Eric's Beijing Diary

I am sitting on the top deck of the Galaxy 1 watching the sun go down behind the mountains along the Yangtze River. I boarded the ship this afternoon, and we will pull out of here tomorrow morning. I'm reading now from a book I picked up at a used book store near the campus the other day. It's called Readings for Citizens at War. This book was published in the United States in 1943, during World War II. It is compendium of readings deemed appropriate for a people living in a country at war. That's the idea, anyway. I have no idea how they chose the selections, but the one that has my attention at the moment is John Wesley Powell's description of his exploration of the Colorado River in 1869. He was the first white man to navigate the river, and he began his journey without having any idea what lay ahead: "We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. "With some eagerness, and some anxiety, and some misgiving, we enter the canyon below..." I am struck by the boldness of his words as I sit here in the Yangtze. My trip will be up the river, not down, and I have a printed itinerary. But when I contemplate what I really want to accomplish in China, I can really relate to this guy. What is it? I mean my dream of being able to do something about the problem of education in rural China? Right now, it's just another day dream. When I look back over my life, I am forced to admit, that most of the things I have dreamed of doing have never come to anything. For example, I remember sitting in study hall when I was in Junior High dreaming of building a raft and sailing down the Mississppi. But I have also noticed that sometimes if you keep dreaming, your dreams really do come true, although perhaps not exactly the way your mind had originally framed them. I never sailed a raft down the Mississippi like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, but I was a river boat pilot on the Mississippi for a couple hours one lazy Sunday afternoon. I won't talk about it now, because I don't want to get off on a tangent. Just these words of advice: Stay between the buoys, and when the Captain says "Bear to starboard," do it now! My point is that any enterprise that ever amounts to anything must begin with a dream, and the person who dreamed that dream most likely dreamed a whole host of others that never emerged from the mist of imagination to become reality.

Labels: Summer 2004