Western Writers
An Interview with Alexandra Fuller: Part One
A conversation with Wyoming writer Alexandra Fuller, in which she discusses her new book, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant.By Jenny Shank, 5-29-08
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Alexandra Fuller grew up on a farm in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and her first book was a critically-acclaimed memoir of those years, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. She followed it with a nonfiction book about an African soldier, 2004’s Scribbling the Cat. In 1994, she moved to Wyoming and this month she published her first book set in the state, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, a moving, poetic portrait of a charismatic Evanston, Wyo. man who died in February 2006 when he fell off the oil rig where he was working. I recently spoke to Fuller over the phone, and in this part of the interview, we discuss how she came to know the Bryant family and how the loss of her own siblings inspired her to pursue this story.
New West: Can you tell me how you first learned about Colton Bryant and how you began to write this book?
AF: The New Yorker had commissioned me to do a story on methamphetamine abuse in Wyoming, about which I knew nothing. And I found out that in the community where the oil boom was, methamphetamine arrests had gone up something like 300 percent. In real numbers, that turned out to be nine people the year before and 30 people in 2005. But it piqued my curiosity about why they were even keeping track of methamphetamine. So I went and talked to the sheriff, and he said it has nothing to do with the oil patch. And I said “What oil patch?” And that was it—I was out on the oil patch, and I was looking primarily at the environmental and social changes, but there were four deaths in the 18 months that I was doing the research. Colton was the last person to die in that period on the one oil patch I was looking at.
And you know, one death you think, “Well, that’s unfortunate.” Two deaths, you think, “Okay, this is getting a little clumsy.” Three deaths you think, “Wait, wait, wait hold everything.” And then Colton died. Ray Ring, who writes for High Country News, did the most phenomenal article called ”The Disposable Workers of the Oil and Gas Field.”
I phoned him up to talk. It was truly one of the most brilliant pieces of investigative journalism. He fired hundreds of flares, and got dozens of accident reports. You can go online and read the accident reports, including Colton’s. I was reading these accident reports, and they just will bring you to your knees. I got to the end of Colton’s accident report and found that OSHA cited the drilling company [Patterson-UTI] for six serious safety violations and fined them a little over $7,000. And I just thought this isn’t right.
NW: How did you choose to write about Colton out of the four men who died?
AF: The newspapers had covered the accidents, but Colton’s had a photograph and the other three men didn’t, and I was just haunted. He’s got this sly little twinkle in his eye, kind of beaten-up looking because Preston [his older brother] broke his nose four times. And the other picture showed him with his children, who were three and 18 months old, and my baby was about the same age, 14 months old. Never underestimate the value of the female hormone. Look, some of the other roughnecks had families, but it was just his incredible youth. And then the picture of Kaylee and Bill [Colton’s parents] in the High Country News article.
My mother lost three children, and there was a look in Kaylee’s eyes that just broke my heart. So I picked up the phone and called Bill and I said, “I don’t really know why I’m calling you, but I’m a writer and I think I’m writing a book and I wondered if I could come talk to you.”
At that time I thought I was going to do a sort of Omnivore’s Dilemma about the failed energy policy we’re living with, and that Colton was going to be a chapter of that book. But then I went down and I met Kaylee and Bill and I was completely smitten--I think that’s the only word—by them, by their values. It wasn’t hard for me to go back and rewind my own life and be sitting in my own home as a child and know what it is for a family to struggle for the rest of their lives—they’re never going to recover from the loss of their son. My mom’s children were a lot younger. My sister was two when she died, but I don’t think it really makes any difference. I gave Kaylee my first book, which is a memoir about that. And we’d talk about my life as much as we’d talk about Colton and his kids and what had happened.
I don’t know if there’s another explanation for it other than I just fell in love with this family, and Colton took over. I felt that if I could tell his story, maybe I could bypass all this rhetoric about our failed energy policy and reach straight to the heart of the matter, which is that our failed energy policy costs lives, and in this case that life is that of Colton H. Bryant, and here’s who he was. He was someone’s son, someone’s father, and someone’s husband, and any way you look at it, there’s a grave at the end of the story.
NW: How were you able create a portrait of a man you’d never met, including the way he spoke and his personality? His mother told the New York Times that you’d gotten it “pretty doggone close.”
AF: I was very fortunate to have spent a lot of time interviewing his best friend Jake. Jake did this incredible impression of Colton—you know, the idiom and the slang. He even got up and walked the way Colton did. He said, “Colton kind of had this waddle like he wasn’t attached to the earth quite right.” It was made worse by the fact that he’d put an axe through his foot. I spent a lot of time talking to his sisters and his brother-in-law, and the portrait just became cohesive.
