Cynthia Olson is an American author living in Dublin, Ireland. She is currently writing about her family, who lived in the Great Muddy Valley in the American southwest in the late 19th Century

The month after I graduated from college, my parents sold the home where I’d grown up in the crowded suburbs of Washington D.C., and drove some 2,300 miles to the place of my mother’s upbringing – a remote stretch of inhospitable land where the horizon was as true as any you would find in the center of the ocean.

They traveled west to care for my grandmother in her final years, and then remained. In the time since I traveled back and forth, east to west, a witness to their decline. During these visits I learned about “true west”: its myths, stubbornness and division, stories heroic and mundane and which linger today among my family and the other peoples who have their origins in these places.

Others grew up learning about the west from books and films. But this is a true story, told with as little embellishment as I could muster