Forty years as a mountain postman: half his bag is medicine
Village postman Luo's bag carries letters — and prescription refills for dozens of elderly households. He also watches chimney smoke: three days cold means someone inside needs help.
Lao Luo's mail bag weighs twenty kilograms — half letters and parcels, half medicine.
He is the postman of Shanli Township, responsible for the mail route through eleven natural villages and more than four hundred households. The mountain paths are brutal; one round trip takes three days, and where even a horse can't go, he walks. His bag began getting heavier twenty years ago — more and more elders left behind in the mountains, more and more children working away — and "picking up medicine" gradually became his second job.
For mountain people, a trip to the county hospital for prescriptions takes a full day there and back, and the elders' legs can't manage it while their children are far away. Lao Luo saw it and set himself an unofficial rule: list your regular medications for me, and when I collect the mail at the county post office I'll buy them on the way — you pay only the drug cost. For twenty years his bag has carried the medicine lists of dozens of households: blood pressure pills, diabetes medication, emergency heart medicine, sorted into little packets labeled in wobbly handwriting with a name and a dosage.
His route became the mountains' lifeline. Medicine running low? Shout "Lao Luo" at the edge of the village. An urgent letter? Wave from the roadside. College admission letters rode in the innermost layer, against his chest — "if the rain got to one of those, unthinkable." In forty years he has delivered more than a hundred of them. "That's the work I'm proudest of. Every letter I hand over, one more kid flies out of the mountains."
Lao Luo's route also carries a special ledger: the list of village elders. Who lives alone, whose health is frail, who he hasn't seen for a few days — time to knock on a door. It was a habit that grew out of delivering letters. One winter he noticed that the chimney of Old Wu, who lived alone, hadn't smoked for three days. He climbed the wall in and found the old man bedridden and sick. He got neighbors to help carry him to the township clinic — the doctor said one more day and the man might not have made it.
From then on, "checking the chimneys" became part of his rounds. Mountain people cook over wood fires; a smoking chimney means all is well. One upward glance as he passes with the mail — it has become muscle memory. The village says: "Lao Luo carries medicine in his bag, chimneys in his eyes, and us in his heart."
The post office drew his route. The medicine in his bag and the chimneys in his eyes were additions of his own. None of it comes with wages or a post on the roster — only with the tenderness one mountain person cannot help feeling for another.
In forty years, Lao Luo's mail route has become a medicine route, a route of the heart. He was awarded the National May First Labor Medal; the citation called him "a wild goose of the great mountains." Coming home with it, he put the medal in his mail bag and carried it for a full day. "I wanted the medal to walk the route with me, just once."
Lao Luo is fifty-eight now, and the route's transport has gone from foot to motorbike. The township offered him an assistant; he declined. "Whoever helps me won't know the mountain paths or the chimneys. Give me two more years — once my apprentice knows every household, then I'll retire." The apprentice, born in the nineties, has walked with him for two years and now looks up at the chimneys too.
Lao Luo says: "The route will change hands. But the half of the bag that holds medicine must never be empty."
In the end
In an age of next-day delivery, one man has spent forty years carrying letters, medicine, and worry into the mountains on foot. Lao Luo's mail bag tells us: the slowest routes often carry the fastest care. However high and far the mountains, there is always someone crossing them for you.