To see the last days of the Yangtze River Valley, Marcello, Elizabeth, and I took the three-day ferry trip downriver. The cliffs are so high you get a sore neck looking up toward the top. Our tour guide pointed to the 170-meter white painted stripes on the Yangtze Valley’s granite cliffs. That’s how high the floodwaters would reach. Looking up, I felt like I was having a Jack and the Beanstalk adventure. One hundred and seventy meters is a trip into the clouds.

Flooding the plain will not only fill the river gorges, it will displace millions of peasant farmers. It will bury the Panda Cave, the Suspending Coffins, the Bright Temple, and Fendu, a ghost town where malevolent spirits are thought to dwell, and more—much more. The Chinese government seems not to worry about this, pointing out with pride that the world’s fastest-emerging economic power will soon boast the world’s largest dam. Early on, engineers and project managers realized that three separate dams would provide more power than one, and would disperse the available electricity over a greater and more expansive area. But why drive a Beetle when you can drive a Cadillac?

With most of the passengers seasick, we disembarked at Double Dragon Town to recover our land legs. In Double Dragon Town the citizens were literally removing every stick of furniture, every brick and stone, chipping away with pickaxes, hoes, and tiny hammers, and lugging all this stuff to the high ground, where they were reconstructing the whole city. And here comes the kicker: in Double Dragon Town, whom do I find but my junkman. It was the Mariners ballcap that first caught my view and sure enough it was him. Geez! Talk about finding a needle in a haystack! The junkman was wearing his charcoal sports coat and his gray trousers, which were now torn at the knees because of his new occupation. His knobby knees were thick with grime, scuffed and bloody. I chased a pair of Dramamine tablets with a bottle of Ice Dew and, having done so, I handed the empty bottle to my old friend. He gave me a toothless smile of recognition. Because the whole story would delight my father, I gave the junkman a pair of one-hundred-yuan notes, a sum of approximately twenty-five dollars. Money enough to buy a good deal more than a new pair of pants.

The junkman took my money but he didn’t exactly seem thrilled to have money. You would think he would be; my father would think that. I mean here he is working like a dog, and it can’t be for his health, you know what I mean? In that sense the junkman was like the David Carradine character Caine, in the TV series Kung Fu, above such trifling worldly concerns as m-o-n-e-y!