At Dollywood

We tell ourselves stories about Dollywood in order to live during the 364 days a year that we’re not at Dollywood. The first time I saw the great mechanical arms of the Barnstormer, flinging sunburned parents and their children into the wide, blue Tennessee sky with the irrepressible vigour of a daredevil aviatrix, I knew that some part of me would never leave. There, amidst Granny Ogle’s Ham ‘n’ Beans and the Lumberjack Lifts, I made contact with a vision of America that never materialised. The skeletal wooden rides came out of the backcountry as if they had been placed there by some invisible hand with the intention of merging vomit-inducing rollercoasters and a cherry-coke daydream of America. Upon rounding Dollywood Parks Boulevard, I saw Tennessee as perhaps Dolly herself had seen it so many years ago, one made of town tramps, banjos, pink-carpeted bathrooms, and summer wine.

An interlude: before my eyes, a stream of red slushie rushes from the maw of a little old lady, narrowly missing the stripper heels of a day-drunk bride-to-be.

Miss Parton’s reverie suits me very well. Hickory House BBQ sandwich in hand, I gaze at a world that has never existed outside of a Chet Atkins ditty. I wonder what delights I will find in Dolly’s Tennessee Mountain Home, an exact replica of the singer’s childhood cabin. Yes, doilies and chintz are still a part of many an American household, but never in such a way as Dollywood envisioned it. And as I leave, a foot-long corn dog sitting uneasily in my stomach, I am seized with the peculiar feeling that, if I were to turn back, I would see nothing but untouched Appalachia, as if the whole enterprise was designed to delight me for a few brief moments. But I do look, and I see a little girl stick a tentative finger into a steaming pile of refuse outside of Doggywood, the park’s facility for visiting dogs, and I know that the moonshine-fueled dream  we all have, buried deep in our cowgirl hearts, will always exist somewhere in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.