The Tiny Reason I Ended Up 4,000 Meters Above Sea Level

One time, on the ABB commuter bus, a colleague from ABB High Voltage said they were commissioning a substation for the Qinghai-Tibet Railway. The relay contacts burned out easily. They did not know how to fix it. I asked a few questions and learned the substation sat above four thousand meters. I told them this was electrical altitude sickness. The fix was to connect the same type of contacts in series. That would remove the ablative impact of the breaking arc.

The colleague asked me to travel to the Qinghai-Tibet Railway substation and look at the solution. At first I did not want to go. Then I thought it over. It would be doing something for the country. I set off.

The railway had not opened yet. I flew to Xining. I do not remember whether it was Xi’an or Xining, but Xining is more likely. Then I took a dedicated bus to Golmud. After that I got on a special engineering vehicle to the substation. Several substations had the same problem, so I only went to the first one.

The repair was not hard. The time difference made me sleepy. After dinner I took a banana and walked near the substation. A Tibetan mother and her son passed me. They put their palms together and said something I guessed was a blessing. I put my palms together in return. I handed the banana to the boy. He ate it without peeling it. I gestured that he should peel it. He finished it in a few bites. They put their palms together again and said something I guessed was thanks. Then they walked away and disappeared into the sunset.

Night came. I missed my family. There was no cell signal. The substation had a satellite phone. I did not use it. I looked at the sky. The stars were clear and crowded. I felt I could reach out and touch them. At the end of the open land were snow mountains. I could not see them clearly. Everything was silent. The wind from the no-man’s land brought cool air. Sleep came. I went back inside, washed, and slept.

The next day I worked. My colleagues and I discussed the solution and the repairs. A few days later I finished and took the return vehicle to Golmud.

The ABB colleague who worked with me went to the highest substation. He stayed there for a year. When he returned, he had a low-altitude reaction. He had to go back. Then he stayed in an intermediate region for a week. He returned slowly, in stages. When I saw him, he looked much older. A man in his twenties looked like a man in his forties or fifties. I almost did not recognize him.

The Qinghai-Tibet Railway opened on July 1, 2006. I did not go to work that day. I stayed home to watch the live broadcast. When the opening ceremony appeared on television, I cried. I had made a small contribution to that railway. It was not much, but it was mine.

Another time I went with people from the Anhui Electric Power Company to Chizhou for an inspection. We stayed overnight on an island in the middle of the Yangtze River near Chizhou.

At night I went alone to the riverbank. Chizhou was bright on the opposite bank. The river rolled. The wind howled. Reeds swayed in the dark and knocked against each other. I could see boats on the river, moving away under the bright moon. I thought of Su Dongpo’s “Former Ode on the Red Cliff”:

Before long, the moon rose from behind the eastern mountain and lingered between the Dipper and the Cowherd. White dew stretched across the river, and water and light merged with the sky. I let a single leaf drift where it would, over the vastness of ten thousand acres. How expansive, as if I were riding the wind through the void, not knowing where I would stop; how ethereal, as if I had left the world and stood alone, transformed and ascending to immortality.

I felt as the text said. I seemed to float and become an immortal.

I felt this once more on a ferry crossing the river in Nantong, also at night. I stood alone at the bow. The river rolled. The lights on both banks receded from near to far. At the horizon they merged with the rising moon. It was beautiful.

I miss those scenes.

A Very Small Thought, a Very Specific Journey

What I remember is the smallness of the reason, not the size of the destination. A relay contact. A banana. A boy who did not peel it. A satellite phone I did not use. A sky so full of stars that I felt I could touch them. A colleague who came back looking older than his years. A live broadcast on July 1, 2006, and tears on my face. An island in the Yangtze, reeds knocking in the dark, and Su Dongpo’s moon over the river. A ferry in Nantong, standing at the bow, watching lights and moonlight blend at the horizon.

People do not always have to go upward. They can also walk around. They can set out for a thought so small that it means something only to them. Not with a grand plan. With a tiny, specific reason that will not let go.