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Alexandra Fuller |
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Alexandra Fuller was born in England in 1969 and in 1972 she moved with her family to a farm in Rhodesia. After that country’s civil war in 1981, the Fullers moved first to Malawi, then to Zambia. Fuller received a B.A. from Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. She is the author of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, a national bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2002, and a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award, and Scribbling the Cat, winner of the 2005 Ulysses Award for Art of Reportage. Fuller lives in Wyoming with her husband and children.
Who is Colton H. Bryant and what drew you to his story?
I had been researching the oil fields in Sublette County, Wyoming for a couple of years before I came across Colton. I was researching for a magazine article which eventually appeared in February, 2007. That whole time, I saved clippings from the paper—anything to do with the energy boom—and in February 2006, the article about Colton’s accident on the oil rig and his obituary were in the paper. I clipped them out and had them next to my computer for over a year. In early 2007, I saw a piece in The High Country News about the deaths on the rigs. The reporter had interviewed Bill and Kaylee Bryant (Colton’s parents) and there was this haunting photo of them in the article that I just couldn’t get out of my head. There were also internet links to the accident reports. When I pulled up the accident reports I was struck by the blatant negligence on the part of the oil companies and by the fact that they had been fined so little for causing Colton’s death.
So I phoned Bill and Kaylee and started the research that would become this book. From what Colton told his family and his wife Melissa, he always knew he was going to die young and I think this gave him a sense of purpose and perspective. He lived with such an inspiring, reckless heart, with such a talent for love and goodness. And there was also this spiritual component to Colton that I started to understand when Jake (Colton’s best friend) showed me photos of the rainbow on the mesa above where Colton died (the rainbow had appeared the morning after Colton’s death).
I also understood, fairly early on, that Colton’s death wasn’t just the fault of a greedy, sloppy drilling company but the fault of all of us who consume energy faster than anyone can drill for it. We don’t honor enough the men and women who are the engines of our lives—the teachers and nurses and yes, the roughnecks and cowboys. Colton was every bit as iconic as an old Western figure. Cowboys have been dying off since they were invented and, at heart, every cowboy story is about the death if not of themselves, of their way of life. Colton is a new kind of cowboy—neither the old hard-bitten kind, nor the new shiny-boot variety—but he stood for something brief and great and he had been such a gift to those who had been close to him. I wanted to bring him to the world as a reminder of what simple goodness looks like.
How did meeting Colton’s family make you realize you had to write this book?
By the time I went down to Evanston to speak to Bill and Kaylee, it was clear to me that there was something very wrong with the way Wyoming was handling this energy boom. At that time, I knew I wanted to do more than a magazine article about the boom and I had thought of writing a conventional book along the lines of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I wanted to show how the lives of ordinary Wyomingites—cowboys, roughnecks, mountain men, contractors, teachers, social workers—had been affected by the boom and I had imagined that Colton might slip into the slot of roughneck (a chapter or two, I thought). But then Kaylee and Bill started to tell me about Colton, how he had been born going seventy miles an hour in a 1976 Ford Thunderbird, how he had been in a rush ever since, and all the time we talked there was a template of Colton’s gravestone propped up on their kitchen table that read, “Mind Over Matter” (Colton’s motto) and his dates, so close together. And then there were all the Colton stories—he lived such a story-worthy life. I think fairly soon after that, I realized that I wanted to write about Colton and no one else. I wanted the book to come out exactly the way the family and Jake told me about Colton, from their lips to my page, like we were all sitting around a campfire reminiscing about the boy and his life.
My youngest baby was a little over a year old at the time that I was doing these interviews and I know that as much as I was inspired by Colton, I was also inspired by Bill and Kaylee’s love for Colton and the vividness with which they could remember every stage of his life. I was struck by the fact that, no mater how old a child is when he or she dies, the parents have not only lost the physical person but also a whole world of possibilities and hope. They have also lost the person attached to the baby they gave birth to, the toddler they taught to walk, the boy they taught to ride and hunt and fish. In some tiny way, I knew I wanted to write a record of Colton for his parents as well as for his children.
You chose not to tell the story of Colton’s birth until the next-to-last chapter of the book. What prompted this departure from your generally chronological approach to your narrative?
