When lives run on oil

PINEDALE, WYO. — ALEXANDRA FULLER is driving south from Jackson Hole toward Pinedale to visit the oil patch where 25-year-old Colton Bryant, fourth generation Wyoming oil worker and the subject of Fuller's "The Legend of Colton H. Bryant" (Penguin Press: 204 pp., $23.95) worked and died. On Valentine's Day night 2006, Bryant fell 26 feet from the catwalk around an oil well's conductor pipe. She is listening to Neil Diamond singing "Forever in Blue Jeans," one of Bryant's favorite songs. "Who the hell listens to Neil Diamond?" Fuller asks, turning it up to hear the lyrics: "Money talks, but it can't sing and dance."

Money talks pretty loudly in this part of the country. In the past 10 years, oil and natural gas have been pumped out of the ground here at breakneck speed. Rigs that used to be 80 acres apart are now often less than five. Roads are lined with dead animals: mule deer, pronghorn sheep, antelope, all hit by trucks heading in and out of production areas around the clock. Communities have spread to accommodate workers, 60% of them from out of state. Groups of trailers, their windows covered in foil to keep out the light, throw a metallic glare across the Mad Max landscape.

It is not uncommon for a writer to be inhabited by her characters, but Fuller has quite a case. Bryant was a motor hand, employed by the Patterson-UTI Drilling Co. on the Mesa Oil Field, rig 455. Fuller never met him, but re-creating him has dragged her into a world of greed and power and destruction and beauty. Fuller, who is 38, married with three children, calls Bryant "the boy." Not every night, but some nights, she leaves a space in her bed for him. It's not the usual kind of love, but it's one kind.

Fuller's first book, "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight," was a memoir of growing up in Rhodesia. Her next, "Scribbling the Cat," evoked her travels with a Rhodesian ex-mercenary in Africa. "The Legend of Colton H. Bryant" is the leanest of the three. It is a book more channeled than written, sparse and beautiful.

"I feel like a whole different person did each of these books," she says. If K, the soldier in "Scribbling the Cat," bubbled up from the heart of darkness, Bryant is the flip side of the coin. "This boy got inside my soul," Fuller acknowledges. "I felt embodied by him."