"To hell with this, I'm exhausted!" After seeing off the last customer, Gu Boyuan collapsed into a chair and wiped the sweat from his face, either mocking himself or complaining:
"I'm getting old. Even digging the Big Canal when I was young didn't wear me out like this!"
"Today's work really wasn't as tiring as digging the Big Canal," Li Long said with a laugh, half sitting on the counter. "Digging the Big Canal, especially clearing the bottom, left you so tired you couldn't even talk. Uncle, you can still talk now, so you're doing better than you did back then..."
He had cleared canals before, and that was nowhere near as strenuous as clearing their bottoms. Clearing the bottom meant hauling silt out of a canal two to two and a half meters deep. It was extremely difficult work, demanding both skill and strength.
Everyone was assigned a section while they worked-say, roughly ten meters per person for a morning. Those ten meters were nothing to scoff at. Originally, both banks of the Dry Canal were bare earth, without cement slabs protecting the slopes. After a year of use, water washed mud down from both sides, leaving a thick layer of sediment on the bottom.
The Dry Canal was required to be at least two meters deep, with no grass along either side. In practice, after a year of use, a two-meter-deep canal might only be a meter and a half deep. To ensure the canal served its full purpose in agricultural production and irrigation could be completed, all the silt had to be cleared before spring sowing. So the first task for every production team each spring was clearing the canals.
Clearing a canal meant climbing down to dig out mud and removing the grass from both slopes.