That Really Big Wall in China

Juggling lenses hundreds of feet in the air, changing my zoom to a wide-angle so I could capture the expanding horizon behind me as the ski-lift gondola slowly caressed the side of the mountain leading up the its peak, my friend Trenton asked me in utter awe and wonder of our surroundings “did you ever think you would see the Great Wall of China??!!” Truth of the matter is I don’t think I had ever really given it much thought, but if I had I would not have had much doubt of the possibility, and sitting there on my way up to one of the seven wonders of the world, I was not at all surprised to be there.

We had traveled two hours out of Beijing to experience a portion of the wall not overcome by tourists or vendors, and it was well worth the travel. After a slow but astonishing cable car ride up the mountain, we walked a ways to a second check point where we took another little trip up on a backwards-traveling “rail car” to check point “B,” at which point we were left to our own strength and ambling utilities the rest of the way up. I passed an older woman with a cane huffing and puffing her way up, a few minutes away from her final destination, and encouraged her along “come on, babe, you can do it,” knowing full well that she didn’t understand me. She did, though…at least the gist of it, and we shared a smile and laugh, after which I had my own laugh knowing that, unlike us, she hadn’t taken cable cars and rail cars up…she had walked the entire way. It was a long ways up too, considering we were at the highest point of the Great Wall in all of China.

The wall itself is astonishing. Standing on its wide brick structure it’s easy to forget you are thousands of feet in the air, and looking over the rolling hills it seems almost impossible that the majestic little trail of brick snakes over mountaintops and through the valleys as far as the eye can see.

The wall is divided, or sectioned off, by little brick huts (more like fortified embattlements, but I’m no history buff) and with each new one you encounter, you step out the doorway only to see a new stretch of wall completely different than the one before. It has its own slope, its own angle, color, and curvature; its bricks are all individually arranged in their own different formation, some smaller than others, making walking on them quite challenging, if not painstakingly problematic. The ground is uneven in its own distinct manner, making you realize with every step that they were all hand picked and hand-placed.

It’s almost haunting to traverse along the wall, wondering if the soldiers who once marched along there also cursed the uneven brick (“ugh, who laid THIS stretch of wall…I bet it was your cousin!” “Hey, don’t bring Ling into this…you know he hurt his back laying brick…he’s now on worker’s comp because of this damn wall!”). People mentioned this person or that who had walked the entire stretch of the wall, people who camped out on portions of it, portions that were closed because they had degraded so much over the years they were no longer navigable, and we wondered how many thousands of people had worked on it, walked on it, fought over it (literally, too), and stood in awe and amazement of it just as we were.

As the sun slowly went down over the mountainous horizon and the cold set in at a quicker pace than the sun took to disappear, we took off down the wall to a point over the river where we zip-lined down over the water to a boat that took us back to our buses to end the day. It had only taken a few hours and I had this feeling that I could open up some imaginary book and simply check it off…The Great Wall…been there, done that, resisted the urge to buy the sweatshirt. Maybe next time I’m here I’ll get the chance to sit and stare without the anxiety of taking pictures to remember every ten feet. Next time? Well, who knew I’d be there to begin with? Think big. They sure did!