Friends,
 
I've already written to some in a rushed email.  The short version is that John, Shirley and I survived the earthquake intact.  Here is the longer version to provide some context.
 
John and I flew from LiJiang to Chengdu on Thursday, May 8th and took a car to DuJiangyan where Shirley is living with her family, mom, dad, grandma and two dogs.  Shirley is a grad student and friend that Jinny and I know from Tarim University in Xinjiang where we taught last year. She is awaiting some paperwork for approval to go
 
We spent Thursday and Friday nights in a hotel across from their home. Friday we explored DuJiangyan, a city north of Chengdu known for its 2,300 year-old irrigation system that splits the might Min He (river) into two channels and then into four that rush thorough the city and then get further subdivided to provide irrigation for the whole Chengdu plain.  It is a pretty city with rushing water everywhere.
 
Saturday we set our in Shirley's car for our northern adventure.  Shiley's car as a Chinese-made Chery model QQ with an 800 cc engine and size to match, bright red and decorated in a Winnie-the-Pooh theme.  Just enough power to make it up some of the winding mountain roads that lay ahead of us.  We drove north for about 90 minutes to the turnoff to the WoLong Panda Preserve and another hour along a bad road in a beautiful valley, along a cascading steam.  Road repairs were needed and ongoing and we waited on the way back for 90 minutes while six dump trucks full of rocks were dumped into the narrow road ahead of us and then a grader and steam roller smoothed them out. 
We saw most of the sixty-something pandas that they had there, in various stages of cuteness.
 
Frow there we drove north and spent Saturday night in the small city of Wenschuan, which has two colleges that I looked at for possible teaching opportunities for September.  Wenschuan was later the epicenter if the quake.
 
Sunday morning we drove north and turned west to follow another river to a Qiang village. The Qiang are one of China's 55 minorities.  
 
http://english.people.com.cn/data/minorities/Qiang.html
 
We were met at the entrance to the village by a handsome 45-year-old Qiang woman in traditional clothing. She squeezed into our car and directed us up the hill to a parking lot and then took us up to her house where we were to spend the night. Shirley did the negotiating and we got room, dinner and breakfast for the three of us for about $22.  The village was built in stair-steps on a steep hillside, with most buildings being two or three stories made of well-plumbed stone construction. No roads, but stone walksways.  We asked about hiking and she told us we could follow dirt road up the valley as far as we pleased. There were little settlements high up in the valley.  Shirley asked if there were any restaurants up there.  She laughed and told us we could just knock on any door and whoever answered would feed us.
 
We hiked a long way up the valley following the stream, and when it became a waterfall the road did a few switchbacks.  There were goats along the way but few people.  It was Sunday and we met a few school children headed down to return to school, probably in Wenschuan, where they boarded for the week.  When we reached a settlement in early afternoon we knocked on a door. The man invited us in.  Two-storey house with a wall enclosing a small courtyard. Grandpa, 65, grandma, 58, girl, prehaps six and her brother, perhaps 4. The girl was squatting naked in a plastic basin in the yard and grandma was washing her hair.  Grandpa was a dignified fellow with the hands of a man who had spent his life moving stones around. When the bath was done they fed us: boiled potatoes, bacon and sausages, tea.  The missing generation, mom and dad, were "up by the glacier" harvesting some kind of mushroom that is very valuable for traditional Chinese medicine that only grows this time of year.  We offered to pay, he declined, we insisted, he refused. We ended up leaving 50 yuan ($7.50) which we hope he does not take as an insult. We said our farewells and walked back down.  I have pictures but not the technology to send them from here.
 
Dinner was good in the Qiang village.  We could take hot showers if we asked far enough ahead of time for the woman to heat up water on the stove and fill the tank.  The WC had a nice view.  The next morning, Monday,  we said our farewells and drove further up the valley to the town of Gambao, a small Tibetan village of perhaps 400 or 500.  Like the Qiang, it consisted of two and three-storey stone houses clinging precariously to a hillside.
 
