the last priest

The nationwide catastrophic flood in 98 almost affected the entire territory of Zhejiang, but Liangjiagou was spared. This time, Liangjiagou seems to be the worst in the entire northwest of Zhejiang.Those few dark clouds didn't go anywhere, and they hung over the sky of Liangjiagou all day and all night, sprinkling water all over the sky as if desperately, but there was no rain falling in the place less than ten kilometers away from our village.

Many old people in the village smoked stuffy cigarettes and said that it was because the Dragon King was angry. Some people began to pour steamed buns into the river, with red paper stamps on them. In the past, these things were used as priests for gods.As the water level continued to rise, some people threw live chickens and ducks into the river, but God did not have mercy on the poor people after all.

In that flood, almost one-third of the houses in our village were washed away.Because Liangjiagou is a village formed along the river, almost every family has a bridge built by itself. At that time, more than half of the bridges were destroyed by the flood, and all the farmers in the field were wiped out, and countless fertile fields were built. up the river beach.My hometown was able to escape the catastrophe because of its high terrain. When I was taken home that day, the flood water was already level with the bridge deck. By noon, the bridge was no longer visible and was completely submerged.

It seems that Liangjiagou’s hundred years of good weather have come to an end, and my condition has not improved. Although I no longer have a fever, my person is quite different from before. My eyes are dull and empty, and I am still in a daze.The family members were also in a hurry and had no choice but to use all the necessary tricks, but Zha Wenbin was missing and the rain was heavy, so he could only stand at home.

I seem to have slept for a long, long sleep. The me in the dream was carried into the old forest by several black shadows on the coffin.Liangjiagou is located in the Tianmu Mountains. The highest peak of Tianmu Mountain is located within the scope of Liangjiagou. We locals call it Dianjing Mountain.

Dianjing Mountain is very high. It is said to be in Liangjiagou, but it is actually far away from us. It takes four or five hours to walk to the foot of the mountain. As for the top of the mountain, no one has ever been there.You can usually see the mountain when you sit in the yard in front of your house, but no one has entered it in the past hundred years.Every time it is going to rain in Liangjiagou, we can take home the clothes, herbs and other things that have been drying outside in advance. The main peak goes down first, and then the rain will slowly move towards the outside.If it catches up with thunderstorms in summer and the rain hits hard, you can clearly see a white rain curtain slowly coming from the mountain.

Before and after liberation, the food in the village was not enough, so the villagers would go to the mountains to plant corn.Choose a barren hill, set it on fire, and the remaining firewood ash will become a natural fertilizer. The corn cobs grown on this high hill are huge, full of grains, and fragrant.But the farthest place is the foot of Dianjing Mountain. According to people of my grandfather’s generation, Dianjing Mountain looks green from a distance, but it is indeed black when viewed from the foot of the mountain, which is very depressing.

The mountains are full of thorns, poisonous snakes and beasts, and they often see thick smoke rising from the mountains.At that time, it was said that there were bandits living on the mountain, and some people said that it was a small army left by the Kuomintang. In this way, no one would dare to enter the mountain.

In the mid-to-late 70s, with the disintegration of the Gang of Four, the entire country was in a tide of construction.Our remote village has also attracted a new batch of guests: a geological brigade of the People's Liberation Army.

Because Liangjiagou is a valley terrain and lacks a large area of ​​flat land for troops to station, these soldiers adopted the model of educated youths going to the countryside and lived in groups in the homes of local villagers.They were disciplined, brought their own food, and provided rent to the villagers. In their free time, they even went to a few movies. The things Liangjiagou came into contact with can be said to be at the leading level in Northwest Zhejiang at that time.

The main task of this army was to replace the mineral resources that were in urgent need of resources at that time, and our village discovered that there were two kinds of minerals in the mining survey: antimony ore and uranium ore!The second type of uranium ore is the raw material used to produce nuclear energy, so a troop was directly stationed at that time, and a team of five was stationed in the old house of my ancestors, and now the land has become a vegetable garden son.

