Sojourner's Guide to Life~The Trans Alaska Pipeline

I grew up in Alaska when the state was still unspoiled, still a real last frontier.

I vividly remember setting my first goals at a very early age. That was to be the glorious day I could finally leave home. I'll bypass the details because they’re not pretty and I would rather forget them anyway. Suffice it to say, leaving home for me was akin to being released from Alcatraz for a crime I did not commit. It was a day I looked forward to as far back as I could remember.

While growing up, there was never a thought of us going to college; rather, we’d hear, “I want you out as bad as you want out, so you’d better figure out how to get out of here.” That could not happen soon enough for me. I used to pray someone would notice the abuse and save us, but it never happened. I had a stepbrother who used to run away all the time, but when he was found, it got ugly, so that was not an option either.

I made it out alive, barely. I enrolled myself into the University of Alaska in Fairbanks as “my escape.” Room and board and a little education, yippee! At last, I was free, swearing never to return to that place called “home.” I could breathe now.

Everything went exceptionally well in college until about midway through the year when it struck me, Wow! Where will I go this summer? I can’t go back home! I remember panicking and literally losing my breath with just the thought. As it turned out, my summer living situation wasn’t really that critical because the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was just starting up, and the State of Alaska, as we all knew her, would never be the same again.

Alaska went from the poorest state in the union to probably the richest in what seemed like overnight. So I did what many other college kids were doing: I went to the union halls in downtown Fairbanks to get a job on the “slope”.

Naturally, being female, I went to the only place I thought women could get a dispatch: the Culinary Union. In the Culinary Union, the workers were predominantly women and worked in the camps, doing cooking, cleaning, laundry, and other domestic work.

There were probably several thousand names on the A and B lists and probably tens of thousands on the “C” list. Being on the C list meant we had never worked for the union before.

The rest of the school year passed by, and I thought, I’m set. I’m not going home as planned, ever. Around March of that school year, I went down to the Culinary Union hall, as usual, to pay my dues so my number (name) would keep moving up the C list to the top (meaning a potential possibility of a dispatch-a job). My name was getting closer and closer to the top! To my utter shock, I was told that day that I was late in paying my dues and that my name had been moved to the bottom of the list. I was speechless and felt hopeless as I staggered outside. I could not breathe.

As I left, I walked past another union hall next to the culinary union.  It seemed to be a very small union. My memory tells me it was about a 10x10 shack, and there was always a long line of men waiting outside. I watched them shuffle up to the window, stand there for a minute, talking to the person behind the magic window, then leave with their heads down. It was the Operating Engineers Local 302.

Without a second thought, I got in line, went to the window, and said, “I wanted to sign up on your C list.” I’m sure they were shocked by my appearance and boldness, but I didn’t notice, nor care. I was desperate to do anything I could to avoid having to go back home. I just signed the paperwork, paid the money, and went back to the U of A campus, feeling hopeful again. I knew there were far fewer people in this union, and my chances of getting a job with them had to be much greater. Besides, many of my guy friends had been getting jobs through this union as “service oilers;” it seemed like a no-brainer.

As school was drawing quickly to a close, many of my classmates (guys) were getting dispatches out to the pipeline. Most of them had no experience in this type of work, but they were securing jobs right and left. I had a good friend whose dad was a “Big Boss” up on the slope, and my friend had already worked there during the summers. He groomed me on what I would need to do if I got a job through this union. I would have to start as an oiler. Fine, I didn’t care; I’d do whatever I needed to. The “why” was bigger than the “how”.

When school was out, I began to worry. I was still not high on the C list. However, a dear friend of my brother’s (who had just died the year before) took care of me by paying for my room and board on campus so I could stay at the college dorm until I got a job. I’ve never forgotten him for doing this for me.  Every day I walked from campus to the union hall to make the call times (when they give out dispatches).

The union hall was about a half- to three-quarters-hour walk from campus, and I did it twice a day, five days a week. Always hopeful. I’d walk up to the window, give them my number, and hope they would say Yes, you have a job. They always said “no” before even reading my number. After about a month of this routine, my friend’s dad took pity on me and requested that I be sent out to his crew. From what I was told, if someone is requested to be sent out, the union is supposed to send that person out regardless of their place in the lists. The Union refused his request.