We parked at the base, walked through the village and found a trail leading up the left, or West side of a valley with a stream running through it.  Ahead we saw a tower which we hiked to, and then down a goat trail to the stream and across a log bridge to a little settlement built along a dirt road that ran along the east side of the valley.  The road did two swichbacks at this point to climb up the hill, and houses were built along all three sections of the road as both road and settlement climbed up the hillside.  We met a group of people at a wide spot in the road, resting and sitting on rocks.  We flirted with a baby girl and an older woman invited us to her house and took us to her cherry orchard and encouraged us to have our fill.  Good, sweet, juicy cherries.  Not on my diet but I had a few and John and Shirley indulged. 
 
We said our farewells and hiked up the road for two or three more hours and reached another settlement at a curve in the road.  We picked the house with the red door and knocked on it.  A man of about 50 lived there with his mother.  She was 85 but could have passed for 100.  She told us that we were the first foreigners that she could remember ever coming there. He showed us his house, more modern than most, poured concrete.  He pointed out the house across the way where his father had been born.  He said he wasn't much of a cook and called his daughter on his cellphone, and she came over and cooked some noodles with pork and green vegetables for us.  We didn't offer to pay but left 35 yuan on the table.  After we left he called after us that we had left some money.  He wanted to return it.
 
About two-thirds of the way back I was walking with Shirley and singing a love song, "Today". Our eyes met and suddenly we felt the earth move beneath our feet.  We were alongside a very high and steep mountain. John and Shirley began running the same way we were going but it wasn't clear to me that it was any safer there than where I was.  I stood there looking straight up at the mountain above me, big rocks jarred loose and tumbling down towards me.  I mean really, really big rocks.  They would come loose, bounce, and fly hundreds of feet towards me.  For a while I stood there moving left and right to avoid them.  Sometimes one would strike the hill above me and send a shower of smaller rocks down, and I had to run to avoid this.  I felt like I was going to die and was just playing for extra seconds.  In my maneuvering I got closer to John and Shirley who had wisely found a big overhanging rock to hide under and I joined them there.  The shaking continued for what seemed like a minute or two, and the cascade of rocks and slides continued for much longer after that.
 
We stayed under the rock long enough to catch our breath and chat about what had just happened.  For us it was all about us.  As far as we knew we were the only people in the world who had witnessed this strange phenomenon.  As we looked around we could see dust clouds rising from other parts of the valley, above, below and across from us.  We wondered but our thoughts were not focused on anything but what to do next.
 
We took off quickly for the settlement where the woman with the cherries was.  Just as we reached it there were other tremors sending more rocks down and we scrambled down and took shelter and assembled in the wide spot in the road with the locals.  Some houses had been smashed and one car was flattened but nobody seemed to be hurt.  Tremors were nearly constant.  A landslide that nearly missed the settlement continued to send rocks down for hours.  We all seemed resolved to sit there in the open, the safest place around, and plans were made to put up a tent for everyone to spend the night in.
 
We were wearing shorts and t-shirts and sandals.  As it turned cooler one man dared to go into his house and brought us three full-length Tibetan robes to keep warm in. We stayed there huddled together for a couple of hours when some people from Gambao came up the road and asked us all to go there.  We felt safe where we were and the road we would have to traverse was right under the mountain and an active landslide.  We negotiated for a while and finally made a run for it.  The road was strewn with boulders but we made it through without incident, running all the way.
 
We assembled at the parking lot at the base of the town.  We could see the town on the hillside with many houses caved in.  I heard no reports of fatalities in the town, but a story that a man had died the previous day and at his funeral up on the hillside several people had died.  The tower that we had hiked to was not there any longer. 
 
The people had quickly harvested a cabbage patch in the most open area and were turning the bare ground into a tent city.  A man on crutches emerged as a leader and enlisted all able-bodied men from 18 to 40 to militia duty, and set them to hauling tent material and others to prepare meals.
 
People whose houses had just been destroyed were looking after us to make sure we were warm enough and later brought us food. 
 
As it was getting dark, about 7 pm, a single-file parade of elementary school children came into town from the nearby school.  Normally Tibetan, or all Chinese, children smile, but these children had a blank, grim look on their faces from having spent the last four-plus hours gathered on the downward side of their school building as tremors rained rocks into the valley around them.  The feeling of relief as the parents reunited with their children was palpable and an emotionally overwhelming moment for me. 
 
