Pipeline

My dad has always been a bit eccentric in my opinion…I love him to death but sometimes I just had to cock my head sideways, wondering exactly where he was coming from. One of the things he did pretty often (if not every night) was step out side and walk on his “pipeline”. We actually lived right beside a natural gas pipeline and the clearing ran right along the side of our property, which happened to make a great driveway…. a 300 foot long driveway! but I digress… Dad would quietly step outside just about the time the evening chatter had grown to a dull roar. Sometimes one of us would notice and look out the window to see him… just standing… or walking slowly… kicking rocks… or kneeling looking down next to a clump of grass. We might watch him for a while… and wonder what he was doing… He said he talked to God out on the pipeline… I often wondered if Dad thought maybe if he “walked with God” out on the pipeline enough God would just translate him like he did Enoch in the bible… Sometimes we walked with him on his pipeline… we would chatter and talk… and play… and he would walk… and point out little things… like bugs busy with their little lives… As I got older I had some walks on the pipeline with him… and a few times I tried by myself… when he had a really bad spell of depression and would hardly come out of his room. For some reason the pipeline just wasn’t the same experience for me that it was for Dad… I shrugged it off as part of his “eccentric” nature.

This evening I went to the new home we bought to work on some plumbing repairs that I wanted to have done before we moved in… as I finished up, I closed the house and walked outside… It was about 12:00 and would have been pretty dark if not for the huge full moon glowing over the freshly plowed fields behind my house. I stepped out to the driveway… suddenly noticing the noise of the city far in the distance… like an annoying mosquito hovering around one ear. I walked out to the south side of my property… Ironically enough a long driveway runs along the side of my property for access to the fields behind it. I took a few steps as I breathed in the cool night air… gazing at the huge full moon sprinkling silver over the tops of the fields. The sky felt like it wanted to just swallow me up it looked so big… the stars seemed close enough to touch… I ambled along just drinking in the quiet… and suddenly I was talking… to God… and walking… and laughing… and crying… wondering how I could be walking so closely in my father’s footsteps… even being hundreds of miles away… I was filled with amazement that all along I had been thinking I was buying a house with a yard and great trees and all that good stuff… when all I was really doing… was finally buying… my very own… Pipeline.