The Legend of Colton H Bryant

by Alexandra Fuller

  A little after lunch on this day in early summer, Melissa comes with the boys. She has brought more bottles of Mountain Dew. Now they stretch out in a riot of green and yellow for half a foot on either side of the stone and threaten to take over the surrounding graves. She adds a few little packets of ketchup to the collection of condiments. Melissa gives the plaster dog a pat on the head. “You keeping an eye on him?” she asks. Melissa kneels in the grass next to the dog and watches Dakota and Nathanial run in and out and in and out of the trees. “Look,” says Melissa. She holds up her wrist to the stone. “Like my tattoo?” She has had a bracelet inscribed in blue ink that reads in linking, fancy letters, “Mind over matter.” She smiles through her tears. “Well dang it all, Colton H. Bryant, I surely like it.” Then she wipes her eyes and says, “Holy cow, Colt…I sure miss you.”

  Someone is trotting a horse down the street behind the cemetery gates. It’s calling out to a small herd in the scruffy paddock near the junction.

  “Cowboy up, cupcake, I guess,” says Melissa.

  Birds flutter in and out of the trees and hop about on the lawn.

  “I’ll be getting on, then,” says Melissa.

  She gets to her feet and calls the boys. “Time to go home,” she says. She buckles Dakota into his car seat. “Who’s a big cowboy?” she asks him.

  “Doggy,” says Dakota, pointing to Colton’s grave.

  “Yup,” says Melissa.

  “Doggy!” Dakota screams.

  “I know,” says Melissa.

  Later, in the early evening, Merinda and Shad, Tabby and Tony drive over to see Colton’s grave.

  “I don’t even know who left half this stuff,” says Tabby.

  “Who brought the Copenhagen?” says Merinda, picking up a can of chew that has been propped up next to several toy trucks, a tiny horseshoe, tickets to a football game. “Did he even like the Cowboys that much?” she asks.

  Tabby frowns. “People are kinda making a mess of Colton’s grave. I’m going to clean some of this stuff up.”

  “You can’t do that,” says Merinda. “Then they will come back and their feelings will be hurt if their stuff is gone.”

  Tabby sighs. “I guess.” Then she gets on her knees and clears away an arrangement of flowers from the stone so that the words on it can be seen. It’s a slab of flawless Dakota stone set level to the earth engraved with mountains and an elk and a fir tree, a fish leaping from a river meandering through the bottom of the picture. It’s exactly the country that Colton liked to cover with Cocoa on his weeks off the rigs. “Father, Husband, Brother, Son,” it says below his name, “Colton H. Bryant,” and his dates, “June 10, 1980–Feb 15, 2006.” And then, under that, “Mind Over Matter,” which is what everyone thought should be on the stone, and “Love Ya Always,” which is what Kaylee wanted, and then finally the words “Sons: Nate & Dakota.”

  Tabby stands up and presses her hands into the small of her back. She says, “If it’s another boy, I’ll name him Colton H. Bryant Ruiz.”

  Merinda says, “What?”

  “How does that sound?”

  “Tabby!” says Merinda. “You’re not…?”

  Tabby says, “If it’s a girl, it’ll have to have Colt as a middle name…”

  Merinda puts her hand over her mouth and looks from Tabby to Tony and back to Tabby again.

  Tabby’s smiling and looking down at Colton’s grave.

  Merinda says, “You’re…?”

  “Yup.”

  “Oh my glory,” says Merinda. She bounces up and down a few times. “Holy cow, Tabby! You superstar! When is it due?”

  Tony looks at his watch. “In about seven months, three weeks, four hours, and fifteen minutes,” he says.

  Tabby pushes him in the shoulder.

  Merinda covers her ears and bounces a few more steps in front of Colton’s grave. “Whoa,” she says. “I didn’t need to hear details. No details please.”

  51

  COLT

  He was born, going seventy miles an hour on Highway 6, near Payson, Utah, in the early hours of June 10, 1980, because, as Kaylee says, “There weren’t any decent hospitals in southwest Wyoming in those days, not that it would have mattered as it turns out, given he was born on the front seat of a 1976 Ford Thunderbird.” The birth certificate gives a mile marker as the place of birth.

  Bill glances over to see the infant on Kaylee’s shoulder, already lifting its head, staring up at the streetlights. “Cover its eyes. I don’t think they’re supposed to look at such bright lights so soon.”

  Kaylee puts her hand over the back of the baby’s head, steadying him, and makes it so that he can’t look up. “Whew,” she says. Fifteen minutes, if that, between the first sign he was on his way and now here he is and everything he isn’t pooling darkly on the passenger seat under Kaylee’s legs. “So help me, whatever I’m sitting in.”

  Bill gives Kaylee one of his specialty sideways smiles. “Well, what we got now?” he asks.

  “I can’t tell. Hold on.” Kaylee lifts the baby up to a passing streetlight. “Boy,” she announces.

  “Then there you go. There’s your colt you been pestering me for.”