Chronologically it might have made sense to put Colton’s birth first—and in several early drafts, I tried that—but emotionally, it didn’t feel right to me. I hoped that by putting Colton’s birth at the end—that magical moment when he came racing into the world with his parents watching—the reader would have become attached enough to Bill and Kaylee to connect to that moment when every parent meets their child for the first time and attached enough to Colton that they would have understood that this is the only way Colton could have been born. There was an awful, tragic symmetry to his life—as Kaylee once said to me when I was interviewing her for this book, “He came into this world in a hurry and he left in a hurry.” I wanted the reader to leave the book with an image of the new, innocent Colton coming into the world, all in a hurry to get ‘er done and then read, in the author’s note, how carelessly his short life was wasted.
I also, perversely, wanted to change the course of Colton’s life. I wanted to leave the readers with a sense of Colton’s possibilities. What if the world he had been born into was as forgiving and loving as he was? What if his aptitude for romance and big-heartedness had met a world that embraced a boy like Colton H. Bryant? What would Colton have become if he had been allowed to live—would he have become a version of his decent, hard-working father? Or would he have surpassed Bill’s talent for goodness? What is indisputable is that Colton was taken too early and I wanted the ending of my book to be something other than his death.
You titled your book The Legend of Colton H. Bryant. What led you to characterize the life of Colton H. Bryant as a “legend?”
After I came up with the title, I phoned Jake to ask what he thought of it. Jake was quiet for a moment and then he said in that lovely Rocky Mountain drawl of his, “It makes me kinda warm and fuzzy all over.” And we agreed that Colton was a legend in the way that only Wyoming can make them. He was the kind of boy that made people want to tell stories around the camp-fire, “Remember the time Colton stopped the train….” “Remember the time Colton lost Cocoa….” He was also a man of legendary forgiveness and love. Those are not simple or easy qualities to embody in the oil and gas world of Wyoming. There was something unique and slightly old-fashioned about the way Colton was raised to respect women, take care of his family, never curse unless you absolutely have to. It’s hard not be smitten by those kinds of old world manners.
There are few people whose lives have passed through England, Rhodesia, Malawi, Zambia, and Nova Scotia on their way to Wyoming. How has this
unique personal odyssey shaped you as a writer?
It’s probably cliché to say this, but in my experience, people are far more alike than they are dissimilar. There are forces in every culture that are trying to protect an often unsustainable status quo and mavericks or risk-takers who try to embrace a broader definition of what it is to be human on the planet. The fracture that is created while the new fights to shake off the old become stories of people whose cultures no longer seem relevant. For example, read Dambadzo Marachera’s controversial The House of Hunger set in freshly-independent Zimbabwe and its drunken violence is comparable to the disturbing heroin-soaked Scottish novel Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. Or look at The Grass is Singing, Doris Lessing’s 1950 book set in Rhodesia and compare it to Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel written in 1964 set in Canada. Laurence writes of the stultifying cost to women of living in small, wind-maddening prairie town in North America and Lessing writes similarly of a woman on the edge of nowhere trying to hold onto herself against the loneliness and the often unimaginative response of her husband in southern Rhodesia. I think the point is, give us similar circumstances and regardless of whether we’re in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Canada or Scotland, we all suffer the same and we all long for a kind of autonomy and self-regard, equality and fairness, the right to use our brains and hands the best we can. We are also all capable of shocking unkindness and thoughtlessness. And sometimes we rise above ourselves to acts of incredible greatness and beauty.
I heard Cindy Sheehan (the American mother who became an anti-war activist after her son, Casey, was killed in Iraq in 2004) speak once in a BBC interview of being a “matriot” instead of a “patriot.” A matriot, she explained, valued the lives of all people, across the world. A matriot does not value the lives of children of one nationality over another. Perhaps more than anything, my life’s journey from Africa to the UK and from there to North America has persuaded me of the moral truth of this philosophy. I don’t think you can assume some of their lives are worth more than others or that some people deserve more of the world’s resources than others. It seems very clear to me that we, in the West, can not afford to continue assuming propriety over the world’s resources in a careless, greedy way without paying for it, not only with the lives of our loved ones, but also with our souls.