Then I met his little son Dakota Justus. I went to where Tabby and Merinda work--they have a daycare in Evanston--and I saw a little boy run in and I knew it was Colton’s son. Everyone told me they were peas in a pod, but it would kind of take your breath away to see it. He had that little eggbeater way of walking. I looked at him and I could see Colton.
I originally wrote this book more as a traditional nonfiction, with me just interviewing the family, and the trouble with it was I would reread it and I would feel moved, but I felt like I was giving the reader a free pass not to feel Colton. So I just took myself out of it, and I figured I wanted him to walk right off the page straight into the reader’s life, the way he had into mine. I wanted to get out of the way, and the best way to do that was to let him speak for himself.
There were certain things about Colton. I mean, who stops a train because he gets a truck stuff in a snowdrift, and sets a firework off on his first date and hits a cop car and charms his way out of it? Who drives all night to pick up a woman he barely knows and proposes marriage to her? He just lived this life that felt as if all I needed to do was listen to the stories I was being told and put it on the page. It was a real gift.
NW: Was it hard to recreate and imagine conversations?
AF: No one was taking notes when Colton was alive, and these aren’t diary-keeping, Victorian-navel-gazing people. These are people that get on with life. But I was sitting in the sitting room with Jake, or sitting with the girls, or sitting around Kaylee and Bill’s table, and they’re telling these stories and everyone’s chipping in and giving their two cents--"No he didn’t say that, he said this.” It was as if I’d been given hundreds of hours of memories, and I just needed to stitch them onto the page.
Then I gave Kaylee and Bill a book when it went to the editor, and I said, “Listen, if there’s something in this portrait that feels really wrong or off, let me know.” And everyone chipped in and said, “Well, he wouldn’t have said this.” The way I originally had the death scene, I glossed over it because it was so painful. But then Preston’s wife Mandy said, “Mom, I think you should insist that that be different.” I thought it would be less upsetting for Kaylee, but she said, “No, I need everybody to know that I stood by my boy and had to pray for the strength to watch him die.”
NW: Did you find any similarities between Colton’s youth in Wyoming and your own in Africa?
AF: Oh yes. Horses and guns and the toughness of it, how tough you’re expected to be from a very young age. Our fathers are practically the same man. Our mothers feel pretty similar too. I don’t think Kaylee takes a lot of nonsense from her kids. She’s very supportive but she’s not a hand-holder. The most dreadful, chilling similarity is that in Wyoming, a lot of people die young, which is similar to the way I grew up.
NW: How did you come up with the language you used in your narration? It has a lot of Wyoming slang and spirit to it.
AF: Have you hung around roughnecks much?
NW: No, I haven’t.
AF: Their language is so fun. Jake makes me laugh, just way he says “hello"—I’m on the floor. I am never bored, and I think that middle America irons out its language and there’s a sort of politically correct dampening effect on the language. By the time I found Colton I’d already been out on the oil patch a couple of years, and I was pretty tuned into the language by then. I listened to a lot of country music, and if you haven’t listened to it, you really should. It’s so damn witty. It’s irreverent and at the same time it has this overriding kind of God-fearing goodness about it.
I came at this story with a kind of self-protective armor of irony and cleverness, liberal cattiness I guess. And I came away with such respect—that’s not even a strong enough word—a deep reverence for people like Bill Bryant who can say less than any other man I’ve every met except maybe my father, and mean a whole lot more. Colton talked a lot—it kind of drove everyone crazy. He was always kidding around and joking.
NW: And ultimately, perhaps because you had such respect for these people, you didn’t end up dwelling on the political issues surrounding the oil boom in Wyoming in this book.
AF: Well, I definitely was on my high horse going into this, and I rode out on a donkey for sure. Listen, it’s not that I don’t have maybe even deeper condemnation for the oil companies than I did going in, but this wasn’t the place for me to start spouting my politics. That would be so self-indulgent. And frankly I think Colton does a better job of it than I ever could. Some shrill, pissed-off liberal with a funny accent or Colton H. Bryant—who would you rather listen to? Colton really speaks to the injustice because he believed in it. He swallowed that lie that this was a patriotic duty.
NW: It seemed there was an inevitability that his life would end this way, because that job was his only option given his education level and where he was born. And he wasn’t like his dad—he wasn’t careful, he was exuberant, he made mistakes.
AF: Yeah, and you know Bill is beautiful to watch just walking across the room--he’s got this incredible self-containment, and I think Preston has it a bit. Colton was kind of the kid who leapt and then looked at the last minute.
He was the guy who put the axe through his foot, who slipped down the beaver slide and broke his foot. Kind of goofy, a little bit careless of himself. I mean, he jumped in that frozen lake to get Jake’s goose and just about killed himself. So yeah, there was an inevitability to it. He should have been wearing a safety harness. Someone should have been paying attention.
Check back here tomorrow for the second part of the interview.
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