Fog
It’s Monday morning. Last night we drove to the Northwest corner of Beijing to a “nature park” called Fènghùang Lîng, where we stayed the night in a small bed & breakfast. We were fed a simple Chinese dinner and had a “marshmallow BBQ,” which was arranged by our Italian laoshī Elena, who had never had s’mores before but planned the event for the benefit of our homesick American peers. The owners of the bed and breakfast played Mah Jongg in the corner of the room, their stacks of Yuan and cigarette cartons growing and shrinking as we laughed and explained the art of sliding a marshmallow off a stick with a cookie.
  A slight drizzle falls from the sky with the silence of the snow back home. It is 7 am as we load into the golf carts, but the concept of time has become somewhat mercurial since my arrival in Beijing. The pollution can slide between sunrise and sunset, turning the sky perpetually gray, and the fog in Fenghuang Ling has done the same. We pile into little green golf-cart shuttles that are waiting for us outside the bed and breakfast, and begin to wind through the streets of the village at the base of the mountain. Several members of our group sing the Indiana Jones theme song and it isn’t hard to imagine having to trek through the foliage on our own.
 When we get to the base of Phoenix Mountain, it is still raining. Lu Laoshī, who has been up the mountain many times, tells us that we will shoot for a Taoist temple about one third of the way up, and see if the rain ceases before we continue up the trail. The swish of our raincoats and slick crunch of gravel between the stone stairs and our tennis shoes marks the beginning of our hike.
 It’s hard to believe that less an hour away stands the great achievement of Beijing- one of the largest cities in the world, essentially built in the last thirty years. Below us, people are being stuffed onto overcrowded subways, working on the 20th floor of an office building they aren’t sure will stand, wearing English tee shirts, and roasting food on spits cut directly into the outside walls of concrete houses.
 A thin wall of mist blocks all this from the view of the traditional curved roof under which we take cover. Its yellow shingles roll upward in a happy salute; each red, blue, and turquoise beam boasts a different painting in traditional Chinese style. Intricate pictures of birds, waterfalls, rocks, and flowers are protected from the perpetual rain and mist. The Taoist temple can be seen from this pagoda, and though we first assume the master has slept in from the rain, he steps onto his porch and we call out a simple conversation.
 In the city, it’s easy to believe that the structures are preserved for the benefit of the income they provide and the tourists they attract. When laowai come to China, they want to take pictures that fulfill their preconceived notions of Asian culture. They want temples, laterns, dragons, and drums. In fact, the government has an uncanny tendency to protect only the areas that are beloved by tourists, and demolish the real villages of people who have lived in the same place since birth.
 But here, up on this lonely mountain, money means nothing. Structures like this one impossibly dot the massive rocks that shoot like solid waterfalls from the mountain face; tiny temples peek out from its thick green canopy. It is a timeless scene of nature and harmony that turns a deaf ear to its flimsy propagandist counterpart.
 According to Southern Chinese superstition, if you wedge a stick between the ground and the side of a boulder, your effort to help the rock will bring you lessened back pain later in life. You lift the burden of the boulder, the universe lifts a burden from your back. It doesn’t matter that a twig can’t possibly hold a thousand pounds of force. It doesn’t matter.
 We pass a rock like this soon after we decide to complete the hike. The rain is not so bad and the scenery is worth it, although the trail is almost entirely paved in smooth marble stones that are slick with rain. The boulder is at least ten feet in diameter, surrounded at the base by a nest of twigs that is apparently human made. All around me, students are shouting, laughing, cracking jokes off the side of the mountain walls, but the noise gives way to focused breathing as the path gets steeper. The line of people stretches and contracts around the stone switchbacks, occasionally expelling a collective breath-- an old fashioned accordion humming with contentment. Being under the fog is like the hush of whispering under a blanket late at night: soft, sacred, and vaguely defiant. I settle into a pocket of silence, and the fog settles on the mountain under my feet. I can see nothing above me, nothing below. Nothing but each step. Up. Up. Up.
 In a way, this hike is like today’s China. It is difficult to see such a drastically different past, and what lies ahead is a mystery. No one can see the top of the mountain, the end of the trail, but we know from the climb there is a long way to fall.
