If there is a sign in every era of a person, my childhood is the tributary of the Xiangjiang River, Huanshui—I didn't know that this small river leads to the Xiangjiang River, flows into Dongting, returns to the mighty Yangtze River, and runs to the boundless sea. Even shaking his head and reading Du Fu's Xiangjiang poems and Fan Zhongyan's "The Story of Yueyang Tower", he still didn't realize this. It wasn't until decades later, with half a century of wind and dust, standing at the source of the Yangtze River in Yushu and wandering at the mouth of the river and sea on Chongming Island, that I suddenly realized that the water that had gently touched me was actually with the trickling ice springs of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and the surging waves of the East China Sea. Oh, the river by my hometown is my kindergarten, my worry-free river, and my forgetful water. The joy of a fierce man swimming to the opposite bank, the courage to jump into the water from a high bridge pier, and the cheers of touching fish, shrimp, crab snails in the sand, stone and mud holes are already a joy that modern teenagers can hardly have.
Of course, there is a process to the end of the boy, and the obvious sign is the railway station on the edge of the county. The first time I took the train, an ignorant teenager from a small county town in eastern Hunan, after more than 50 hours of shaking, was directly pulled to the most prosperous place in the country of abundance, and suddenly became a young man who looked around. I don't know when the ambition to travel all over China was born, but it was probably planted in my heart by the sound of the clanging train. A few years later, when I arrived at the farthest Kashgar station in the green car, I suddenly remembered the station in my hometown with tears in my eyes. When I drove the car through the Qiangtang grassland alone, I also recalled again and again the starting station that sent me on a long journey. When I have taken the train again and again, walked through one station after another, and walked through more than 2,600 counties, I will look back, reminisce, and be grateful again and again for this starting station of life.
Perhaps, I will also take the China-Europe Railway to the other end of the Eurasian continent and take the Pan-Asian High-speed Railway to Southeast Asia, but this small station will always be the starting station of life. Like, maybe I will stand at the Cape of Good Hope and watch "the earth ends here", and stand on Tierra del Fuego to see "the sea begins here", but the small river of childhood will always be the clearest source of living water.