Rigged: Alexandra Fuller’s “The Legend of Colton H. Bryant”

By Jenny Shank, 5-09-08

The Legend of Colton H. Bryant
By Alexandra Fuller
The Penguin Press
202 pages, $23.95

In her extraordinary new book, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, Alexandra Fuller does a cruel thing.  She makes readers fall in love with a Wyoming boy in the space of a few pages, carries us through his life, which leads inevitably to a dangerous job on an oil rig, and makes us stand as witnesses to his end, however much we wish we could turn our heads away.  I still feel heartsick a few weeks after finishing it. 

Fuller writes with simple grace and a cowboy twang, taking a rather unconventional approach for nonfiction by composing the book of the private conversations and intimate scenes that are the turning points of Bryant’s short life, and though she must have spent months with his family and friends, the author stays offstage, disappearing into a bracing, honest voice that is motherly in its tenderness toward her subject.  “This is the story of Colton H. Bryant and of the land that grew him,” she writes, “And since this is Wyoming, this story is a Western with a full cast of gun-toting boy heroes from the outskirts of town and city-shoddy villains from head office.”

Colton, Fuller makes us understand, is not exceptional for a boy growing up in Wyoming: The second son of an oil worker, who in turn was a son of an oil worker, Colton prefers to be outside, doesn’t do well in school, and is put in special ed “on account of the way his brain works, like a saddle bronc, fired up for eight seconds maximum and then bolting around the rails looking for a way out of the arena.”

But even if he isn’t exceptional demographically, Colton is special.  When the other kids at school tease him, calling him “retard,” he develops a mantra: “‘Mind over matter.  I don’t mind so it don’t matter.’ Colton heard that somewhere once, on television may be, and he likes the magical ring of it.” And though he isn’t the best-looking kid in the world, Colton has eyes that are “such a stunning shade of blue that they register as an absence, like a washed, empty sky.”

Colton’s father Bill, “the kind of man who can say more in an hour of silence than most men can say in a year of talking nonstop,” is his hero, and Colton wants to be just like him, though he appears to be cut from a different sort of cloth.  While Bill is stoic and laconic, having survived decades of difficult work on oil rigs, emanating “tough-bound soul, like a monk,” Colton is as affectionate as a puppy, goofy, willing to perform a spontaneous “happy dance” when a friend is feeling low, and about as salty as his language gets is his typical exclamation, “Holy cow!” Colton is also incurably tender-hearted: when he is fourteen, he goes on his first hunt, shoots his first buck, throws up immediately, and continues to vomit throughout the cleaning process.  A few years later, Colton is pondering love as he chops firewood, and ends up bringing the ax down on his foot.

Colton spends his boyhood and teenage years outdoors, riding his horse Cocoa, and making a fast friendship with Jake, who is also an outcast in high school because of his 300-pound bulk and erratic behavior due to a history of abuse.  Fuller portrays this friendship beautifully, capturing its playful, loving loyalty throughout the twists of their lives.  Jake helps Colton knuckle down and finish high school, and then soon enough, both of them take jobs on oil rigs, though Colton enjoys a brief idyll in which he follows around a buddy trying to make his way up as a broncobuster in gritty little rodeos across the region.

While Jake, who has a sharp intellect, quickly moves up to a less dangerous position within the oil company, “selling service supplies to wells,” Colton makes mistakes, breaking his foot during his first drilling job, and loses his position.  Colton doesn’t seem cut out to be a “roughneck” on the oilrigs, but that’s where his life leads him, as do the lives of thousands of Wyoming men with no more than a high school education.  Colton’s destiny with the oil rigs has the inevitability of a Shakespearean tragedy.  “The rigs are manned like ships,” Fuller writes, “in back-to-back twelve-hour shifts by roughnecks, five or six per crew.”

The income is impossible to pass up, and when Colton falls in love with a single mother, marries her, and quickly fathers another baby, he feels he has no choice but to stay away for weeks from his young family, working on rigs so he can support them.  His wife misses him and fears for him, and convinces him to take a job in town for a while, but only for a while, before he heads back out to the rigs again.

When Fuller displays a picture of Bryant after the last page of his moving story, you feel she is daring you not to care.  Although Fuller’s first hand experience with the oil industry in Wyoming has led her develop strong opinions about it, such as those she aired in a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece, she eschews politics and sticks to the human story in The Legend of Colton H. Bryant.  She does, however, describe the incredible safety lapses on oil rigs, including the one that ends up costing Colton his life.  How can you read this tender, troubling book and go out and fill your car with gas, and not care about the men who risk their lives to provide that energy?

Fuller will discuss her book at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) in Denver on Monday, May 12 (7:30 p.m.), at Borders in Portland on May 13 (7 p.m.), and in Evanston, WY at the Uinta Library on May 16 (5 p.m.)