The book: Pilgrim's Line. The story:

1973: Billy Hodge, a recent college graduate with a Bachelor's in Political Science can't find any other employment apart from working for Dutch Creek Power Company up in the high country of the Colorado Rocky Mountains.

Billy and the crew he's on will be building a brand new power line--a three-phase electrical system that's going to traverse some of the toughest terrain in Colorado.

In the story you'll meet men that some might describe as a little rough around the edges. And yet, for all their gruffness, they somehow manage to impart to Billy a tender sense of fatherhood that he was not able to learn from his own dad who, while always there in Billy's life, was still nonetheless an absentee dad.

The story is about serious challenges and setbacks and the way these men overcome them. It's about the way that men who should be brothers can so harshly treat one another. It's about the mixed up lives of men who work for money, but not for reward. And mostly, it's about a young man, scared, unsure of himself or anything else, who is forced to reach out and grab life--to learn what it is to be a man and a human.

Chapter 1

Tell me what you think. Write me at: PilgrimsLine@billheldman.com