The Story of Osipcheon River(river with 50 bends)

At the beginning of one of my favorite movies, It's a wonderful life, the 12-year-old protagonist, George Bailey, is sledding down a snowy hill to a frozen lake with his younger brother, Harry, and their friends. When it's his turn, the younger brother says, “I'm not scared,” and slides down the hill and onto the ice of the lake, only to break the ice and fall into the water. “Boys, make a human chain,” the protagonist shouts, and dives into the water to grab his brother. His friends immediately form a human chain, holding each other's hands and stretching out their arms, and his brother is rescued safely.

 

More than 50 years ago, when my brother and I were about the same age as George Bailey in the movie, a similar incident occurred. It was a cold winter day in Samcheok, Gangwon-do, when the lower reaches of the Osipcheon River(river with 50 bends) froze over and the neighborhood children gathered to go sledding. I borrowed my older brother's beloved sled, but while riding it, I fell backwards, and the sled slid by itself and fell into the middle of the river where the ice was not frozen. I was looking at my brother, and he yelled, “Hurry up and get it out.” I took a few cautious steps and heard the ice crack under my feet. I was scared and hesitated, but my brother yelled again, “You left it out. Hurry up and get it out.” I stopped because I was in the habit of not listening to my brother's words, but if I had just walked into the water, my life would have ended at the age of nine. 

 

Long ago, there was always something to do in Osipcheon, where the water flowed from the Sadae square in the center of Samcheok town, through the relatively large rice fields, around the Maitreya rock at the foot of Mt. Bong Hwang(Phoenix), plucking acacia flowers and roasting them on the flat stone. Sneaking ears of barley and roasting them on the bonfire, catching fish with a torn basket in the shallows of the river all summer long, picking up marsh snails that were common on the bottom of the water, swimming, bathing in the river to wash off the salt after a day at the sea not far away, watching the schools of salmon come up the river during the salmon spawning season, catching grasshoppers in the rice paddies and roasting them, catching mudfish among the paddy levees, sledding when the river froze... These are some of my favorite memories from my hometown.

 

The other day, I went to the website of my elementary school's juniors and saw a photo of the lower reaches of the river posted by my hometown junior Heung Shul, and I remembered the faces of my friends who used to play in the river as children.

 

Kim Sung-ho, who drowned after being caught in a whirlpool under Rock while swimming in the river, was a poor kid who lost his parents when he was young and lived in a relative's house. He always wore black clothes and had a depressed expression. Even after all these years, I can't forget his face, which seemed to be a little shy. There was a legend that a dragon, a monster serpent or a water ghost, lived in the whirlpool below Maitreya Rock and ate one person a year, and I believed it to be true because someone always drowned there in the summer. 

 

When we were catching fish with the basket, one of my friends held the torn basket, and the other swung both feet diligently to gather the fish into the basket, while the friends around us made a “shukka-shukka” sound. We were all dirty, with our pants rolled up as high as they would go, but we weren't ashamed of it, because we had to survive on a couple of clothes. It was a time of poverty.

 

The barley stealing and the bean stealing for fun in the fields by Osipcheon River... it was all guiltless fun. How fun it was to string grasshoppers on stalks of grass and roast them. It was a feast when we picked up a lot of marsh snails, which were common along the river, boiled them in a small pot that we had prepared in advance and dipped them in gochujang.

 

In the winter, the backs of my hands would crack from sledding all day in the cold wind. I used to apply mentholatham, but it was rare, so I would dip my hands in the urine chamber pot then take them out to dry after staying overnight, but I felt dirty, so when my mother asked me to dip my hands in the urine, I rebelled and got beaten. The sled I used to ride was made by my older brother, who was good with his hands, by cutting and nailing wood, and then nailing a thick wire to the bottom.  

 

I was so nostalgic that I looked up a map of Samcheok City. When I left my hometown, construction was underway to turn the S-shaped river into a straight line, so I thought the area around Osipcheon must have changed a lot. When I looked at the map, the riverbank I had been playing on had disappeared, the whirlpool beneath the Maitreya Rock on Mount Bong Hwang, where my friend Sung Ho drowned, was no longer there, and not only were the Sadae squares and the rice fields that touched them gone, but the new land that had been created by the river's altered course had houses, shops, government offices, and schools. When I looked at the map again, the new names of 'Phoenix Road' and 'Sadaegil' faintly showed the old traces.

 

I don't know if this is development or progress, but where are my childhood memories? Comparing the map with the old photos posted by Heung-Sul, I can't help but feel nostalgic.

 

(August 18, 2014)