Finally, after about 30 days of this walk of shame, I went to the window, and the union steward said to me, “Come back at 1:00, and we’ll talk.” I was excited! I was walking on air when I left the hall that day. I thought this meant I was going to get a dispatch! Far from it, as it turned out.

When I met with the union steward at 1:00, no one else was there. He said to me, “What the hell do you think you’re doing here?” “Trying to get a job,” I stammered. “You don’t have any experience; you have no idea what to do.” I replied, “Many of my friends who had no union work experience got dispatches through this union; why can’t I?” He was flustered and said, “Did you notice there are only men here in line? The only women who get jobs out of this union are daughters of union workers.” Then he said, “Do you realize you will have to sleep with your bosses?” I was shocked. I am not, nor have I ever been, a “women's libber,” but I was shocked. I remember that walk home to the campus. I went from crying to mad, mad, mad.

I did not want any preferential treatment; I just wanted a chance. Fortunately, I had taken some legal classes at the college, so I called one of my professors and told him what had happened. He told me to go to the Human Rights Commission and file a claim against the union. Okay! That’s what I did!

I filed a claim with the Human Rights Commission, and they, in turn, sent the complaint to the union. Within a week, Operating Engineers Local 302 begrudgingly gave me a dispatch! I could breathe again, and I was on cloud nine, but a little scared, not knowing where I was going or what I was to do.

I was sent to a camp near Fairbanks called “Livengood.” The camps were akin to really small cities or towns, constructed of trailers all connected by boardwalks. “Live-in good in Livengood,” was the saying.

It was about a four-hour drive up the haul road from Fairbanks and close to the Yukon River. The camp was nice, and the stories you’ve probably heard are pretty much true. The food was off the charts—filet mignon, lobster, napoleons, croissants, French pastries, ice creams, any drink you could think of. Box lunches were reported to contain over 800 calories. Brand-new equipment sat unused everywhere. It was rumored they used to order light plants (light generators) and then crush them for the money (cost-plus job).

There appeared to be prolific waste everywhere you looked.

Luckily, I did not know I was a girl. When we were growing up, if we didn’t kill it or grow it, we didn’t eat. I never owned a dress until someone gave me one at 16, so I was just one of the guys in my mind. Apparently, the guys didn’t see me as one of the guys... I can remember my first week. I was working on a drilling rig when numerous buses from nowhere drove by one after another. I could not figure out why so many buses were going this way. Then someone said, “Hey, a girl is working out here.” They wanted to see me. Okay, now I get it. I was naive.

When I first arrived at the camp, Livengood had six women and 600 men. I was the only woman who left the camp and worked on the line at the time. They put me on a big, nasty drilling rig. The drilling rig drilled holes for the VSMs (vertical support members) to hold the members that held up the cradle, which supported the pipeline. It was a dirty job. I drove the rig, changed the augers and the bits, oiled and greased her, and made sure the holes were vertical every time the auger came out of the ground. It would spin off the dirt and mud (all over me), and I would have to level it before it went back down. I got really dirty, and when it rained, which was all the time, it was really a mess. I was happy, though. We worked seven days a week and 10-16 hours a day, depending on the season and how far we had to drive to the work area.

There was nothing to do but work, and the pay was good for back then, around $14 an hour. We made the "money" on overtime, getting paid time-and-a-half for working over 8 hours a day and on weekends. Sometimes we got double time, and even triple time.

I kept my mouth shut and my head down. When I was off work, I spent most of my time washing my work clothes so that I wouldn’t smell like diesel the next day. The other trades were nice to me (the teamsters, laborers, culinary cooks, and even the infamous 798 welders (the BAD boys), but the “operating engineers” working on the line hated me at first. They said I was “taking food out of their kid's mouths.” Eventually, the men in my trade saw I just did my job, never asked a man to do my job for me, and—oh, by the way—the rig was black when they put me on it; within a week, it was Caterpillar yellow, and you could eat off of it. The operators in the field saw that I was doing what I was expected to do and began offering to train me to operate the heavy equipment. I had finally earned their respect.

They taught me to run everything from man lifts to side booms. I started operating man lifts and small cranes on the job. For fun, I also ran dozers and side booms, but not in the work setting. I never had a problem with the guys bothering me. I always say, “If you put it out there, you get it back, and if you don’t put it out there, you don’t get it back.” I did not put it out there.