  Kaylee’s laughing. “So let’s call him Colton,” she says. Colton pulls away and begins to paddle, as if trying to feel the limits of his new world and, finding none, trying to swim away on his own umbilical pull back to the earth. Kaylee tries on the name, “Colton Bryant.”

  “Colton H. Bryant,” says Bill.

  There’s a pause. “What’s the ‘H.’ for?” asks Kaylee.

  “Show,” says Bill. “Just for show.”

  52

  JAKE AND COLTON

  Afterwards

  A month after it would have been Colton’s twenty-seventh birthday, a little less than a year and a half after he died, Jake says to Tonya, “I think I’ll just head out for some air.” They’ve put the kids to bed and cleaned up the kitchen and they’ve spent a couple of hours working on the new porch. They are getting ready for bed themselves.

  Tonya nods. “Okay.”

  Jake pulls a ball cap onto his head and takes his keys off the counter.

  “Say hi to him for me.”

  “Yep.”

  Jake gets in his truck, a white F250, and drives a mile or two southeast onto Highway 191, then he turns right onto Paradise Road just this side of the New Fork River. There is a whole cluster of rig signs swinging in the wind, including the circular orange, black, and white sign that reads patterson-uti drilling company—snyder, texas. On the tail of an arrow cut through the sign is the number 455. That was Colton’s rig, moved on to a fresh location. Another sign hangs close to this one except this has the numbers 515 on the tail of its arrow. That’s rig 455’s sister rig. Jake doesn’t even pay close attention to the signs. He’s done this drive a lot since Colton died. He knows his way around this oil patch blindfolded.

  It’s dark by now. Jake rolls down the window and taps his fingers on the steering wheel with the radio tuned to the country station. Anchored to the shadowy swell of the high plains there are maybe fifteen, twenty drilling rigs, lit up like so many Eiffel Towers, with fresh-cut roads like veins going deep into the high plains to the heart of each pad. The headlights of so many company trucks bob along in the darkness, like lost, disembodied orbs looking for a place to roost. Jake drives a distance toward the rigs on a freshly paved road and when he hits the dirt he turns right onto another dirt road, past a sign that says nerd farms and another sign that says the land beyond this point is Bureau of Land Management critical winter habitat and that traffic is prohibited here from December until April, except for activity related to drilling. The air here is sour with gas. Jake keeps driving.

  The radio gets jumpy with static. Jake switches it off and now he can hear the strange singing of the drilling rigs on either side of the road—a high, breathy sound—as if the drills might be calling softly to one another, a fresh breed of metal animal, caroling the way wolves and coyotes used to do
out here. Now the smell of gas is overwhelming, like walking into a chemistry lab of broken Bunsen burners. Fans in a nearby compressor station scream. And then, faint and lonely through the midsummer night sky, there is the occasional shout of one roughneck to another.

  They say Indians used to press their ears to the earth to hear what was coming next, but if you were to lie down and listen to this ground, you’d get run over. Jake turns right at the compressor station and now he’s facing the Wind River Mountains again. A hailstorm this afternoon pulverized the drought-stricken sage and a cloud of it hangs about a foot above the ground in a grey-green mist. Jake turns right again. You wouldn’t know, if you didn’t know where to look, where Colton fell. There’s nothing to mark the spot except an abandoned well, covered over, taped up. A sign saying riverside 88-2d hangs above one of the pipes. Jackrabbits and a couple of pronghorn antelope scuffle about on the surrounding gravel.

  Strands of rope hung with yellow, red, and blue pennants—like triangular prayer flags without the prayers—flap over the abandoned evaporating pond. Jake gets out of his truck and faces the sky to the west. He takes a deep breath of the gas-smelling air and puts his hands together. “Hey Colt,” he says.

  Nothing much happens. The jackrabbits hop off a few more steps and the pronghorns jolt a little further away and then look over their shoulders at Jake.

  Jake bows his head and puts his hands over his eyes. “I know you’re in a better place,” he says. “So I’m not so sad. Kinda.”

  Above Jake’s shoulder, to the northeast, the two Patterson-UTI rigs, 455 and 515—red, white, and blue in the daylight, but anonymously lit up at night, just like all the other rigs—keep on drilling and drilling into the earth. Fifteen thousand feet deep and beyond for natural gas that will go to the compressor stations less than a quarter of a mile from where Colton fell and from there into pipes that run, but not fast enough to keep up with demand, across to the coast to fulfill California’s demand for the promised, big, hot-and-cold on-demand life.

  The last glow of the sun shuts down but the sky remains an anonymous blur of grey. There aren’t shooting stars above the plains anymore. Now the brightest places in the plains are the rigs, all violent with night lights. The antelope disappear into shadows.

