Clear Windows and Yellow Pipes
If I had been a child rather than an adult, I would have pressed my nose against the window, willing my body closer to the world on the other side of the glass. I was in a midsize SUV exiting the city, and I was in the unusual position of being a passenger rather than the driver. I didn’t mind. The scene sliding past on the other side of the glass so engrossed my attention, it made following the getting-to-know-you chatter inside the vehicle difficult. I had arrived in the metropolitan hub only days before, and this was the first time I received a continued view of my new Central Asian country as we drove forty minutes away.
While still inside the city, the four lane streets had clear lines following the European style of white paint only, crisp curbs, well populated paved sidewalks, and frequent bus stops ready to receive the large green city buses. We passed modern high-rise apartments and old Soviet-style concrete apartments, a small, brown-faced mall boasting a movie theater inside, flower shops, car detailing shops and repair shops, and gas stations with names such as Helios and Royal Petrol. Of the three mosques we passed, one was traditional with a royal blue dome with four matching blue minaret caps, and one was more modern without a dome with its white single tower crisscrossed near the top with silver hashing and completed with a silver spike.
Apartments and commerce gave way to neighborhoods, and each house was guarded by some version of an eight-foot-tall fence butted up against the sidewalk or, once we left city limits, the dirt pathway that served as a sidewalk. Often the fences were tin painted in either bright turquoise or blue or green, and there was one that was a vibrant mauve, and sometimes there were gates with sturdy black metal frames and fancy work backed by a green or red privacy piece. Tracing the sidewalks and fences was a curious yellow piping. It rested within semicircle-topped, four-foot-high supports placed approximately every twenty feet. When it encountered a side street it needed to avoid, it would jump straight up, then over, the straight back down to continue its trek paralleling the main road. Frequently these pipe jumps would have the red rimmed white circles with the big black numbers to warn drivers of the overhead hazard.
Usually these pipes were about six to eight inches in diameter, and some times they were joined by identical but smaller pipes running parallel on their own supports. Sometimes the pipes sent small shoots down the side streets, and sometimes they were joined in a conglomeration of elbows and valves. As one visiting friend later put it, they were rather “Seussical.” Their color ranged from the happy new yellow of a school bus, to the tired pale yellow of a paint job which had borne too many years of the intense Kazakh sun, to the long-since-gone yellow-now-rust of a long-used piece of machinery.
But more than the color or the turns that impressed me was the mere fact that it continued for miles and miles. It was a near ubiquitous companion on the drive. Even though it disappeared once we turned off the highway and down a one lane, uncurbed and unmarked road, it reappeared a mile or so later, blending into the countryside with its rustiness and in its use as a free fence posts upon which a pasture was fenced in with chicken wire.
“What are all yellow pipes for? Water?” I asked.
“Gas.” Was the reply.
“Wow, what’s the freezing point for gas? It must be really low,” I marveled, unsure such an unheard-of way of building natural gas infrastructure could possibly work.
“I’m not sure the exact number, but it’s only frozen once since we’ve been here,” was explained.
I knew Kazakhstan would be the coldest place I had yet lived, so I wasn’t sure whether or not to take this piece of history as a positive or negative sign concerning the future state of my toes as I walked to my car in the winters. That it was possible to reach such a level of coldness at least once indicated such a difficulty to be a rare occurrence, but that such an inconceivable thing could happen at all was a bit of a worry.
After school started and I drove that stretch twice a day, five days of the week, the oddity of above ground yellow pipes paralleling and jumping roads faded into normality. But every once in a while, I’ll encounter especially bright and happy Seussical pipping, and I consider how interesting it is that boring, everyday necessities can be supplied in unexpected ways. Much wonder is available in a new country, but only if one is willing to live life with one’s nose against the widow.
