This is an extract from At Least It Looks Good From Space: A catalogue of modern, millennial and personal catastrophes by Carl Kinsella, published by Hachette Books Ireland.

IT WAS AN overcast, humid August day and the clouds rested eerily on the mountain range that ringfenced the town.

From above, I caught sight of a clapboard wedding chapel, a dozen restaurants, families making their way through the town in matching T-shirts, and a museum complex underneath a large sign that read: ‘Christ in the Smokies’.

My curiosity piqued, I reminded myself to remain safely within the confines of the cable car until I made it back to terra firma to investigate what exactly Jesus Christ had been up to in the Volunteer State. I love state nicknames, by the way. I think it’s the funniest thing in the world for whenever someone tells me they’ve been to some flyover state, the more anonymous the better, to go, ‘Ah yes, West Virginia: The Aloha State.’ Nobody finds this as funny as I do.

I guess I must have been trying to save money or something because I can’t for the life of
me think why I wouldn’t have paid the entrance fee into Christ in the Smokies. It’s a mystery to me, I’ve never been that type. I would say being easily parted from my money is one of my most core characteristics.

You can get $20 from me just by having a ponytail and bumping into me at a bus station. I just know that I didn’t see fit to pay in, and I regret it to this day. Though it’s since been demolished, Christ in the Smokies was, for all intents and purposes, a museum dedicated to the life and times of Jesus Christ, sitting at the foot of the Smoky Mountains in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

I did step into the foyer and take a long, hard look inside. When I strain my memory, I can remember a glass case protecting a range of ‘artefacts’ that, as far as I could tell, was just a community theatre-costume department approximation of the kinds of cloth Jesus might have worn or coins that sort of looked like coins he might have used.

I’m pretty sure Christ in the Smokies didn’t have the budget to house any of the real shit from Aramaic times. Especially if not even a schmuck like me was paying entry. What stood out to me more than anything else was one of those seaside amusement
cardboard cutouts – you know, the ones where you put your face in a round hole and it looks like you’ve got the body of a Viking or a cow or the Dalai Lama. This place had one of those, except the hole you could put your face in belonged to the body of a Roman guard who was apprehending Jesus. Sort of seems like that’s the last person any God-fearing Christian would want to be in that situation, but okay. At least Judas and Pontius Pilate had some characterisation.

I spent two full days in Gatlinburg, wandering through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and listening to ‘Wichita Lineman’ on repeat because Glen Campbell had just died.

There were signs all over the park warning visitors not to get any closer than 50 feet to a
bear, which I always enjoyed because, if I’m 50 feet from a bear, whether or not that distance narrows is going to be entirely up to the bear. After about two hours of walking and the realisation – which I had failed to pre-emptively google – that the park was 522,427 acres in size, I decided to make the two-hour trek back to town. It was rapidly becoming clear to me that you can travel the South without much money, and you can travel the South without doing any planning, but you can’t really do both at once.

That evening I stopped into a large moonshine emporium – the Ole Smoky Distillery – closer in aesthetic to a Body Shop than an off-licence. They were using the word ‘moonshine’ but it wasn’t like some drifter selling moonshine out of a train car. Though that would have been cool. No, it was an enormous glossy operation, where I paid tax at the till and got a receipt for my two 70cl shoulders of the strongest moonshine I could find. It seemed like a fitting souvenir from that part of the world, and I stuffed the bottles into the bottom of my travel backpack, underneath layers of clothes and towels and whatever electronics I could carry.

On my last day before moving on from Tennessee to North Carolina, I decided I would calm my nerves with a trip to Dollywood: the Dolly Parton-themed theme park. Parton had long been a hero of mine, since the first time I heard ‘Jolene’ on the cassette tape of country classics my father would play in the car whenever we drove down to see his family in Wexford. It was a stellar playlist – ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’, ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’, ‘Achy Breaky Heart’, and a whole bunch of Nanci Griffith, may she rest in peace. This was before the memeification of Dolly Parton had truly taken off in earnest, but even then she was probably regarded at large as one of the most beloved, least polarising people on the planet. She stood for things like giving books to children, choice feminism and being one of the greatest songwriters and performers of her generation.

