Pipe Dreams

 by Brian Brannon

Reprinted from the Seal Beach Sun Newspaper

Believe it or not, I was not always the stalwart, upstanding father of my young daughter and pillar of the local community.

During my earlier, untamed, unmarried years I was known as somewhat of a crazy-man when it came to skateboarding in giant desert pipes. Living in Arizona, we had plenty of large circumference cylinders to transport irrigation water from canals and to channel rainfall from sudden seasonal cloudbursts called monsoons.

One year, they decided to build a freeway through the center of Phoenix and huge 24-foot pipes were constructed to provide drainage. While this project was underway we had a field day sneaking in and seeing how high we could ride and slide into the over-vertical environment. But after about 18 months, they finally finished and closed off the entrance. This cut our funtime down considerably until someone said they knew where the pipes emptied out to the then-dry Salt River. The only problem was that about 21 feet of the 24-foot pipe was filled with water.

Employing very rudimentary logic, we figured the pipes had to run downhill to the river, so perhaps if we got in a boat, we could eventually paddle far enough upstream to find a place dry enough to skate. So we set out — me, my buddy Chad and my bass player Mike. The going was slow, and after about 100 yards, we turned off our lantern and it was so dark we lost all sense of direction.

After an hour of paddling, the waterline had receded five or six feet, so we knew we were making progress, but we also started to get a little spooked. What if we drowned — who would ever know? What if some mutant man-eating water creatures popped up and ate us alive? What if there was some kind of nuclear waste dumped in there that would kill us? Or, more likely, what if our lantern ignited an explosion of methane gas that had collected 300 feet beneath the city?

Still, we pushed on. And after about three hours, we finally reached the point where we couldn’t paddle any more because the water had gotten about a foot deep. Then I made a terrible discovery, it looked like the water was running. That might mean it ran the entire length of the pipe. Unwilling to give up after going so far, we got on our boards and pushed alongside the stream, each falling in at least once and getting thoroughly drenched in the process.

Sure enough, when we reached the source, a huge cavernous underground hall, we saw it drained from a deep pool to make a long five-mile trek underneath downtown Phoenix.

At its lowest point, the water was still about four inches, too deep to ride through and too steady to dam. Damn! We finally made it out at about 9 p.m., seven hours after we started. We were wet, cold and had a half-mile walk out carrying our boat to get back to the car. We didn’t find what we were looking for, but we certainly had an experience to someday tell our young daughters about: “Honey, I don’t ever want to hear about you trying something as crazy as this…”