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Growing up in Sweden there was a single photograph that we had of my dad’s distant American side of the family. I remember looking at this photo when I was child and thinking—they are really cowboys! While I spent many of my summers in the US, I had never met this side of the family. My dad could only recount a handful of times that he had ever met his cousins. We used to keep the photo in a little wooden frame that hung in our hallway. Occasionally my dad would tell stories about his cousins and his uncle. They were always some sort of legend about a chili and cheese corndog eating contest at the local AMPM convenience store or how his cousin Myles would shoot rattlesnakes after school and turn them into hat bands for his cowboy hat.

I met my father’s cousin Myles very briefly when I was 18. There was a definite biological connection to my father, yet Myles was so different. He hunted bears and deer and birds and collected old guns, flew kites and remote controlled airplanes, launched backyard rockets, made his own bullets and built elaborate miniature Bavarian villages at Christmas time. When I met him, he started talking to the birds in the neighbour’s tree while barbecuing ribs. It was surreal. He invited me to come visit him and shoot some guns. I remember him saying, “Alice, I have the perfect gun for you, you are going to love it.” I had never held a real gun, but I think I knew right then that I wanted to visit. Mostly because I was so curious about this other side of my family that I had never been exposed to before. In the autumn I sent him an email and two weeks later I was sleeping in a trailer in their backyard about to learn how to butcher quail.