The Culvert Pipe

The mother wondered what her child was doing. He’d been playing with his cousin in the backyard, but she hadn’t checked on him for a few minutes. She looked out the kitchen window to the yard below but didn’t see him.

Quickly walking down the stairs to the basement, she walked into the backyard. “Bobby, do you know where Lane is?” she asked the child.

“I think he went inside to go to the bathroom,” Bobby replied.

She turned around and checked the basement bathroom. Her son wasn’t there. She ran up the steps and checked both bathrooms upstairs. He wasn’t there either.

“Lew,” she said to her husband, “I don’t know where Lane is. Bobby said he came inside to go to the bathroom, but he isn’t anywhere in the house.”

After looking around for a few minutes, the father stepped out into the front yard. He surveyed the area… his mother’s house that they were visiting… looking for his young son. He saw no movement as he looked around. He stood listening for a minute. There was no sound above the normal springtime chirp of birds and bugs.

***

The child slipped from the house his family was visiting. He was in the front yard, the cousin he’d been playing with was in the back. He wandered around the yard for a moment before he found his next mission.

The culvert under the driveway was too tempting for the four-year-old. He squatted down in the ditch at the end of the yard and examined the path. He could see the light coming from the other end. He jumped up and ran to the other side of the driveway to look at the reverse side.

He went back to the initial viewing point and looked again. Putting his arms in front of him, he slid into the narrow opening. He pushed himself into the space, barely enough room to propel himself forward. When he looked up, he could see the circle of light on the other end, twenty-five feet away.

Lane pushed with his feet in the tight space and pulled a little with his hands in front of him, but the limited movement made it hard to move. He tried to back out, but he couldn’t get traction to go backward. Besides, he thought he might be close to halfway.

***

As the father walked around the yard, looking into the neighboring yards to see if there was anything that might draw the attention of a four-year-old, he looked at the culvert.

“Surely not,” he said quietly to himself.

He walked over to the ditch and kneeled down to look into the pipe. He didn’t see the light coming from the other end. As his eyes adjusted, slowly the reality came into focus. Little feet. They were pushing… slowly.

Panic set in.

In his mind, the father could see the fire department and a construction crew tearing out the culvert to cut his son out of the dangerous enclosure. Surely, the boy must be panicked. The recovery would take hours and the fear it would instill would be devastating. Terrifying.

The father knew what he needed to do.

***

The boy was tired. Each push only propelled him a couple of inches at most, and that was if he moved at all. His toes hurt from trying to get traction on the slippery pipe, and his fingers could barely gain purchase on the pipe in front of him. His shoulders ached from the position he was in… and he couldn’t change it.

And then something blotted out the light.

“What are you doing in there?” came the calm voice of his father.

“I wanted to see if I could crawl through,” the boy replied.

“It looks to me like you can,” the father said.

“I’m stuck,” the boy said, fear creeping into his voice.

“You’re over halfway,” came the calm reassurance. “I’m right here. Just push toward me.”

With a renewed vigor, the boy pushed again in earnest. He moved a few feet, then a few more. The father laid down in the bottom of the ditch, his head a couple of feet back from the end of the pipe so that light streamed in around to opening. The boy could see his father’s face and pushed toward it. His father’s arms were outstretched, a target for the four-year-old.

“Only a little more and I can pull you out,” the father said. “You’re almost through.”

It had been half an hour since the boy entered the pipe. His father had been with him, watching and talking with him for twenty minutes. His mother was frantically searching in the house and the backyard. When she’d looked out front, she missed seeing her husband laying at the bottom of the ditch, calmly talking to their only child.

A few more minutes and the boy’s fingers could touch his father’s, but not enough to be pulled out.

“Lew,” the mother shrieked, seeing her husband reaching into the pipe.

“I’ll be back in a second, Lane,” the father said, his voice as calm and even as it had ever been.

The father stood up and stepped out of the ditch, pointing back to the house. “Shirley, go inside,” he said quietly. “You’ll panic him. He’s ok.” The father took the mother and pushed her back into the house. She was crying and losing control. “He isn’t stuck. He’s moving and I almost have him. If you scare him, he won’t be able to keep crawling. It’ll be over in a minute if you stay in here,” he explained as he took her to the couch.

