From the bestselling author of Don’t Let’s Go to the
Dogs Tonight and Scribbling the Cat, the
unforgettable true story of a boy who comes of age in the
oil-fields and open plains of Wyoming; a heartrending story
of the human spirit that lays bare where it is that wisdom
truly resides
Colton H. Bryant was one of
Wyoming’s native sons and grown by that high, dry place, he
never once wanted to leave it. “Wyoming loves me,” he said,
and it was true. Wyoming—roughneck, wild, open, and
searingly beautiful— loved him, and Colton loved it back. As
a child in school, Colton never could force himself to focus
on his lessons. Instead, he’d plan where he’d go fishing
later, or he’d wonder how many jackrabbits he might find on
his favorite hunting patch, or he’d dream about the rides he
would take on the wild mare he was breaking. “At my funeral,
you’ll all feel sorry for making me waste so much time in
school,” he said to his best friend Jake—and it was
true.
Two things got Colton through the boredom of
school and the neighborhood “K-mart cowboys” who bullied
him: His best friend Jake and his favorite mantra, a snatch
of a saying he heard on TV: Mind over matter—which
meant to him: If you don’t mind, it don’t matter. Colton and
Jake grew up wanting nothing more than the freedom to sleep
out under the great Wyoming night sky, to hunt and fish and
chase the horizon and to be just like Colton’s dad, a strong
and gentle man of few words. When it was time for Colton to
marry and make money on his own, he took up as a hand on an
oil rig. It was dangerous work, but Colton was the third
generation in his family to work on the oil patch and he
claimed it was in his blood. And anyway, he joked, he always
knew he’d die young.
Colton did die young, and he
died on the rig—falling to his death because the drilling
company had neglected to spend two thousand dollars on the
mandated safety rails that would have saved his life. His
family received no compensation. But they didn’t expect
to—they knew the company’s ways, and after all as Colton
would have said: Mind over matter.
In
Scribbling the Cat, Alexandra Fuller brought us the
examined life of a Rhodesian soldier; now—in her inimitable
poetic voice and with her pitch-perfect ear for dialogue—
she brings before us the life of someone much closer to
home, as unexpected as he is iconic. The moving, tough, and
in many ways quintessentially American story of Colton H.
Bryant’s life could not be told without also telling the
story of the land that grew him—the beautiful and somehow
tragic Wyoming; the land where there are still such things
as cowboys roaming the plains, where it’s relationships that
get you through, and where a just, soulful, passionate man
named Colton H. Bryant lived and died.
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