At that time, this army paid more attention to uranium ore than antimony ore, because uranium ore was an important strategic material. They brought in advanced drilling equipment, and drilled a mine hole as deep as a thousand meters.So far, there are still large and small unknown metal pipes scattered on the mountain opposite my hometown. These pipes are buried hundreds of kilometers underground, and they have never rusted in the wind and rain.

There is also a small team sent to investigate the antimony ore. The antimony ore is located on the mountainside of Dianjing Mountain. This small team is the five people who live in my old house.

It was Grandpa who was in charge of bringing these five people into the mountain. In fact, he could only bring them to the foot of the mountain, and it was up to these soldiers to go up.Four of these five soldiers are child soldiers, the new recruits who have just been assigned to the company, and the squad leader who takes the lead is only a two-year soldier, only in his early twenties.

Mining is hard work, especially in wild prospecting. In this deep mountain and old forest, it will take several months to transport the equipment needed to collect samples, and it can only be carried by manpower.They disassembled the equipment and moved it up to reassemble it. The camp was built on the mountainside. Every other week, two people would go down the mountain to get the diesel oil and their rations needed for the drilling machine.

Occasionally when the weather is bad, they will all come down and live in my old house to listen to some old stories told by my grandpa. None of them left their names, and my father only knows to call them the People's Liberation Army.These [-]-year-old child soldiers come from all over the country, and they often give some biscuits to their father who is still a child.

These people stayed on the mountain for about half a year. During the period, some people complained that there were places on the mountain where the drill could not be drilled. After drilling down for tens of meters, it was impossible to continue. They have found the ore vein, and the samples brought down prove that it is a piece of antimony ore with high purity.At that time, the exploration of uranium mines was not going very smoothly, so the company decided to send the news to the superiors, and wanted to deploy more people to mine the antimony mines first, and asked those two soldiers to go back and inform the other people to expand the camp and prepare to move in. many people.

The two soldiers entered the mountain happily with the instructions of the leader. After a week, they were not seen again and continued to go down the mountain to collect supplies. Ten days later, a team of about ten people entered the mountain. Fifteen days later, our village suddenly opened. A large number of troops, 20 days later, the entire exploration team was evacuated overnight, and the cables, generators and other equipment left behind were not taken away in time.There are still two shovels left in my hometown. They have been used for nearly 30 years without any problems. The quality is good. These two shovels were left at that time.

No one knows why this unit was withdrawn overnight. This is a secret of the military, and ordinary people naturally have no right to know.But every Qingming Festival, a small car with a military license plate will come to our village and place a wreath at the intersection leading to Dianjing Mountain. This place is located two kilometers away from the reservoir.

At that time, Liangjiagou picked up a large number of soldiers, especially those diesel engines, which made contributions to farmland irrigation for a long time later.But it was also at that time that Liangjiagou began to be isolated from the outside world. It is obvious that a provincial highway is the closest and most convenient way to go from Liangjiagou, but the construction party would rather detour tens of kilometers to dig a tunnel.

In the next 20 years, Liangjiagou never received any support for modernization, and the village seemed to be abandoned, and the high-quality mineral deposits that once dispatched troops were buried underground.Later, some companies wanted to develop antimony mines, but for unknown reasons, these companies were not approved to mine, and every teacher who is familiar with Chinese geography would warn the students of Liangjiagou not to get too far away from the pipes that are half exposed to the ground. close.

The radioactivity of uranium mines was so strong that it lasted until the middle and late 90s. The villagers in Liangjiagou basically died of cancer.A report of all the villagers was handed over to the top management layer by layer, and finally a troop came to seal off several entrances to the uranium mine. Liangjiagou has only improved in recent years, but there are more people like my family. People have migrated out.

Back then, I slept for a long, long time. In my dream, I was carried up to Dianjing Mountain, where I saw abandoned camps and several bottomless pits. More importantly, I I also met Cha Wenbin!