DESERT CHROME

Testimony to the healing power of wildness.

Essayist Wilder makes her book debut with a candid memoir that interweaves a trajectory of loss, pain, and hard-won serenity with a paean to wild horses. Sexually abused by a family friend when she was a child, Wilder suffered severe consequences: PTSD, depression, and addiction. When she was 19, shortly after her boyfriend died suddenly, she started using heroin and soon added cocaine, pills, and alcohol. “I lied to everyone,” she writes, “hurt friends, stole from family, shot up in my mother’s bathroom.” She married and divorced, and when she lost custody of her two sons, she fell apart. “Drugs,” she admits, “kept me going as I lived without my children.” What saved her, eventually, was a connection to the power and beauty of wild mustangs. “Watching wild horses is the best medicine,” she writes, “like watching a river or the flames of a campfire burning low in the night.” Wilder evokes with feeling particular horses she has loved as well as the dry, rolling landscapes of high desert country—red rock and juniper, pinon pine and sagebrush—where she has camped, bought and sold ranches, set up a horse clinic, and accompanied a photographer friend to document the mustangs’ lives—and their plight. Wilder examines the problem of the burgeoning mustang population, resulting from the passage of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act in 1971. Because mustangs compete with cattle for land—angering ranchers—the Bureau of Land Management conducts helicopter roundups, removing herds to reservations, where they live essentially in captivity, forcibly separated from family band members. Wilder, along with other mustang advocates, instead promotes a “humane, commonsense” solution: injecting mares with PZP, which prevents pregnancy. A governmental PZP program, she argues, can ensure that mustangs “stay wild on lands they know.”

A spirited and impassioned chronicle.