The camp life was interesting. Of course, we had all the trades, the laborers, the teamsters, and operating engineers living and working together. And then there were the “good ole boys, (aka the wild bad boys), the 798ers. They were a rough-and-tumble group of professional pipefitters who traveled all over the world putting in pipelines and were mostly from the South. They ran all over the other unions and wrote the rules. They actually tore the places up many times during my time up there and earned their reputation. If the tables were set funny in the cafeteria, they could come in and turn them over. I saw many awful fights and heard heads get hit with baseball bats more than once. But they treated me very well and took me under their wing, so I was grateful.

Yes, there was prolific gambling, drugs, alcohol (it was supposed to be a dry camp ~Ha), and there was prostitution.

One clever entrepreneur came up with a stroke of genius. Since Livengood was close to Fairbanks, he would bring a busload of “ladies” up to the camp, and they made their own fortunes from the oil rush. They stayed a week or two and probably moved on to the next camp, I suppose. The funny part was that two weeks later, after work when everyone returned to camp, the boardwalks connecting all the trailers were backed up for what seemed like blocks with guys waiting at the medical shack for their “shots.” I would snicker as I walked by.

I saw three kinds of men up there. Those needing to bail themselves and their families out, looking for a break and a better life; those who didn’t want to be home at all; and the professionals who just worked pipelines for a living, making it their lifestyle (the 798ers). I saw so many poor fools send their checks home for months, then go home to no money and no wife... It was sad. By the second year, most guys would not send their checks home at all. They just held onto them in their rooms, gambled the entire check away, or ... I’ll get to what else in a minute.

We would stay at one camp until the work moved north, then move on to the next camp up the field. I worked the northern section of the line, about a 400-mile stretch from Livengood to Prudhoe Bay on the Beaufort Sea.

There were so many jobs; if you didn’t like the cafeteria or your boss, or your assignment, you could just quit, go back to Fairbanks, and get another dispatch to another camp. I kept the same dispatch for two years until the work for my company, HC Price, was finished.

We were laid off for several months in the winter when it was too cold to work; even with the equipment running 24/7, the diesel would freeze. Off I would go to Hawaii and collect unemployment for a few months, then come back to work for HC Price in late February or March.

We paid the union hall handsomely with our union dues (I think it was $2.50 an hour).

When I went back to Fairbanks after being laid off from HC Price, the hall had gone from a 10x10 shack to what I called the Taj Mahal building—paid for by us.

In the second year of the pipeline, the ladies came up. They all wanted equal rights and equal pay. I was the only woman out in the field running equipment. They wanted to run equipment too, and I can’t tell you how much equipment was destroyed. They demanded their own bathrooms in the camp trailers and porta-potties on the job. A porta-potty required: 1) a sled to put it on, 2) a laborer to hook and unhook the sled, 3) a cat and an operator to pull the cat, 4) an oiler to oil and grease the cat. All this so that “ladies” could have their bathrooms out on the line. I used the same bathroom and shower stalls as the men in the camps and peed in the woods on the job. It was good enough for me. I wanted to work; I did what I had to do. I know this will not be popular with some women today, but that’s how it was.

The highlight of my experience with my beloved Union (who hated me) was one day during the strike. There was an agreement that there would be no strikes, but for some reason, a strike occurred, and the operating engineers were not supposed to work. The 798 bosses asked me to run a crane, which of course, I was delighted to do. The “operating engineers” union steward showed up on the job a few days later when I was operating and knocked on the door of my crane. He was red-faced and yelled at me, “What do you think you’re doing operating this crane? You are an oiler, and we are on strike. Get out of this crane now!” I calmly looked at him, smiled, said, “‘F’ you,” shut the door in his face, and continued to operate. I think he about had a heart attack. I would have loved to be a fly on his wall that night! The union would never move my card up to operator status, even though I had the experience and the hours operating to qualify. They hated me and vehemently refused to give me more pay and benefits. It was the best of times.

We had a great time playing on the Yukon River after work on an airboat, trading with the local Native Alaskans for some of their fish as it dried on their racks, and giving them yogurt and other things they had probably never seen or eaten. We panned for gold as we worked, and yes, we found a lot of gold.  

They would make us leave every two months for two weeks ( R & R). physiologically you really could not have taken it much longer than that. The work and lifestyle messed with your mind over time. We thought we were rich, so we’d go off wherever we wanted to go since we had all the money we ever needed in life, or so we thought.

