The only artist I knew growing up was my grandmother, and she did not preface or credential herself as such. She took photographs of javelinas sheltering beneath sun in thornscrub, foraging for prickly pear fruit, she earned the trust of coyotes and bobcats, capturing them still and reserved several yards from her lens; hummingbirds and desert bloom, flighty in disposition, welcomed her shutter. She sold these photographs in Sonoran bookshops and mailed them to me with asides about the resilience of creatures in a world unconcerned with ecological conservation or reverence for what came before one’s time. Our phone calls today still round to this topic and I ask her if she’s familiar with Hope Ryden, a wildlife documentarian and activist so close to her age and spirit they could have been sisters or collaborators. She is not familiar and I prattle on about Ryden’s God's Dog: Celebration of the North American Coyote, a book completed after two years living in remote parts of southern Nevada, studying what Crow mythologizers called “the first worker.” “The Northwestern tribe not only regarded coyote as creator of the earth and all living creatures, but also believed him to be the founder of human customs. Yet because life on earth was so full of error, it naturally followed that Old Man Coyote himself must be fallible, and though inordinately clever, capable of being duped. Nevertheless, the coyote was no less venerated for being vulnerable,” Ryden writes in 1975. God’s Dog followed America's Last Wild Horses, Ryden’s investigation of the Bureau of Land Management for rounding up thousands of mustangs and eliminating herds. Ryden worked as a National Geographic photojournalist in rural Montana and rallied the help of local residents to safeguard deteriorating land for horses roaming freely. Understandably skeptical, residents only invited Ryden on four-wheel-drive when it became clear she was not an agent or a meatpacker. Her efforts, beyond her books, saw tangible reward with Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall creating Pryor Mountains Wild Horse Range in 1969. Congress, too, unanimously passed the Wild Horse and Burros Act in 1971, informed by Ryden’s methodical research and photography. “When I first saw wild horses sweeping across a mountain slope, tails and mains streaming, my whole view of modern America brightened,” she wrote. “My resignation to a jet-age America with her streams polluted, telephone poles marring every landscape and automobile graveyards where once wild meadows sheltered grouse and butterflies, was replaced momentarily by a small hope.” In her late twenties Ryden had been a flight attendant, and without theorizing too much of another’s life and purpose, it is fitting she spent the majority of her remaining years surveying closely the swaths of land city lights and smog obscured. She savored every square mile two-fold.
-Katie Calderon