Pipeliners' families relax Sunday in the Valley City RV park on Main Street. (Steve Browne/VCTR) 

By Steve Browne
Valley City Times-Record

They come from small towns across the country, they go wherever the work demands. They build the pipelines to carry the raw stuff that becomes the energy we use to run our homes and businesses.    The hours are long and hard. If they have a permanent home somewhere, they might actually live in it one month out of a year. It's hard on men, and it's hard on their families. Always moving, but always getting together on jobs, pipeliners become family to each other.     Jodi Green, a pipeliner's wife said, "The people out here on the pipeline are our family. There's not a job you go to that you don't know somebody. We all travel together. We have a home home back in Kansas but this is our family. I look forward to it. I love going home to see our grandbabies. My daughter's married with two children back home, this is our family out here - our home away from home."
    Married pipeliners often travel in large, well-furnished trailer homes, pulled by a truck that might be equipped with a welders rig.
    Sharon Ross said, "I was raised on pipelines. My dad was a pipeline welder, and we started traveling probably about 1967. We've traveled all over the United States, we were raised in an eight by 35, me and my mom and dad and three kids. Then we stopped when I was in seventh grade and bought a place in Sedan, Kansas. My dad kept on pipelining and my mom set the place up."
    Among the older married couples, you can find wives who stayed at home and raised the kids while their husbands were working. Then when the kids were grown they joined them on the road.
    "My husband's here, our two kids are back home. We got them raised and I started traveling with Bill again and I'm working out here with Bill. If you've never done it, it's hard. But if you're raised like this, it's life. You get a call one day and you're gone that same afternoon or the next day. You never know where you're going to be or what town you're going to be in. It's a challenge," Ross said.
    "We'll have been married 41 years in September. I stayed home with our children till they were grown and married and left home. I've been going with him for the last five years. I'm used to it because my dad pipelined," said Sela Wyatt, pipeliner's wife.
    Pipeliners' wives sometimes have jobs on the pipeline as well, in the essential positions of logistics and support. When a family has young children, it makes life on the road hard, but they cope by relying on the support of the pipeline family.   

For full story, see Monday's edition of the Valley City Times-Record.