Chen Yuanshan, Keeper of Heigou’s Lights AI Image Prompt

I. Black Chen Yuanshan remembered every detail of that night. On the 27th day of the twelfth lunar month in 2019, deep in the Qinling Mountains, at a mountain pass 1,400 meters above sea level, wind came over the back of the ridge like a knife. He squatted at the door of the maintenance hut, clutching a burnt-out fuse in his hand, black machine oil under his fingernails. The distribution box in front of him was like a sheet-metal coffin with its guts hollowed out; all the wires were frozen into stiff snakes. Below the mountain were three hundred seventy-two households. They called this gully “Heigou.” Not because there were bears in the gully, but because—there was no electricity. To be precise, there was electricity, but the 10 kV line pulled from forty kilometers away over three ridges broke every winter. It broke once, was repaired once, and broke again after repair. Like a person with recurring high fever, burning until eventually he no longer had the strength even to burn. Chen Yuanshan was the only line patrolman on this line. Fifty-three years old, he had worked for twenty-nine years. His left hand was missing half of its little finger—burned off by an electric arc in the winter of 2003 while he was connecting wires on ice. He no longer felt pain. In twenty-nine years, pain had long become a kind of background noise, like tinnitus, like wind, like the fog in this gully that would never disperse. That night, he repaired for four hours. At 2:17 a.m., he closed the knife switch. Below the mountain, the lights of three hundred seventy-two households came on. He saw those lights. From the bottom of the gully all the way up to the mountainside, it was as if someone had scattered a handful of crushed gold into black water. A child was shouting, a dog was barking, a woman was cursing a man: “You dead ghost, aren’t you coming back to eat?” Chen Yuanshan smiled. Then he stood up, his knee clicked, and he walked back into the maintenance hut and threw the fuse into a drawer. There were already thirty-seven fuses in the drawer. He did not know this was the last time. II. Road It was not that Chen Yuanshan had never thought of leaving. In 1996 he wanted to leave for the first time. That year he was thirty-one, newly married, his wife taught in town, and they met once a month. He rode that 28-inch bicycle over the ridges, with two boxes of instant noodles and a bundle of wires tied to the rear rack. When he reached the second ridge, the bicycle chain broke, and he pushed the bicycle six kilometers through the snow. By the time he reached the maintenance hut, it was already dark, and half the instant noodles were crushed. He sat on the threshold eating the crushed noodles and suddenly felt that this life was probably just like this—eating crushed noodles, walking snow roads, repairing broken lines, and then growing old and dying in this gully. He wrote a letter to his wife, saying he wanted to resign and go to Guangdong to work. He wrote three pages, but in the end he did not mail it. Because the next morning while he was patrolling the line, he saw Granny Wang from the bottom of the gully standing under the utility pole waiting for him. Granny Wang was eighty-one, hard of hearing and with failing eyes, but she remembered him. She took his hand and said: “Yuanshan, there was electricity last night. I watched TV all night.” Chen Yuanshan did not ask what channel she watched. But he knew that for Granny Wang, that glowing rectangle was the last line between her and this world. He tore up the resignation letter. In 2008 he wanted to leave for the second time. That year there was an earthquake, and all the lines in the gully were destroyed. Alone, he spent forty-three days rebuilding twelve kilometers of line. In those forty-three days he lost nineteen jin, and the tenosynovitis in his right wrist still has not healed. The night after he finished stringing the last line, people came from the county, gave him a certificate of merit, and took a photo. In the photo he was smiling, but his eyes were empty. That night he drank half a jin of baijiu and called his wife, saying: “I’m tired.” His wife was silent for a long time, then said: “Then stop doing it.” He said: “Yeah.” The next morning at six, he got up and patrolled the line as usual. His wife never brought it up again. There was a tacit understanding between them—some things, once said, are just said, and need not be taken seriously. Just as every winter he would say “I will definitely resign this year,” and every spring he would still be on that line. III. Break In the autumn of 2023, Chen Yuanshan received notice: Heigou was going to have electricity. Not the patched-up kind of electricity, but real electricity. State Grid’s “Last Hundred Meters” project was going to pull a new 35 kV line from the neighboring county, over the mountain pass, straight to the bottom of the gully. The construction team would enter in November, and completion was expected in March of the following year. “By then, line patrolmen won’t be needed anymore.” On the