Chapter 5.19 Rods and Steel Bars (Extra)

Fatty and Poker-Face dug through the equipment and pulled out the Luoyang shovel. We had each brought five threaded pipes with us. These days, they were all special carbon fiber poles that were made in a fishing rod factory and were particularly lightweight. Fatty positioned the shovel head and began hitting the salt field. The surface cracked, but the section below was much stronger than we had thought. The salt had actually crystallized after accumulating, so the shovel head couldn’t penetrate like it would if we were digging through soil. But the salt surface cracked piece by piece every time it was struck.

I opened my lips that had turned into pickled sausages and asked Fatty, “Remember when we used a stove to melt and dig holes in the ice on the snow-capped mountains?”

Fatty panted a few times. He was prone to shortness of breath as he got older, and it became more and more difficult to breathe in the strong wind here. He pulled out the alcohol stove (1). “Does salt even melt? Damn, we can’t die here. We’d become ham in minutes.”

At that moment, the old man also spread out his equipment nearby. He pulled out two steel pipes that were very similar to the Luoyang shovel. One was a drill bit and the other was a handle. It was a hand-cranked ice drill that was used for ice fishing (2). The old man stood about three or four meters away from us and started to drill a hole in the ground.

Fatty made an expression that meant, “Look at him. That’s what a professional would do.”

I knew how hard salt was. Even if the area below us was hollow, our stable footing here meant that the salt layer must be very thick and the old man’s drill bit wouldn’t be long enough. I watched the old man slowly start to drill. After he had drilled down a bit, he took out a threaded steel pipe and connected it. After turning the hand crank for more than ten minutes, he stood up and rested before continuing. We squatted nearby and watched him while smoking cigarettes that tasted more and more salty. I wrapped my scarf around my mouth and looked around in the dark. The salt particles briefly blew into our limited lighting range before quickly disappearing into the darkness. I turned to look at Poker-Face, but his light was moving away into the darkness. He apparently wanted to go exploring.

He ventured much farther than I did, so I was relieved to take a cursory look at the few hundred meters surrounding us. After Poker-Face arrived in Rain Village, he traveled to practically all the mountains around the village. There was even a time when I would only see him a few times a week. But every time he came back, I was excited to see what strange local products he brought back with him. There was one time he brought back a strange fish head, which Fatty tried to eat. It took him three days before he finally finished eating it.

“You know, ethnic minorities have the custom of salt burial.” Fatty said to me while taking the salt on the ground and building a snowman.

“I know what you’re going to say. Don’t. I’m a man who’s achieved a lot and survived great catastrophes. I should have a pepper noodles burial instead.” I said while silently adding, I should stop talking. I really don’t want to open my mouth. If I eat any more salt, I’ll suffer from high blood pressure.

“Look at you.” Fatty said. “We’ve worked so hard for so many years. We should at least get a curry burial. But like you said, things have gone very smoothly this time. If it was the old days, we would have definitely encountered something bad by now. This time, we didn’t even meet anything scary. It’s a little weird.”

I squinted, feeling rather bored. The amazing sight of the salt field stretching out in front of us was a spectacle that ordinary people wouldn’t be able to see at all. But for me, this kind of scenery really only excited me for a few minutes. My body and nerves were tense, just waiting for the inevitable danger. I had forgotten that this wasn’t a strange tomb others had designed, just waiting for us to enter. It was merely a cave.

Over the past ten years, I had unconsciously become addicted to danger.

I chastised myself and scratched at the salty ground with my eyes partially closed. I glanced over at the old man’s fishing rod and equipment at this time, and decided to go over and have a look.

The fishing equipment all looked the same at first glance, but they were actually very different. Crucian rods, carp rods, Luo Fei rods, stream rods, breakwater rods, lure rods, interline rods, raft rods, and boat rods all utilized different materials in different parts of the fishing rod. For people like me who only knew a little bit, anything was fine as long as it had a hook. But it was very different when they were used by a master. For example, some fish only lightly nibbled on the bait, so you needed to feel the slight movement from the fishing line to the pole to determine when to lift the pole up. For something like this, the fishing pole needed to be very light, sensitive, and small. If you used a big thick pole that was six meters long, then by the time the force would be transmitted from the place you were holding it to the head of the pole, the fish would’ve already run away.

I was familiar with fishing rods because I bought and sold them. Ten years before Changbai, I once went to Japan to look for cultural relics and helped a buyer search for a guqin (3) from the Tang Dynasty. I didn’t find it, but I received more than a dozen poles and rods. Like other aspects of their culture, the Japanese were very particular about making fishing rods. They were also divided based on what clans and famous teachers made them. Since they were made of real bamboo, each fishing rod was different and had its own unique characteristics. The Shiguang school was said to have produced a genius who had made a fishing rod that could even catch water dragons. Legend had it that you could catch a lot of things you had never seen before with that pole.

Back then, I really liked the “grip strength” at the end of the pole where you’re supposed to hold it. Each master had his own grip strength preferences, and I especially liked the ones the Feng Ye family made because they were light. I sold seven of them when I came back to China, but I couldn’t sell the rest. I tried to use them myself, but I couldn’t get the hang of it. They did look really beautiful when I put them in my home, though.

The old man had a rod with a chain-patterned grip, but it was obvious to see that he had improved the rest of the pole himself. I didn’t know what kind of ideas he had to make such improvements.

At this time, I saw that the steel pole with the yellow cloth had been placed in the middle of all the other fishing rods. I wanted to stretch my hand out and take a look at it, but I gave up after thinking it over.

Fatty patted me on the shoulder: “Mr. Naive, the old man stopped drilling.” I turned to see the old man suddenly lift the pole up and turn the drill bit counterclockwise to pull it out, but there wasn’t any water that rushed out of the hole.

“No water?” I asked the old man.

He shook his head, “No, I couldn’t go all the way down.” When the drill bit was pulled out, there was a big hole in the ground. We shined our flashlights in it, but I couldn’t see the bottom at all. I put my ear to it, but didn’t hear any sound either. I looked at the tip of the drill and saw that there was rock debris on it.

It looked like my judgment was wrong.

We put away the equipment and our miner’s lamps. If it wasn’t under the salt layer, then where was it? I was about to persuade the old man to go back. Since we had come all the way down, there was a very low probability of catching the fish. We just didn’t expect that we wouldn’t be able to find the lake at all. It was possible that this was the bottom of the lake, and it had already dried up.

At that moment, I saw Poker-Face’s light start signaling us from very, very far away. He seemed to have found something.

<Extra 5.18> <Table of Contents><Extra 5.20>

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TN Notes:

(1) Uses alcohol as it’s fuel source. They are most commonly used in the ultralight backpacking because they’re minimalist and compact. Looks like this:

(2) The drill bit can also be called an auger. They look like this when assembled:

(3) It’s a long zither with seven strings that you pluck with your fingers

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Sorry about bailing yesterday. I needed a full day with no work and no DMBJ lol. Maybe now that Wu Xie and Fatty jinxed themselves, this extra will start picking up lol