It just dawned on me that this qualifies as a pretty rare touch with fame, if mundane and pointless.
The pipeline runs through the corner of the southeastern Pennsylvania real estate I grew up on, and it gained a pipe during the 1960s. The construction project was what they call an “attractive nuisance” to the little children who lived around it, what with trenching machines, heavy equipment, and all those pipe sections. Not surprisingly, when I got the chance, I crawled into the end of the pipe, though I didn’t go very far because it quickly gets dark and spooky in there. The sections of pipe they have staged along the route, being open at both ends, were less spooky and better lit, so I crawled through some of them too.
A section of the pipeline ran through our part of rural Maryland, not 200 yards from our house, when I was a kid in the sixties. We ran through the open sections of pipe, too (entertainment options were very very basic at that time).
Totally cool. At a Burning Man regional a few years ago we had a guy from Michigan with an electric fiddle and a recording box controlled with foot switches. He’d record a short phrase and loop it back with a delay about the same as the pipeline had then play against it. He could layer phrases – he did as many as three – and could change them on the fly so the performances could get quite complex.
He put on two performances of about fifteen minutes each at about noon and dusk all three days we were there and everything would come to a halt when he did.
There have been people in pipelines in two James Bond movies. James himself in Diamonds are Forever. And the defecting Russian went for a pig ride through the Trans-Siberian Pipeline in The Living Daylights.
I look back at the way we crawled all over sites like that once the workmen went home and just shake my head. I can’t believe what we were allowed to get up to.
Ought be more of it! Young children of today know nothing of the real world. Now get off ma lawn!
Pipeline also refers to a surfing phenomenon, as in this pic. Richard Bach, stunt pilot and author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, tells the story that he once flew his biplane through one such.
We would seek out construction sites where somebody had left a backhoe, dozer, excavator or other equipment with an implement not lowered to the ground. Whenever we’d find one, we’d look for something to place under the implement, and crush it by working the lever to lower the implement (which works without engine power if there’s a float position on the valve).