There’s a fabulously catchy country song out now—I started to listen to a lot of country music and Southern rock when I was writing The Legend of Colton H Bryant. It’s called Little Bitty by Alan Jackson and is really an anthem to peace and sharing—“A little bitty house and a little bitty yard/ Little bitty dog and a little bitty car….” Colton was pretty familiar with “little bitty.” He drove his sister’s little bitty car for long enough (although he longed for a Ford F350, it’s true), spent the first few years of his life in a little bitty trailer home, and he never really had more than a man needed to get his life done. It was a life lived with values we hardly recognize anymore, closer to the earth than many Americans can even imagine. He is not so far from people I know in Africa in that regard, nor from the people my Scottish grandmother told me about who lived on the Isle of Skye off the west coast of Scotland.
The Legend of Colton H. Bryant speaks eloquently of the effect of climate and landscape on a person’s thoughts and character. How do you think life in Wyoming has influenced your own thinking and personality?
I think the West used to be simpler. People came out here and got beaten into shape by the climate they found. Now the West has become a crucial energy supplier for the rest of the United States and the old ranching way of life which has always rubbed shoulders more or less comfortably with mineral extraction is disappearing. It’s all about getting ‘er done quicker and cheaper whether it’s getting minerals out of the ground, or getting food on the table. There isn’t the old-world time anymore to let a cow grow to its full size on prairie grass, so we put them in feed lots so they can get fat quicker and cheaper and we can follow suit.
I was lucky to get to Wyoming before this latest oil boom. I had a chance to see a glimpse of how those cultures worked before the money piled on and the fights over how much we could all make broke out. It was—and still is in places, though it’s harder to find—a strange combination of people who really mind their own business and have incredibly decent values. Some old cowboys I met remind me of monks, which is how I found that image for Bill Bryant. Their peace is hard-won, but they’re ascetic and profoundly Zen-seeming in their philosophy. “Mind over matter,” is about all you need to know. Well that and “Cowboy up, cupcake.”
I don’t know if its just my age, or the climate, or the high altitude, or some of those old-cowboy values rubbing off on me, but I’ve grown slightly mellower and, at the same time, much more spiritual, living in Wyoming but in a pragmatic way. I’ve also tempered my politics. I’m not such a shiny, new liberal, anymore. I think I’m a pragmatic liberal now. Maybe Colton turned me into a redneck liberal. I think if you ride into the West on a high horse, you pretty soon end up in a pile of manure. I like how humbling all that space and all those hours in a saddle can be. Also, one long stare from someone like Bill Bryant tends to put a person in their place. He doesn’t mean anything by it, but he has a kind of moral authority that is incredibly hard won, and it really is life changing to be around someone who has such a clear sense of self.
You seem to have captured the speech and idioms of your Wyoming characters with native fluency. Was it difficult for you to absorb these mannerisms, verbal and otherwise, that must seem so foreign to those of your own earlier life?
I listened to hours and hours of country music and Southern rock on those long drives from Jackson to Pinedale and all around Sublette County and down to Evanston which didn’t help with the accent, but it helped with the humor and the slang and the attitude of rural North America.
One night, I left Jake and Tonya’s late, after talking about Colton. It was late May and a spring snowstorm had hit the mountains. As I was leaving, Jake gave me a carton of fresh eggs from their chickens and told me to, “Keep ‘er on the road.” He seemed worried about me driving in the snow since spring storms tend to make the roads slick and the snow is slushy and hard to see against. Suddenly, he turned and ran back into the house and came back out with a handful of cds, “These were Colton’s,” he said. “We found them in his house after he died.” I drove home through the snowstorm that night listening to Colton’s music; Neil Diamond, Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton and a whole bunch of people I’d never heard of. I cried the whole way home through a pretty terrific snow storm. I don’t think I went over thirty the whole way. I also started to “hear” Colton in my head a little on that drive home. Maybe it was the way Jake had been imitating Colton all night and the way he got all goofy when he tried to demonstrate the way he walked. Maybe it was the music and the long, lonely drive home, but Colton’s “voice” really settled on me at that point and after that, I don’t think I ever lost his sound. I can hear it, and I can write it, but I couldn’t speak it if my life depended on it.
