I've driven across Wyoming twice in my life now, and there's something amazing about it. It's still got a wild, untamed sort of feel that I've never experienced anywhere else. Its sprawling miles of mountains and plains are staggeringly beautiful, but they do have that edge of danger about them too. While passing through, I really wanted to know what it was like to live there, not just passing through on warm late spring day, but what it would feel like to live there year round.
The Legend of Colton H. Bryant gave me a taste of it, and not necessarily a sweet one. Colton is the young son of an oil rig worker. Never much good at school and always looking to follow in his father's footsteps, it was practically inevitable that Colton himself would one day end up working on the rigs. Fuller paints a picture of a mostly happy go lucky, good hearted kid, growing up on the high plains of Wyoming, breaking horses, hunting, camping, going out on the rodeo circuit but ultimately heading to work for big oil.
In this lightly re-imagined telling of Colton's life, Fuller manages to bring out that spirit Wyoming seems to wear on its face, indescribable open spaces and mountain vistas that only thinly disguise a harder edge. The people she introduces readers to are hard living, hard working, decent types carving a life out in a place that's not quite hospitable. At the same time, Fuller is writing a scathing indictment of big oil, an industry that dominates Wyoming's economy, preying on a lack of other opportunity and an often undereducated workforce trying to eke out a living.
Fuller expertly draws out the lives of Colton and his family and friends, showing us a big hearted, loyal boy who grew into young family man trying to earn a living to support his wife and kids. Fuller, just as skillfully, lets readers in on the issues with big oil in Wyoming - the hours, the undertraining, the under-penalized safety violations, and countless underhanded ways of sticking it to a labor pool that doesn't have much other opportunity.
The Legend of Colton H. Bryant is heavy with foreshadowing. There isn't a moment in the book, even while Fuller amuses us with Colton's childhood antics, that doesn't carry the weight of looming tragedy. This book is a true heartbreaker of a story and a powerful call to action against the sort of corporate greed that ruins both landscapes and lives. Highly recommended.
The Legend of Colton H. Bryant is heavy with foreshadowing. There isn't a moment in the book, even while Fuller amuses us with Colton's childhood antics, that doesn't carry the weight of looming tragedy. This book is a true heartbreaker of a story and a powerful call to action against the sort of corporate greed that ruins both landscapes and lives. Highly recommended.
This sounds outstanding. Is it based on a true story?
ReplyDeleteIt reads a lot like a novel in places, but it's technically non-fiction. The nature of it meant that Fuller had to reimagine some dialogue, but I think she tried to keep that part of things as true as possible.
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