Captain’s Log — She Was Everywhere
I loved Dolly Parton before I understood why.
When I was growing up, she was simply everywhere. On the radio. On television. In movies. Singing songs you knew whether you owned the record or not. She was funny, glamorous, completely herself, and somehow never seemed far away.
9 to 5 is still one of the funniest movies ever made. I loved her in it then, and I love it now.
What I didn’t understand as a kid was how much of her world she had built herself.
I didn’t know how hard the road had been. I didn’t understand the businesswoman behind the rhinestones, or how unusual it was for a woman from where she came from to build something that large and keep ownership of herself while doing it.
I just knew I liked her.
And maybe that is what a role model does before you even know the words role model.
She showed a little girl that you could be feminine without being weak. Funny without being foolish. Poor without staying small. Ambitious without losing your heart. You could take where you came from with you instead of running from it.
Years later, James and I drove through Pigeon Forge with Prudence in the back seat. I snapped a picture as we passed the gates. I remember looking over and saying something like, “Come on. Two hundred and fifty dollars just for us to get through the gate?”
So we kept driving.
It was funny then.
It means something different now.
Because looking back at that photograph, I realize we were driving past a world somebody once had to imagine before it existed.
Jobs. Music. Books. Families on vacation. Kids seeing the mountains for the first time. People making memories. A ridiculous woman driving past with her husband and a giant black dog because she was too cheap to buy the tickets.
That world did not appear by accident.
She built it.
That realization became two songs.
The Busted Knuckle Boys came at it one way: what do you do when you make it through the hard road? You widen the road behind you.
Prudence, naturally, has a different concern.
She still wants into Doggywood.
And somehow that silly little song became something I didn’t expect. It became a thank-you from a dog who never met the woman who built the place, and from a grown woman who finally understands what the little girl watching television all those years ago could not.
I understand now.
She wasn’t only entertaining us.
She was showing us what could be built.
Thank you, Dolly.
And for the record, Prudence still thinks I should have paid the $250.
She may be right.
Steady light. Steady hum.
— Captain