Into The Pipe

In small town America, sometimes there isn’t a whole lot to do. Case in point, one summer afternoon I was doing what a normal four year old in the mid seventies did. I was playing with Tonka trucks in the ditch next to the street in front of our house. If you saw that scene these days, the parents would be put away for years for child abandonment or neglect. That's all bullshit. My parents were great and I turned out just fine. So there I am bulldozing and hauling dirt clods, when a small group of boys rode by on their bikes. At this time, I didn’t have a bike yet and it would be a few months before I would be getting my Big Wheel, so bikes were fascinating. The boys had old bikes. The paint was scraped off, the tires were worn and, on one bike, the rubber on one of the handlebars was missing. They were still cool bikes in my eye though. The boys went up and down the block a few times and looked to see if I was still hanging around, which of course I was. There were dirt clods to be moved and bikes to be seen. The four boys that ranged in age of around six to ten rode up and got off their bikes. A little panic set in because I was not good at confrontations and it looked like an inevitable confrontation. To my surprise and relief, it was not. They were coming to see what I was up to. I explained the situation of my demolition project and they sat down for a while. I learned that the boys were a set of twins, their brother, and a friend. After a few minutes, one of the twins noticed our yard had one end of a culvert sticking out from under the road. When rainwater would gather in the ditch that I was now playing in, it would flow through the pipe into the neighbor’s ditch which would flow further downhill until it went into the fields outside of town. One of the twins went over to the pipe and poked his head into the opening and shouted. You could hear the echo, which apparently intrigued the other boys. Two of them went across the street to the other end of the culvert and yelled back. It was turning out to be a fun day watching these guys yell back and forth through a big tube under the street. Then my happy-go-lucky, sunshiny day turned gray. The twin that was on my side of the street said “We should all crawl through the tube.” The feeling of dread and claustrophobia squeezed my neck shut. If I had the colorful language I have today, I would have told him “That’s the dumbest shit I have ever heard.” But at four, the best I could come up with was, “I don’t think that’s good.” He was determined to crawl through the tube whether I wanted to or not, so he yelled across to the others that he was going in. The other twin thought it was also a good idea and came over to follow his brother into the pipe. Keep in mind that this pipe was only about twenty-four inches in diameter. There was plenty of room for flowing water, but not enough room for a couple of twin boys. Into the pipe they went. I was nervous. I turned into a four year old Woody Allen right there in my front yard, pacing back and forth, looking in the pipe, pacing some more, talking about how their mom wouldn’t find them for weeks if they got stuck, because I wasn’t going to tell anyone that they did this. After a long worrisome fifteen minutes, the twins emerged from the other end of the pipe. They were a little dirtier than when they went in, but their smiles of accomplishment showed that they didn’t care. I told them I was glad they made it out and that I had enough excitement for one day and went back into the house. For weeks after the crawl-through, I would play in the ditch and periodically go look inside the culvert. I don’t know if I was checking to see if it had gotten wide enough that I would brave going through it, or if I was checking to see if some poor sap had gotten stuck in there. Either way I wasn’t too keen on the whole thought of this thing being in my front yard. It was a breeding ground for delinquency in my book. Luckily, in a few months, we moved to a new house that didn’t have a culvert running beside it. What a relief that was. A few years later, I asked one of the twins about crawling through the pipe. He said he didn’t remember doing it. Strange how he forgot so easily one of the events that scarred me enough to write about it thirty years after it happened. I can’t help but wonder if something I did thirty years ago affected someone that way. If I did, you can be sure it didn’t involve a two foot drain pipe. Jumping off a roof, yes, drain pipe, no.

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