More than that, I’ve lived in Wyoming for 14 years. I have spent enough time on cattle drives and with ranch hands that I have started to get a grip on the way people slide their language over their tongues, and their sly wit and the way they understate everything—the bigger the mess, the less they say about it. What I didn’t get until I met Bill Bryant was the way Wyoming people speak in silences. Sometimes you ask them a question and they’ll just kind of squint at you or spit, or both, and it took me a long time to realize that they were letting the wind and the spit do the talking. Understanding that piece of the dialogue was very important but it was hard to write—how do you express an absence of dialogue in which the unsaid is everything?
Your writings have explored both farm life in Africa and life on the oil patch in rural Wyoming. Are there any comparisons to be made between the two existences?
Oh sure. Both places are inhabited by some of the toughest people I know—resilient, resourceful, uncompromising. I don’t think you’d survive very well in either place without that kind of toughness.
In The Legend of Colton H. Bryant you say early on that every Western is a tragedy “because there was never a way for anyone to win against all the odds out here.” Would you like to elaborate further on this idea?
There is something inevitable about tragedy out here. I think because there has always been a rush for the resources and that kind of greed ensures that tragedy is close behind. I was struck by There Will Be Blood, the movie by Paul Thomas Anderson, based on the Upton Sinclair story, Oil, and also the Cohen brothers’ No Country for Old Men. Almost nothing has changed since the early oil days except the magnitude of the violence. Now we have violence on a less hand-to-hand level, but we have drugs and greed instead of mules and whisky, so our violence is quicker and surer, even if it is more remote and the oil companies have PR campaigns to smooth over the reality of their heartlessness.
Everyone from the oil companies to the federal government to the Bureau of Land Management (who issue the drilling leases) are pushing to get the minerals out of the ground as fast as they can. I don’t know what will give them pause. Colton was the third roughneck killed on an Ultra rig in one area in six months and they just fenced off the place where he fell, moved the rig and went right back to work. I’m interested in how Colton’s tragedy will impact readers. What is the reader going to do differently, knowing what the true cost of energy is?
You write that, in the 1990s, the West was “still full of a kind of gun-shot, hard-won innocence and broken promises and open roads.” That wasn’t so very long ago, yet your tone makes it sound as if that moment were long gone. What do you think is different now, and how could the old ways have evaporated so fast?
During Clinton’s second term, the Republicans in Congress began to push for more and more oil and gas development in the West. In the eight years since 2000, the Bush administration has consolidated their grip on any and all minerals they could get their hands on domestically. Nearly 30 million acres of public lands were leased to the oil and gas companies in the West and that does not count all the private land that has been commandeered. Almost half the private landowners in Wyoming do not own the subsurface rights to their land, so oil companies can go onto ranches and even subdivisions and drill for oil and gas. It was shocking to see the transformation of towns and landscapes surrounding these new gas fields. In their hurry to get minerals out of the ground, the culture—that “gun-shot, hard-won innocence”—was lost and so was an understanding of a common kind of Western decency.
I think most Westerners went into the turn of this century believing that they were doing the right thing by allowing expansive oil and gas development—they felt it was their patriotic duty. But then it became increasingly clear that the drilling had less to do with domestic security than massive, record-breaking profits for the oil companies. The loss of life and culture that went with what some have called “Dick Cheney’s land grab” has not been met with a pragmatic, frugal response from the Federal Government. The West has been sold out, and the only thing anyone has to show for it is a warmer planet and richer mineral companies. The war has dragged on. The West’s wild lands are incredibly, maybe irreparably, compromised.
The Legend of Colton H. Bryant has some rather harsh words for the oil and gas industry. However, we might suppose that industry executives would say that they are just doing what companies do: trying to supply a necessary product at a competitive price while giving their shareholders a strong rate of return. Any comments?
I wrote this book in part to demonstrate that there is no heart and soul—embodied by Colton—when the only imperative is financial profit. I have heard over and over again that the drilling business is a dangerous business and death is an expected part of the game, but I’ve also seen the way that safety violations, human and environmental laws, and a concern for the local culture are flaunted in pursuit of money. It’s no secret that there are safer, more thoughtful ways to live and to generate power. Throwing heartbeats at a drill bit in this particularly mindless way isn’t one of them.
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