PIPELINES AND RIVERS

Rex Burress

When is a pipeline like a river?

The 2016 pipeline protest incident in North Dakota, involving a plan to move oil from the Dakota's to Illinois via a pipeline located near Native American reservation land and rivers, has made people aware of the peril to the environment, as well as the immense multitude of pipes strung all over earth. The effort is precarious as metal pipes can rust or break, and even plastic is not forever.

Even though a pipeline is involved in moving liquids, like a river provides a channel for water to flow, usually it is volatile oils and gases that flow through pipes. Oil is alien to water, and if a pipe breaks near a waterway, there is chaos. A river of oil is not conductive to the well-being of the environment...or the people. Remember those east coast rivers that had so much oily pollution that they caught on fire? The Environmental Protection Agency has made some progress in improving how some people think about Mother Earth. A river is not a sewer line, nor should oil spill into a river.

I had a personal experience once about how oil and water do not mix. On the way to the Mojave near Gustine, CA, the motor-block split on my camper, allowing water to reach oil. Enough said.

Of course, some pipelines have improved living. Consider the pipes under your house infrastructure. In days of yore before piped water, it was water pumped from a well and carried to the kitchen in a water bucket. I experienced some of those days on the 1930's Missouri farm. No indoor plumbing either. It was the era of the outhouse and indoor pot. [Not marijuana pot but rather a metal pot for elimination on cold winter nights!].

My Grandfolks didn't even have a well pump. Water was drawn out of the cistern-well by a bucket tied to a rope! One of my boy-joys was in helping Grandpa pull up a bucket of water--to the rhythm of “plop, drip, and echo!”

Pipes are rather rare in nature; at least metal pipes. Mankind is the pipe-maker and pipe planner. Some natural things are given the name 'pipe,' such as volcano pipes [fissures conducting lava], pipefish [like a long sea horse fish], pipevine [native plant], grapevine, and pipestone [a type of soapstone mined in Minnesota by Indian tribes to make 'peace-pipes']. My deceased cousin Al Tolle visited that mine and sent me a piece, pre-drilled and ready to carve into a peace-pipe. Does the world need peace?

Blood veins in animals could be thought of as a kind of pipeline carrying vital fluids to a destination. We know what happens when that line is cut, worn, or blocked--there is a spill that is an utter disruption.

The huge pipes that helped divert water from mountain sources to the gold mines at Cherokee, CA, for use in hydraulic blasting of hillside gold-bearing gravels, was a wonder, and a curse, as it flooded the lowlands with sediments.

In the early 1900's, a pipeline was made to carry water from a mountainside spring to White Sulphur Springs Camp west of St. Helena, CA. The line had been laid in a pathway laboriously dug along the mountain wall of a forested canyon to a gushing sweet-water spring.

Although no longer used, the pipeline path was perfect for a self-guiding nature trail I made for the camp in 1972. By extending the path from the spring up a ridge and down into a virgin watershed featuring an acre of giant Woodwardia chain ferns, an access to an ultimate nature wonderland was made. Fairyland Creek that drained the ancient volcanic basin was a magical place. The numbered posts along the nature trail are probably gone, but I hope the trail-way and wilderness is still there.

“The Trail...remote for detachment, narrow for chosen company, winding for leisure, lonely for contemplation, bordered with plants for nature study, leads not merely north and south, but upward to the body, mind, and soul of man.”--Harold Allen