《The Snowy Road》 - by Yi Chong-jun
”Along the winding lonesome mountain road, I only followed his footprints in the snow...”
A mother’s love for her child is extreme devotion. Scores of mothers in the world take care of their children even if they must sacrifice everything they have. However, in some cases they are unable to express their love even though their love for them is bountiful. There are some mothers who are forced to ineffectively show their love due to harsh circumstances such as poverty, death, separation, and war. It is these same mothers whose hearts are heavy with regret. 《The Snowy Road》 is the story of a mother whose love for her son became fraught with distress due to her poverty.
The plot centers around a mother in a remote country village whose husband is dead. The mother lives with her oldest son--an alcoholic--and his wife, while her younger son attends high school in the city. When her alcoholic older son dies after squandering all the family’s assets, she is left penniless and without a home. As a result, she has no home for her younger son when he comes to visit her.
To a young child, a hometown is a special place where one’s mother lives. In the Snowy Road, the mother finds herself being incapable of supporting her younger son because her house has been sold. Even when she is in a torrent of anguish and despair, she thinks only of her younger son. She yearns to show her maternal affection by fixing him a hot meal and making it possible for him to spend one last night with her in the house that’s been sold, so she asks the new owner a favor, arranging for her to stay in the house until her son’s visit. She stays on in the house, which has already been bought by someone else, waiting every day for her son’s visit. Finally, her younger son returns to his hometown after he hears the news. She fixes a hot meal and prepares his bedding for him. It is the last hot meal she prepares and the last bedding she will ever lay out in the house.
The following day, at the break of dawn, the mother has to send her son back to the city. In order to catch a city-bound bus, one must walk all the way from the village to the bus terminal in town. Once her son returns to the city, he has to wrestle with the brutal world on his own. The mother has no house for her son to return to, and she no longer has any means to provide for him. Sending her son off in this way makes her heart tremendously heavy. She walks with him for some distance, at first intending to walk with him only up to the main road. However, she ends up walking with her son up to the newly constructed road, climbing over the crest of a hill and going all the way to the bus terminal. The road is blanketed with white snow that fell the previous night. The mother and her son walk side by side on the snowy road at the crack of dawn, supporting each other, as they leave their footprints in the snow. All the while the mother fights to hold back her tears.
Ignoring the mother who can’t bear to part with her son, the indifferent bus driver speeds away, carrying her son away from the terminal. At a loss, she sits down in the empty terminal for a long while before eventually getting up to leave. The real grief begins at this point. The day has not yet broken. The mother returns to the village as she retraces the footprints left by her and her son on the snowy road. The mother’s tiny feet only walk over her son’s footprints, as if she wants to feel his bodily warmth from these imprints in the snow. At this point, she doesn’t bother to hide her tears. She feels as if her son’s voice and warm body temperature have been left in his footprints. While the mountain birds flutter above, she becomes dazed, as if her son’s soul has become a bird. When she sees trees canopied by snow, she feels as though her son is among them; the mother believes there must be another trace of her son left behind besides his footprints. The endless tears that the mother has shed must also have left a trace, like a scar, on the snowy road on her way back to the village.
When the snow melts, the footprints on the snowy road will disappear. However, the lingering scar in the mother’s heart will never heal.
影像﹕攝於韓國江原道五臺山國立公園 (Odaesan National Park)。
五臺山國立公園建於1975年，經江原道洪川郡內面和平昌郡珍富面、道岩面。五臺山（面積298.5平方公里）因滿月臺、長嶺臺、麒麟臺、象三臺和知工臺這五臺而得名。
五臺山主峰爲高1563米的毗盧峰，西南方綿延著小臺山、虎嶺峰、小溪房山等山峰。東面與上王峰和頭老峰相連，因多爲高度超過1000米的崇山峻嶺而著稱。這些高山構成了環抱平原的地形，北漢江的支流五大川在其間形成了幽深險峻的山谷並向南流去。東臺山和老人峰間凹陷的真嶺，形成了五大川和連穀川的分水嶺。真嶺經過五大川和連穀川等沿岸，形成了連接東海岸地區的一個通道。
五臺山的代表寺刹是月精寺，該寺因東臺山滿月臺上十五的月光特別明亮而得名。這裏有著名的八角九層石塔（國寶48）和石造菩薩坐像（寶物139）。此外，月精寺的寂滅寶宮供奉著慈藏的釋加真身舍利。沿著月精寺的樅樹叢向東走5公里左右，再上去可見五臺山的史庫址，這裏建有靈監寺。
五臺山國立公園擁有我國最大的天然樹林，各種植物和野生動物很多。著名的植物有毗盧峰一帶的石櫧樹群落以及頭老峰到上王峰之間的踟躇、金剛籠等，動物主要棲息有野豬、麝香獐、鴛鴦、五色啄木鳥、白腰雨燕等。
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