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I was casually channel surfing the other night when I came across a public television special on John Wayne and movie director John Ford. Grainy clips from “The Iron Horse” and “Stagecoach” flickered across the screen, along with amazing wide-shots from Utah’s Monument Valley, stern-faced Indians and backlit cowboys on raring horses.

It all made me feel like I was 12 again because it was around that time I discovered my love of Westerns.

Yes, I do understand that some of you may consider this not politically correct, but please remember that I was a teenage girl living in a cold Scandinavian country and the Wild West was far, far away in some sort of imaginary place called Montana. Or Wyoming – and I could never remember whose side the Yankees were on. Sorry, but they didn’t teach a lot of American history where I went to school. Once I moved over here I learned the locations of the states by watching the Weather Channel.

Anyhow, I fell in love with the simple Western world: Men had gunfights and women screamed and the bad guys wore black hats.

I loved the horses. Those big chestnuts with blazing white stars and the golden palominos galloping across the prairie – I wanted to ride like that, fast, ferociously, returning to the barn smelling like dust and horse sweat.

Well, I did smell like horse. But I was just a teenage girl with a paint pony and a Western saddle, and dreams of going on cattle drives and sitting in the stands of rodeos. I couldn’t imagine that one day, just 15 years down the road, I’d drive through Monument Valley and live where I live now.

Life takes you in peculiar directions, doesn’t it?

The first real rodeo I went to took place at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds in Maryland, a good 45-minute drive from the White House. City slickers, suburbanites and the farm-raised crowd all gathered in the stands waiting for the bucking to start – and there I sat, staring at the moon, enjoying quietly reflective immigrant moment.

It didn’t matter that this particular rodeo was easily accessible by Metro train, or that the third floor, two-bedroom apartment I lived in at the time was just around the corner. It was still a rodeo. And I was very far from “the swamp” where I grew up.

Preview next week’s Home section, on KHQ-TV’s local news Saturday mornings. I’m on in the 8 o’clock hour.