phone, the station chief’s voice was a little embarrassed. “Old Chen, you... the organization will make arrangements.” Chen Yuanshan said: “Okay.” He hung up, stood at the door of the maintenance hut, and looked at the line he had walked for twenty-nine years. The utility poles stretched from the mountain pass all the way to the bottom of the gully, like a string of ellipses. He had counted them: one hundred forty-seven in total. He had climbed every one, some more than a hundred times. On the thirty-fourth pole was something he had carved—“2003.12.6,” the day he burned off half his finger. Under the seventy-eighth pole was buried a wild rabbit; he had found it frozen to death while patrolling in the winter of 2011 and buried it casually. The guy wire of the one hundred twenty-first pole he had replaced himself, using steel strand he had carried back from town, carrying it twenty kilometers. Suddenly he did not know how to say goodbye to these things. In November, the construction team arrived. More than twenty people, with excavators and cranes. Chen Yuanshan stood at the mountain pass watching them work and felt like a part that had been replaced. The new line took another route and did not pass by the maintenance hut. Those old utility poles would be dismantled after the project was finished. He still got up at six every day. But he no longer patrolled the line. He sat at the door of the maintenance hut and watched the construction team erect the new steel towers one by one. Those towers were taller than any utility pole he had ever seen, silver-gray, shining in the sun. One day, the construction team leader came over to him and handed him a cigarette: “Master Chen, how many years have you worked on this line?” “Twenty-nine years.” The leader exhaled smoke: “Then you’ve really put your life here.” Chen Yuanshan did not answer. He looked into the distance; the fog at the bottom of the gully was dispersing. IV. Lamp On March 15, 2024, the new line was switched on. That day Chen Yuanshan did not go to the site. He sat in the maintenance hut and heard people setting off firecrackers in the distance. Then he saw the light at the bottom of the gully change—not the old flickering light that could go out at any moment, but a stable, even light that spread upward like water. He suddenly thought of Granny Wang. Granny Wang passed away in the winter of 2021. The night she died, the power in the gully went out again. Chen Yuanshan repaired it until three in the morning; when he closed the switch, he saw that the light in Granny Wang’s house was not on. The next day he went down to look; the door was locked. A neighbor said the old woman had already passed the night before, walking away in the darkness. Chen Yuanshan stood in front of Granny Wang’s door for a long time. He thought, if there had been electricity that night, could the old woman have watched TV for one more night? Could she have stayed a little longer in that rectangle of light? He did not know the answer. But he knew that from today on, no one in this gully would walk away in darkness because there was no electricity. That night, Chen Yuanshan did one thing. He wiped clean the kerosene lamp in the maintenance hut that had been used for twenty-nine years, lit it, and placed it on the windowsill. Then he closed the door and went down the mountain. He was going to town to pick up his wife. V. Light Later someone asked Chen Yuanshan whether twenty-nine years had been worth it. He thought for a long time and said: “Have you seen that kind of light? It’s—the whole gully is dark, and then you close the switch, ‘pa,’ and everything lights up. Children are shouting, dogs are barking, cooking smoke rises. You stand up on the mountain looking down and feel that you are not a person, but a wire. Connecting this end and that end.” He paused, then said: “Worth it or not doesn’t matter. As long as the lights are on.” In the summer of 2024, the old line was dismantled. Chen Yuanshan made a special trip back, removed the piece of metal sheet with the date carved on it from the thirty-fourth pole, and put it in his pocket. The maintenance hut was also demolished. On its original site a stone tablet was erected, inscribed: “Heigou Line · 1995-2024 · Paying tribute to every lamp keeper.” Chen Yuanshan went to see the tablet. He touched the words on it, smiled, turned, and walked away. When he left, it was evening. The setting sun dyed the whole gully golden. The steel towers of the new line cast long shadows in the light, like a row of people standing guard. At the bottom of the gully, the lights of three hundred seventy-two households came on. Steadily, evenly, like water, shining. Epilogue This story has no villain, no conflict, no climax. It is only about one person, and one line, and twenty-nine years of wind. But if you stand at the mountain pass, on the night of the 27th day of the twelfth lunar month, in a wind of minus nineteen degrees, and watch the three hundred seventy-two lights below the mountain come on one by one— You will understand that some light is not given by electricity. It is given by people