the bypass

In full

In the boom-years crisis an emergency cross-feed was laid along a residential corridor because there was no time to go through the trunk. The pipe is gone and the permanent repair is done; what remains is different-fabrication plating on the route, a corridor that never got its width back, redrawn lease boundaries — and a name. People still call that stretch the bypass, and eight years on a good number of them could not tell you why. Nobody ever explains it, which is how station words actually work: a term survives after no one recalls its origin.

Key facts

• Named for an emergency cross-feed laid where people walk.
• The pipe is long gone; the name stayed.
• Ordinary, geographic, unremarked by the people who use it.
• Proof on the page that the Cairn has a past.

See also

Where it appears

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