STORYTELLER:The poignant story of the death of a Wyoming oil worker led to sleepless nights and bouts of uncontrolled weeping for author Alexandra Fuller, writes Louise East
BIOGRAPHERS ARE OFTEN disconcertingly matey with their dead subjects.
"Typical Milton," they chortle. "Naughty old Napoleon." Their subjects drift around like unmarried uncles at Christmas, present but never quite there.
For Alexandra Fuller, it was far more extreme. While researching her new book, The Legend of Colton H Bryant, she routinely set a place at the dinner table for Colton. Sitting on the sofa, she told her husband to move over to make room.
Describing herself as "haunted", she stopped sleeping, wept constantly, and despite a life-long preference for the secular, started attending church services twice a week, purely to find peace.
The result is a strange, but compelling hybrid; a biography which reads like a novel about a hero to who nothing much happens. Colton H Bryantis not famous. Nor has he climbed Everest while missing several limbs, taught himself to breath underwater or survived a gothically grim childhood. He is simply a young Wyoming oil worker and part-time cowboy, father of two, fan of Neil Diamond, killed at the age of 26.
There are countless deaths like his - arbitrary, accidental, unnecessary - and countless lives as uneventful, yet in Fuller's skilful hands, Colton H Bryantbecomes a kind of blue-jeans Everyman; two parts Brokeback, one part Little Prince, one part Blazing Saddles.
The clue is in the title. While the story might be a true one, Fuller set out to write a legend.
"I think writers do themselves a disservice when they pretend they aren't moved by their subjects. What's wrong with feeling?"
In person, Fuller is an unlikely package. Strikingly pretty and animated, she wears a long hemp skirt and linen shirt, and drinks beer in the afternoon. Her author photo shows her holding the rope halter of a blaze-nosed horse, dogs foaming up her legs and although she claims to feel a certain relief at being out of the States ("I'm just so disgusted with Bush, I really am. I'm wearing holes in my knees praying for Obama"), you sense she has limited patience for the social niceties of the interview process.
Although she was born in England some 39 years ago, Fuller grew up in Africa, a childhood she wrote about in her shockingly good 2002 memoir, Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight. The Fullers were white settlers - "very racist" according to Fuller - who slept with loaded Uzis by the bed, shot snakes in the kitchen, and in her mother's case, routinely drank herself into a stupor.
It was only when Alexandra married and moved to America that she realised, with some trepidation, quite how unusual her childhood had been. "It's embarrassing when you're living in liberal America to say, well actually, my parents fought to keep one country white-run," she says.
Her parents now live in Zambia, still together and still farming. More astonishingly, given Fuller's frank portrait of her mother (the book's title is an A P Herbert quote which goes "Don't let's go to the dogs tonight/For mother will be there"), they're also still talking to their daughter.
"Mum was furious, organised a full scale family boycott of me for two years. But then she got over it and I think she's quite proud of it now. It was the Book at Bedtime on Radio 4, and she was thrilled about that."
If Fuller's childhood was one of genteel colonial deprivation, all spiders, malaria and powdered milk, her life is definitely swishy now. She, her estate-agent husband and their three kids live in the chi-chi resort town of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Their neighbour is Dick Cheney. In winter, they head out to their cabin and go cross-country skiing.
Wyoming has always been the still-beating cowboy heart of America, home of Buffalo Bill, the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains. With a bison on its flag and the lowest population per square mile of any American state, it has long offered the lure of the wild, of eagles, clear water and big skies.
Not any more, says Fuller. Wyoming is in the grip of an oil boom, as the Bush administration frantically attempts to find fuel sources to replace those cut off by the war in Iraq.
"A quarter of Wyoming's land mass is now under gas development. The 2005 energy bill rolled back environmental laws which go back to Nixon. I mean Nixon, who personally knew what needed to happen to protect us from the worst impulses of our greed and hubris, and here you have G W rolling it back."
In 2006, Fuller spent several months researching a piece on the environmental and social impact of the oil boom for the New Yorkermagazine.
The piece had already gone to press when she read about a young oil worker called Colton H Bryant, the fourth rig hand to die at an Ultra Petroleum rig in 18 months. Intrigued and appalled, Fuller got in touch with Colton's parents, Bill and Kayleigh Bryant. Wary and still raw, they invited her to come and visit.
"Of all the hundreds of interviews you do for a book, one catches fire, I just completely fell under Bill Bryant's spell - he's so iconoclastic, so powerful - and Kayleigh broke my heart. I had just weaned my baby, and I think I was a bit hormonal and emotional. I was very unprofessional and I just burst into tears."
The Bryants suggested she get in touch with Colton's best friend, Jake, who took her to the rig where Colton lost his life. It was situated behind a state-sponsored sign declaring it to be a Critical Winter Wildlife Habitat, not to be entered in winter months.
"They have permits to do whatever they want," Fuller says with barely contained fury. "There were ozone alerts eight times this winter because the air pollution has got so horrendous. This in an area previously known to have some of the cleanest water left in the US."
Fuller is the first to admit that she arrived at Colton Bryant's story with certain prejudices. Her concern was for the environment, not for the roughnecks who depend on the rigs for their way of life and their livelihood. Should the rigs be shut down, those jobs would be lost and traditionally, there has been little common ground between the rig-hands and environmentalists.
"I no longer see a disconnect between someone like Colton, and the environment. That's where environmentalists have gone so wrong, and got labelled elitist. It's not as clear-cut as shutting the mills down and stopping oil drilling. But we do need to slow it down. We're going to need this energy for a long, long time. Let's put some conservation in place, and in the meantime, let's keep those boys alive, get them home to their families and make sure we've got alternatives coming in right behind, so when Colton's kids grow up, they might be working on a solar or wind farm."
Initially, Fuller intended to write the book as straight non-fiction, describing how she uncovered the Bryants' story, but overwhelmed by her feelings, she decided to get out of the way and let Colton's life speak for itself. "It was just luck that he lived such a novelistic life. I mean, he was born going 70 miles an hour, trained a mustang at 16, stopped a train, went goose hunting, had a friend called Jake: all these details were just like a novel. I said to my husband, 'if I mess this up, I've got no right to call myself a writer'."
As for why Colton H Bryantinvaded her supper table and took over her life, Fuller has her own theory. "I was straining so hard to hear the last song of this cowboy, it stopped me talking," she says quietly. "I couldn't talk about my environmental concerns. I got off my high horse and put my ear to the ground and it was unbelievably humbling."
The Legend of Colton H Bryant by Alexandra Fuller is published by Simon & Schuster, priced £12.99