I have a plastic snow globe from Dollywood, Dolly Parton’s theme park in Tennessee. I bought it on my first visit, several years ago. The base is black and emblazoned with the word Dollywood in red, the “W” transformed into a butterfly in flight. On one side of the snow globe is a grist mill, on the other is a church, and there are pink flowers in the lower left-hand corner of each side. I keep the snow globe on the windowsill in my kitchen, so the grist mill and the church have faded in the sun. These are both real places at Dollywood: reproductions of the countless churches and grist mills that used to populate, or still populate, the Great Smoky Mountains beyond the theme park. The sticker on the bottom reads ITEM NO: GRIST MILL 00193 44084 RETAIL PRICE $4.99 MADE IN CHINA. It is not a valuable object, not in terms of money. And it is both of and not of Dollywood; it is a mass-produced souvenir from China. This is not my only souvenir from Dollywood. I also have several fridge magnets, the tickets from each of the three times I have gone, a shot glass, a Dolly ornament, a mug, a key ring, and a mock-old-fashioned sepia-toned photo of my friend Amanda and me dressed as saloon girls. I also have a thimble, although I found the thimble at an antique store and not at Dollywood. It was, at some point, someone else’s souvenir. I turn my snow globe back over and watch the snow fall. It is a hot June day in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and I’m standing just inside Dollywood, looking over a large, cartoonish map. This is my third trip here, and I remember the park’s geography pretty well, but I still need the map. I like going to Dollywood in the summer because Dollywood feels like summer. I can hardly imagine it existing in the winter, apart from Christmas. When the park celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2015, I went that summer — my dog Millie spent the day at Doggywood, the park’s “Kennel and Pet Cottages.” And my first trip was with Amanda, a couple of summers before that. It’s a pretty drive from where I live in Winston-Salem, in central North Carolina. You head up into the mountains toward Asheville and through Cherokee, along the Oconaluftee River into Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where you might see elk grazing in meadows. Or a bear. Although Dollywood feels familiar to me now, it is still a little overwhelming. But anything associated with Dolly Parton is likely to be overwhelming. |
