By the time Li Long drove to the Fourth Team, there was already water in Reed Gully. Traces of the flood remained: watermarks along the banks and places scoured by the mud and sand the flood had carried.
Sandbags and gravel bags were still piled beside Reed Gully Bridge and on both sides of the dirt road, probably to keep the road from washing away if water spilled over the bridge.
It seemed this flood had been fairly large. The team must have mobilized quite a few workers to fight it.
At the time, this was the Fourth Team's only main road to the outside world. If the Reed Gully road washed out, getting the students to school alone would be a major problem.
Two years earlier, this sort of thing had happened often. Back then, there had been no bridge or road across Reed Gully. People could walk across when it was dry, but during floods, the students could only go over to Little Haizi and wade across the source of Reed Gully-the team had to send militia members there to escort them.
It was nothing like later years, when the Fourth Team had at least three roads leading out, all paved, with no worry about being cut off. Of course, by then Little Haizi had become badly silted up, floods no longer passed through here, and Reed Gully had filled with silt and been planted with trees. The reeds were gone.
That was how completely the landscape could change.
Reflecting on this, he drove toward Old Ma's Place. When he arrived, Li Long was surprised to discover that his patch of saline-alkali land beside Old Ma's Place had already been sown.
Before Start of Spring sowing, the land had to be plowed, then leveled, harrowed, and worked with