Kathryn Wilder - Desert Chrome: Water, a Woman, and Wild Horses in the West

A raw and honest journey of addiction, love, trauma, and redemptiongrounded in a deep love of place and all things mustang. The best memoirs reveal the deeply personal in order to see the larger world with renewed clarity and insightthis is one such book. As Wilder moves from heroin to horses, we see a substantive journey of recovery and strengthand ultimately, of resilience.

LAURA PRITCHETT, author of Stars Go Blue

For too long, the lone cowboy myth has corralled the American West in the barbed wires of dominion and destruction. Tangled in that telling are women and mustangstheir wildness, togetherness, and vulnerability. In Desert Chrome, Wilder bucks against a story as desiccated as the deserts she has dwelled inkicking hard enough to free what was bound, to redeem what was broken. Listen now, to the thundering of hearts and hooves. Theyre coming for us, at last.

AMY IRVINE, author of Air Mail and Desert Cabal

Desert Chrome journeys through parched valleys, on wild rivers, and into deep rock canyons on a unique quest. In this authentic, hard-won account of her life, Wilder finds the warm, true hearts shes been seeking and that deserve our humanity, healing, and a hell of a lot better future than theyve been dealt. Theres a quiet heroine at the center of this story, yes, pointing toward a beautiful world. It can be ours if well love better, lean closer, and listen to the voices, like Wilders own, well worth heeding from birth.

REBECCA LAWTON, author of The Oasis This Time

Wilders love of horses and the land is the theme threaded through her, and her writing makes a heartsong of it all. I could feel the land rising up as a subject, not background, not setting, but subject like the land has a story as important as her own, like the land and Wilders stories make a helix together, like the land has a piece of her heart in it.

LIDIA YUKNAVITCH, author of Verge

Blame it or praise it, Virginia Woolf writes, there is no denying the wild horse in us. Desert Chrome is the story of a landscape and the many ways the land sings us into being. It is the story of one of our most iconic North American species, Equus caballus, the wild horse. And, most of all, it is the story of a woman coming to know her own wildnessa wildness that is free, and sustaining, and on her own terms.

JOE WILKINS, author of Fall Back Down When I Die and The Mountain and the Fathers

A powerful coming-of-age story, into the age of a womans strongest power, when, with complete awareness of her past, she can, with might and strength, will the future before her. Wilder writes with all the love, wisdom, and courage it takes to make positive changes for the western landscape, horses, and readers.

CMARIE FUHRMAN, author of Camped Beneath the Dam

I learned so much reading Kathryn Wilders book, Desert Chromeabout wild horses. About desert and water. About Kat. We were neighbors years ago, but the new paths along which, with smooth and stunning prose, she leads readers into the depths of her life suggest how little we know those close to us. And how huge life can be once we commit with our whole hearts to wildness.

BROOKE WILLIAMS, author of Open Midnight

WATER, A WOMAN, AND WILD HORSES IN THE WEST

KATHRYN WILDER

TORREY HOUSE PRESS

Salt Lake City Torrey

First Torrey House Press Edition, May 2021

Copyright 2021 by Kathryn Wilder

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

Published by Torrey House Press

Salt Lake City, Utah

www.torreyhouse.org

International Standard Book Number: 978-1-948814-36-2

E-book ISBN: 978-1-948814-37-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020931567

Lines from The Creation Story, from The Woman Who Fell from the Sky: Poems by Joy Harjo (W. W. Norton & Company; revised ed. 1996). Reprinted with permission of the author.

Lyrics from The Circle from the album Tonopah by Dave Stamey, copyright 1999. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Cover photo by TJ Holmes

Cover design by Kathleen Metcalf

Interior design by Rachel Buck-Cockayne

Distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

Torrey House Press offices in Salt Lake City sit on the homelands of Ute, Goshute, Shoshone, and Paiute nations. Offices in Torrey are in homelands of Paiute, Ute, and Navajo nations.

For Nancy Park, who was there for so much of this

And for wildness, that it may remain so

We are all on the run, human and wild. Endangered. Exiled. Refugees.

Terry Tempest Williams, Thirty-Year Plan

Maps and plans lose integrity within the grind of a rapid.

Craig Childs, The Animal Dialogues

I LEAD MY GRULLA MARE, SAVANNA, TO WATER. SHE IS THE gray of a mule deers winter coat, with a dorsal stripe and zebra markings on her legs that trace back to the original wild horses, though she is quarter horse, not mustang. The mustang follows. It is his first time here, to the pion pine and juniper woodland that defines my desert home. We walk down the rocky path and around to a flat below the cabin, where in the 1930s post-and-rail sheep pens were built right up against the wall of Dakota Sandstone, which forms the back fence of the old pens and the cliff base upon which a modern log cabin sits.

Savanna follows me on a loose lead despite thirst. The big, dark bay mustang, who wears no halter or rope, sticks close to the mare until he smells water and trots up and around and above the creek, missing the trail the cows have made through the coyote willows. Four hundred years ago that trail would have been carved by bison and wild horses, and Savanna might be a direct descendent of the horses brought to North America in the 1500s by Spanish conquistadors. I would not be a white woman in her sixties watering her horses in Disappointment Creek but a young girl nearing a stream that ran cold and clear from the mountains, the rope in my hands plaited grass.

The mustang comes in close to the mare again and I quicken my steps, the willows tight here with no place to veer off if the horses crowd me. No longer a young and nimble escaper, I trip over tree roots or rocks or my own boots more often than ever before. My sons tease me about this, and because I have strong bones I can laugh, too, each time I pick myself up off the ground.

Last week I stepped in a prairie dog hole as I backed up while closing a wire gate. My right leg dropped in clear to the knee (fortunately my left kneemy troubled kneewas spared), and my boot got stuck. I tried to jerk it out and finally had to yell at Ken, my elder son, to come help. He trotted across the pasture with the natural grace of a wild horse and yanked me up out of the hole. Jeez Mom, he said. That was all.

The next day I stepped backward and tripped over a sandstone slab, falling not just on my ass but all the way down, elbows to the ground, bruises purpling my arms and legs for days.