People built a bonfire and sat around it late into the night. Tremors continued.  It rained lightly and the tents in the cabbage patch must not have been pleasant.  The people offered us the best place in their humble shelter but John, Shirley and I sat dry and comfortable enough in Shirley's little car and slept fitfully all night.
 
The spirit in Gambo was overwhelming. People were cooperative and supportive of one another.  There was sharing rather than hoarding.
 
In Gambo we felt safe, comfortable and connected to the community.  In the morning John had about 50 school children gathered tightly around him while he gave an impromptu English lesson.  I led them in a chorus of the only two songs I could think of that they would know, the ABC song and Happy Birthday.  We spent part of the morning in the tents with the students communicating as best we could.
 
Authorities in the local capital, LiXian, got word somehow that there were foreigners in Gambao and sent word that we were to be taken there.  The local officials wanted to take us there in a police car and we questioned why we would be better off there sleeping in tents than we were in Gambao where we had our car.  They reached a compromise and John, Shirley and I rode in a police car to LiXian while another policeman drove Shirley's car.  The road was strewn with boulders, a smashed dump truck, fallen utility poles and wires, a smashed bus and portions covered with landslides. There was a large brick house with a three-foot hole in the wall above the front door and a corresponding three-foot stone lying in front of it, like a Wylie Coyote cartoon. The police drove through this mess as fast as the cars could possibly go and the drive as almost as terrifying as the previous day's earthquake.
 
LiXian was a few miles west and further from the quake area.  We saw no collapsed buildings but many with cracks. People were living in their cars, as we did, or camped. Some were in tents. There was no electricity or cellphone coverage.  A few shops opened but mostly the town was closed.  Hundreds of soldiers arrived in town having completed a forced march of 60 kilometers to get there, but there was little for them to do in LiXian.  They swept the streets and some were sent out for road repairs.
 
In LiXian the authorities in the next larger city, the regional capital of MareKang, got word that there were foreigners there and wanted us to come to MareKang where they could have us under their wing.  There were three car fulls of people in LiXian who all wanted to get back to Chengdu and we waited for the roads to clear to MareKang and formed a four-car caravan.  Shirley's car developed engine problems and overheated frequently.  Up one long hill one of the other cars pulled hers with a very dangerous rope maneuver.  We hit a police checkpoint and when they recognized the foreigners we got a police escort to Marekang, had our cameras confiscated briefly while they made sure we had not taken any illegal pictures of earthquake damage, deleted some, and sent us to a hotel where we were told we could only leave to go to supper.
 
We got more news of the quake.  It was much larger than we had imagined.  It destroyed the town of Wenschuan where we had spent Saturday night, but the greatest number of deaths were reported in DuJiangyan, Shirley's home town.  Shirley was able to reach her family by cellphone and they were all alive and well, but their home was not safe to live in.  They had spent one night sleeping outside their house and then had gone to Ya'an to stay in a hotel.  Death counts were reported at almost 15,000, total.  A school dormitory had collapsed with students taking afternoon naps.
 
A wonderful hotel manager let us use her hotel office computer for internet purposes and for the first time I was able to send a brief message to my family letting them know I was alive.  Fortunately other sources had already reached them with the news.  
 
We left Shirley's car in Marekang and piled into the three other cars.  All day Thursday we drove, not in the earthquake zone, far west towards Kangding. Rough road, breakneck drivers.  About two hours north of Kangding we were met by Shirley's boyfriend, Fen, and her mother, for a tearful reunion.  Fen is a man's man and drives a man's car, a big Toyota four-wheel-drive SUV that smoothed out the rough road.  In Kangding we headed east and met Shirley's father in Ya'an.  Dinner for the whole caravan, thanks for their support.  Three cars full of people had shepherded us for two days, people we had never met before.  How nice can people be?
 
Now we are in Chengdu. 
 
I know that I am very lucky.  I know that I am lucky to be alive.
 
The Chinese would tell you that I am lucky because I was born in the "Year of the Golden Pig".  But I think that I am lucky because I have friends who look after me, and friends of friends, and sometimes even strangers.
 
Thank you, friends.
 
Permission to share this email is granted for any purpose.
 
Jim Batterson