There is a saying all Alaskans have undoubtedly heard. “Dear God, let there be another pipeline, and I promise not to piss it all away again.” A lot of truth in that. Only now we are too old for the next one! Virtually all of my lady roommates (during years two and three) on the pipeline spent all their money on cocaine. You could lift pretty much any bed skirt in any room and find cocaine on mirrors. The US mail was no longer the US mail once it hit Fairbanks (to distribute to the pipeline), so some of the drugs they paid for got recycled once they hit the pipeline mailroom. Many people lost a lot of themselves up there.  

Those paychecks those guys saved because they quit sending them home to find no wife and no money?? All the money and the wife was gone. During the second and third years, some of the women workers in the camps would sleep with a guy for an entire paycheck. They would just sign it over. It was a piece of paper. Akins to probabaly $1000-$2000 per paychaek (in the 70's).I heard repeatdely, “I can’t believe you don’t do this.” There was always something in me that said, “This pipeline will be over someday, and you will remember what you did.”

I never spent a penny on drugs or ever did them. It was by God’s grace only. After my rough childhood (a book in itself), I had every reason to do those things, but I chose not to.

HCPrice’s (my company) role was done on the job after two years, and I got laid off. So here was to be the second dispatch I got from the Operating Engineers.  As mentioned, the union hall was the size of the Taj Mahal now (thanks to our union dues), and I found myself walking in there, now 2 years layer, expecting a dispatched to another job. They ignored me day after day. I’d go to the window two times a day- and no job, no job, no job. I sat in the lobby all day, watching people come and go with their dispatches. I am an “A-list " card holder at this point. There certainly should be a job open for me. Finally, about the 4th or 5th day, I wrote a little note and slipped it to the guy at the window. It read something like: “This time I will follow through with the suit against you, and this time I will not drop it. That’s a promise, not a threat.”

I had a dispatch the next day. They sent me to the worst camp out there. By now, the pipeline was winding down, and the money that flowed like milk and honey was drying up. It was a cost-plus job, meaning the more they spent, the more they would make, and as I mentioned, the waste was prolific. But getting near the end of the cost plus money, the trucks just stayed where they died. They were duct-taping things together. The camps were beat. This particular camp was called Franklin Bluffs, just south of Prudhoe Bay. I’m not sure if it was ever a nice camp, and it was far from it when they sent me. The camp boss up there was disliked and feared by everyone. I won’t mention names. It was reported he was a monster, and it was rumored people had actually tried to kill him when he was sleeping on night. The Unions diabolical plan was to send me there so I would be miserable. As it turned out, I loved the job and loved the boss. He let me work in the heavy equipment shop. I was supposed to be a dispatcher. I learned how to change out engines, order parts, and work on heavy equipment as well. It was a great job, and I didn’t have to be outside much. Thank God for that because Franklin Bluffs is about the coldest place on the planet. It would register to be 100 below zero with the wind chill factor on some days.

For entertainment we would to drive up to Prudhoe Bay after work because Prudhoe Bay was like a four-star hotel. It was what we called a “resort,” and the food was outrageous (like it was in the early pipeline days). I understand a worker could not even eat there unless he was clean and dressed appropriately. While there, we would load up on ice cream and other delicacies we no longer had at our camp. It was like being in heaven, our very own Baskin-Robbins on the North Slope. Once someone from our camp stole their popcorn machine, but we had to return it when they put out a reward for it.

When that job wound down, I realized that it was time for me to go back to school, and besides, I was rich. I had enough money to last me a lifetime. Yes, I was still young and naive. I did have a few friends who managed their money well and, to this day, live very nice lives thanks to wise counsel and sound financial decisions. I don’t blame anyone, but I had no mentorship or any family whatsoever, so I had no idea how to live or invest. I did buy a peice of land and wanted to build a house, but my father talked me out of building the house, but he was glad I bought the land (on a lake) so he could land his floatplane.

Do I have it in me to work another pipeline? I think I do, but there are two glaring obstacles 1) the Union (I'm sure my name is stil etched in their journmals 2) I doubt my husband would care for that.

Nonetheless, I am left with the greatest memories and a great story I will tell for the rest of my life.

It’s been almost 50 years since my pipeline days, and yet it all seems like just yesterday.

I hear a gas line is going in now… anyone game? Do I dare?