OUT OF EDEN WALK

The concrete village road was devoid of people but buzzed with sounds: Distant tractors. The cawing of overhead magpies. The faraway waw waw waw of barking dogs. Open space rang all around.

Faded old jackets and trousers—work clothes—were slung across the lower branches of elms lining the empty road. As if some lost party of sinners had stripped in haste. Had walked into rapture.

Exactly 85 years before, in May of 1938, Mao’s troops had opened a dry-goods store in the adjacent village of Donghenanzhen. The Red Army took a stab here at capitalist self-sufficiency. The communists bought 3,042 yuan’s worth of salt, paper, soap, and bolts of cloth from city merchants, hauled this modest inventory to the village on the backs of 11 donkeys—maybe along this selfsame road—and earned a profit of 800 yuan. One month later, their frenemies, the Nationalist Chinese troops, would blow up dikes along the nearby Yellow River to slow the Japanese advance into central China. The resulting flood drowned a million people. Survivors might have slogged this road too.

I was walking with Becky the entrepreneur, with Luo the historian, and He Ping, a mountaineer.

We were pounding out the final miles of Shanxi Province, pushing hard for Beijing. We were taking a breather, packs off, pacing in small brooding circles atop the leaf shadows spackling the desolate road. As if awaiting a savior. I thought: What if? And I thought: Does the power of reason only serve to deceive me? But it was just a false alarm.