The last time I drove coast to coast in the US was fifteen years ago, on a 1975 BMW R90S motorcycle that I had restored in Santa Cruz, going west to east. On that trip, or any of my previous trips cross-country it would never, ever have occurred to me to go to Dollywood.

But Egon, as it turns out, is a fan of Dolly Parton, and we are now in the Dolly’s native Great Smoky Mountains between North Carolina and Tennessee, within striking distance of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, where Dolly Parton has a theme park called Dollywood.

I am a Yankee not a Good Ol’ Boy, and never had any sense for country music before. As a kid I actually found southern culture somewhat alien, with its culture of honor and glorification of chaos (“Raisin’ hell”). As a kid I also always identified with the indians, never the cowboys. It might be fun to watch cowboys shoot each other in the movies once in a while, but I never liked them, and off the open range, a cowboy hat looked clownish to me.

I had dismissed Dolly Parton without actually paying any attention to her. But Egon set up a playlist, putting Dolly Parton in the context of Lee Hazelwood, Sanford Clark, and other country music, and I had to admit it was pretty good. So with some trepidation on my part, we aimed our great black ship of the highways toward Pigeon Forge, the backwoods part of Tennessee where Dolly Parton grew up, the fourth of twelve children of a dirt poor tobacco farmer.

The place is scary. There is a vast parking lot and a train of carts pulled by a van takes you from the parking area to the gates, while the driver cracks corny jokes over the intercom. Inside there are swarms of overweight southern families waddling around in brightly colored clothes, junk food in one hand and camera in the other. The theme of the park is a sanitized glorified version of old backwoods Tennessee, where everything is homemade and rickety and jury-rigged. There are food stands everywhere and various roller coasters and water rides and other amusements and lots of shops selling hideously tacky handicrafts. There are also stations where masters of lost crafts demonstrate them for the public, such as carving a bowl from a piece of wood, or squeezing molasses from stalks of sorghum, or sand casting. They do this dressed in nineteenth-century garb. Everyone in the entire park is white.

Not only that but they are Christian. Christian themes are prominently on display, and what’s more, it happens to be Gospel Week and there are busloads of people here just for that. They all get all of their clothing at Wal Mart. Our clothing style, on the other hand, blended in perfectly in New York but here we look absurdly misplaced, like two turds in a punch bowl. We go about our business and check out the rides, but we are attracting some skeptical glances.

The best ride is an insanely great roller coaster called the Wild Eagle, newly opened this year. You are sent through a huge swarm of wasps at the top of the first rise before plummeting into two and a half minutes of crazy adrenaline charged madness. At several points you are sure that you are about to be decapitated by trees.

Egon and me at Dollywood