one for me- or prison.

They then asked me if I wanted to pay for a phone call to talk to the American embassy.

“Professor Jerome Black?”

Yes,

“This is the American embassy. You know they are listing to us right?”

Yes

“Did you sign a confession paper?”

I did.

“They said they are charging 3600 Yuan, do you have that much?”

I do.

“They will probably let you go tomorrow, but you have to leave the area. There has been some kind of nuclear incident.

Your route to Kashgar might be closed”

I was let out of jail with just 50 USD and a horrible lung infection. I was now alone in the center of China with winter coming on fast.
While the sun was rising and the mist just lifting, I followed the rail tracks down to a garbage-filled river and saw a rusty coal-powered train, loading supplies, spewing black smoke, and charging its belly with pieces of coal the size of a watermelon.