  Jake says, “Tonya says hi. Me and her are building on a porch out back.” He smiles and says, “But I guess you can see all that from up there, huh?” Jake kicks the dirt with the toe of his boot and spits. “Yup,” he says, “I ain’t doing so bad. Kids are doing good. We’re thinking maybe of getting another one. Huh, what you think about that?” Then Jake clears his throat and wipes his nose on his sleeve. “Well,” he says, “that about does ’er, I guess.” He climbs back into his pickup truck and drives back the way he came. “Yep,” he says, “that’s about all there is to say,” and he’s glad it’s dark and that he’s alone in the truck because some people don’t like to see a grown man cry.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a work of nonfiction, but I have taken narrative liberties with the text. I have emphasized certain aspects of Colton’s life and of his personality and disregarded others. I have re-created dialogue and occasionally juggled time to create a smoother story line. I have changed one name (Chase). I must emphasize, however, that Colton’s friends and family were never less than honest and open with me and they were endlessly patient and understanding with my questions, some of which can only have been incredibly painful.

  Colton was the fourth rig hand in just over eighteen months in the Upper Green River Valley to die at an Ultra Petroleum well site. Ultra Petroleum has made it clear, through their website and other announcements, that profit is their priority. They have repeatedly boasted that they have the lowest cost per thousand cubic feet of gas produced in the industry. In July 2005, Brian Ault, the vice president of Ultra Petroleum, quit the company. “It makes me sick,” he was reported as saying, giving his reasons for leaving UP, “how much we’re pulling out of the ground and how little we’re giving back.”

  The week before Colton died, Michael D. Wattford, chairman, president, and chief executive officer of Ultra Petroleum, issued a statement that reads, in part, “Ultra Petroleum continues to excel. 2005 was another record year in a continuing string of record reporting periods…. Our 2006 plans continue the growth theme…. We plan to execute the most aggressive drilling program in our history with 160 gross wells in Wyoming, and bring into production three more fields in China. With over seventeen years of identifying drilling opportunities in Wyoming coupled with our low cost structure, we remain positioned to continue delivering industry leading performances for many years to come” (emphasis added).

  For their part in Colton Bryant’s accident, in which six serious safety violations were found, Wyoming Occupational Health and Safety (OSHA) fined Patterson-UTI $7,031. On May 3, 2006, less than three months after Colton’s death, Patterson-UTI Energy announced record results for the first quarter of 2006. Their net income for the quarter had increased 174 percent to $159 million and their revenues for the quarter were up by 70 percent to $598 million. Ultra Petroleum was not found culpable of any infractions in relation to the accident that killed Colton. In 2006, revenues at Ultra hit a record $592.7 million. Beyond worker’s compensation, Colton’s family received no compensation for his loss.

  In his article “Fatalities in the energy fields: 2000–2006” (High Country News, vol. 39, no. 6, April 2, 2007), Ray Ring writes, “At least 89 people died on the job in the Interior West’s oil and gas industry from 2000 to 2006 in a variety of accidents, including 90-foot falls, massive explosions, poison gas inhalations and crushings by safety harnesses.” Of those deaths, Wyoming is responsible for thirty-five, by far the highest percentage.

  In April 2007, the Casper Star-Tribune reported that Wyoming and Montana had the worst records in the nation for workplace safety in 2005. “Wyoming has the highest rate of job fatalities with 16.8 per 100,000 workers and Montana has the second highest, with 10.3 fatalities per 100,000 workers.” Since 2006, the State of Wyoming Department of Employment has increased its personnel to eight OSHA compliance officers working in the entire state. Four are based in Cheyenne and four in the field. No rig hand I spoke to beyond those associated with a fatality on the rigs—even those who had worked in the industry for decades—has ever seen an OSHA compliance officer on the oil patch. It would have cost Patterson-UTI two thousand dollars, at most, to have safety rails where Colton fell.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I can never adequately express my gratitude to Colton’s family for trusting me with his story; Bill and Kaylee Bryant, Tabby and Tony Ruiz, Merinda Bryant and Shad Powers, Melissa Bryant, Preston and Mandi Bryant. For incredible generosity and kindness, my thanks to Jake and Tonya Wigginton.

  For all those who took me on cattle drives and onto the oil patch, and who explained their love of Wyoming to me, my deepest thanks: John and Lucy Fandek, Freddy Botur, Holly Davis, Saul Bencomo, Aaron “James Curry,” Linda Baker, Steve Belinda, Bill Close, John Carney, Linda Goodman, Joel and Kim Berger, and Bridget Mackey. For socioeconomic statistics and endless patience with my questions, Jeffrey Jacquet.

  For reading parts and/or the whole of this manuscript in all its incarnations and for encouragement, support and guidance during the writing of it: Joan Blatt, Bryan Christy, Nicola Fuller, Terry Tempest Williams, Oliver Payne, Dean Stayner, David Baron, Adanna Moriarty, Dan Glick, Bill Broyles, Cassie and Bill Ross, and James Galvin.

  For their advice and guidance and faith, thanks to Ann Godoff and Melanie Jackson.

  And for their love and patience and support, deepest thanks to my husband, Charlie Ross, and to my children Sarah, Fuller, and Cecily Ross.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Alexandra Fuller was born in England in 1969. In 1972 she moved with her family to a farm in southern Africa where she lived until her mid-twenties. She has lived in Wyoming with her husband since 1994. They have three children.

   

  Alexandra Fuller, The Legend of Colton H Bryant