“Shirley, he’s right,” the grandmother said. “You need to calm yourself for the sake of your son.”

The father walked back out the door and stepped back into the ditch. “I’m here, son,” he said. He reached out again, and while he could touch more of his son’s hand, he still couldn’t get a strong enough hold to pull the boy out. “Just a little further.”

The boy pushed forward again and again, until he could feel his father’s hand close on his small wrist. His father pulled, but he didn’t move.

“Lane, you need to relax. I have you. Everything is fine,” he heard his father tell him. “Wiggle the same way you have been, and you’ll be out in a second.”

Lane wiggled and moved around in the pipe. A moment later he could feel his father pulling him through the pipe. He closed his eyes against the bright light as he slid out into the ditch, his father sweeping him up into his arms.

Lew carried his son toward the house. Shirley rushing from the door to meet them partway across the yard. The father kissed his son’s cheek and handed him to his mother. “I need to clean up and change,” he said, calmly.

***

The father stood in the bathroom, fresh clothes on top of the hamper next to him. He put water in the sink and wiped some of the grime from his face. He looked in the mirror and could see the redness in his eyes from crying. He cooled his face with the water again, then changed clothes.

***

Twenty-seven years later, the father and son were sitting in the older man’s living room. It would be the final time he would see his father before he passed away, lung cancer and congestive heart failure competing to see which would take victory over his body.

There had been a lot of tears and a lot of stories told during the visit, but the father had one more he needed to tell.

“Do you remember when you were in that culvert at Grandma Bailey’s house?” he asked.

“Vaguely,” the son, now thirty-one, replied.

“I still have nightmares,” the father said, wiping tears from his tired eyes. “In my mind, everything went wrong. I was helpless and watching you scream in terror. And there was nothing I could do.”

“I don’t remember any of that,” the son replied. He dug through his memories. “All I remember is you telling me that if I could crawl halfway through, I could crawl all the way through. You almost seemed bored, not scared.”

“I know,” he replied. “That’s what you needed. You needed me to be calm and confident. That might be the scariest half an hour of my life.”

“Surely, that couldn’t have been the scariest time for you… of all the things you’ve dealt with…”

“All the other times, I was scared for me. That time, I was scared for you. That was a lot worse.”

***

After spending two weeks with my father, I flew home. I talked to him every other day or so, his health quickly deteriorating. Then he didn’t call. Six weeks after coming home, I got the call from the hospice center he had been moved to.

“Mr. Bailey, your father’s condition has changed faster than we expected. If there is anything you’d like to say to him, this might be your only chance.”

The nurse held the phone up to his ear and I talked to him. I don’t know what I said… I just talked to him. I told him some of the stories that he’d told me. And I cried.

“Mr. Bailey,” the nurse said, his voice calm and comforting, “your father is gone now. Hopefully you’ll get comfort from knowing he passed without pain. He told me earlier today that he was ready.”

“Thank you,” I told him.

A few days later I was there to bury him. That was twenty-four years ago.

***

There are a lot of stories from my father. He was a character. Parts of his life were better than fiction. And, knowing him, there are probably parts I’ll never know that were even better.

But among the things I carry from him are lessons. At his core, he was a teacher. He taught math and science… and he taught me life.

“Son,” he said, that night in Minneapolis, while talking about the culvert, “sometimes, you have to let your kids live their lives. It is scary and, frankly, hard. But you can’t help. You want to dig up the world around them and fix it. Instead, you have to let them make their way. All you can do is cheerlead from the side. Let them know they aren’t alone. Tell them they have it in them to do it.”

I have two sons. What they do scares me far more than what I’ve done.

My heart was in my throat as I sent one, fifteen at the time, off to fly halfway across the country and hike in the wilderness of New Mexico with part of his Boy Scout Troop. For two weeks, contact was minimal. I dropped off a boy at the airport and picked up a man when we went to Philmont to meet him and enjoy a vacation after his adventure.

The younger one has those kinds of adventures in front of him. If he wants to dive with sharks in the Florida Keys. I’m going to let him. I know that there is danger, but also that he will be watched over. And he’ll grow. And my best purpose is to facilitate that… to give him the chance to grow.

***

That is the most important lesson I learned from my father.

Happy Father’s Day.