I was soon to learn, however, that the town built around Ms Parton’s theme park has a sick secret. Since I’d already checked out of my motel and I’d be boarding a fresh Greyhound bus right after my Dollywood visit, I’d been forced to keep my bottles of moonshine in the bottom of my backpack. As I made for the park’s security check, I hadn’t even been thinking about them. I only really remembered they were there when a short, bald security guard with a small white plaster that didn’t fully cover the cut on his cheek curtly asked me to take every item out of the backpack. This instinctively struck me as excessive, though in hindsight one can see why this would be necessary, what with America’s … area-specific problems. When I removed the two bottles and gave a sheepish shrug, the mood soured quickly.

‘Sir, you’re lucky you’re not spending the night in county jail,’ he told me in a thick southern accent and without much ceremony. I had only ever dealt with Orlando-grade theme-park staff before. I had never been spoken to this way. My heart was racing in that moment. Was he joking? I’ve never understood the wink-nudge humour of the man’s man over-fifties demographic. I believed I had a trump card, a trump card I may share with you.

And so I stood tall and spoke the words.

‘I’m sorry, sir. I am Irish. I have no idea what’s going on.’

Naturally, I can’t remember exactly how I formulated the phrase, but it was something along the lines of I am Irish, not only can I not be expected to know the rules, but now that you understand I am Irish, I also expect to be exempted from whatever bullshit rules I didn’t learn in the first place, now get out of my fucking way so I can meet Dolly Parton.

For the first time in my life, maybe for the first time in history, it didn’t work.

‘Son, you’re lucky I’m not calling the sheriff right now,’ he said, effectively ruling out any
double-down I might attempt on the old shamrock card. Not only that, but he was leaning even harder into this whole ‘night in the county jail’ bit, which, given my paranoid predisposition, was causing me to panic quite badly. What was I to do? What was the protocol for a situation like this?

I thought about the kind of people who travel in groups, the kind of people who plan their trips, the kind of people who book their accommodation before they get to Christ in the Smokies and don’t develop a mortal distaste for cicadas because they don’t like the vibe of the only one they’ve ever met. How would someone like that get out of this jam? Do I make a run for it? I don’t kill him, do I?

In that moment, I believe my tongue was a little tied up as my brain tried to process what this man was telling me. It briefly occurred to me to say something clever that would probably make him kick the shit out of me, like, ‘On what charges?’ or to simply ask him, ‘Sir, can you please explain to me why on earth I would be going to jail for inadvertently bringing these bottles of moonshine into Dollywood?’

Those questions seem, in hindsight, pretty reasonable. Instead, I withered under his
wraparound sunglasses stare, feeling like Cool Hand Luke under the pitiless gaze of Boss
Godfrey, and I told him apologetically that I would get rid of the bottles. He gave me no
indication whatsoever that my concession pleased him, which was his right. I had broken the law, apparently, or at least some very strange moral code that this man adhered to. But if you know what kind of man I am, you know I’d never put two bottles of moonshine before a lady, and especially not a lady like Dolly Parton, and besides, I’d already spent $70 on the ticket.

Mooching outside the entrance gates, I was struck by a moment of divine inspiration. I
hurried over to the lost-and-found kiosk and held up a bottle in each hand like I was trying to get the party started in a 2000s music video. I asked the woman behind the counter if she could just sort of, you know, pretend that I lost the bottles, before reclaiming them at the end of the day. The old lost-and-found con. The woman behind the counter, old and small, took one of the bottles from me and examined it before telling me she couldn’t be liable for it.

I nodded, though I didn’t really understand. Liable? County jail? Sheriff’s office? Why do
these people keep saying these things? After spending ten months in New York, the last six of which had been taken up mostly with freaking out about the consequences of sending mail or touching off the poles on the subway, was I about to be brought down on bootlegging charges?

I sat forlornly on the kerb until the back of my neck started to burn, wondering if there was any obvious place I could stash my moonshine. Holding on to the drink had stopped
seeming worth it quite a while ago. I cut my losses and placed both bottles carefully in a bin, and while I had no real intention of fishing them back out later on, I did take a mental note of where the bin was just in case I changed my mind.

In a show of goodwill, I returned to the security queue and made sure I was in the same line again, so I could repair my relationship with the man who’d threatened to turn me in mere moments earlier. When I got to the front, I smiled like a coward, saying, ‘I got rid of the bottles’ and stood there like I was waiting for a hug from a father who hated me.

His mood did not soften.

‘You better have,’ he told me, and he watched on, impassive as the sun, while I took
everything I’d brought south with me out of my backpack yet again. He said nothing this
time, so I said, ‘I can go in?’

He nodded yes, though at the time I couldn’t help but wonder if it was some kind of ploy on his part. Now, he knew exactly where I was. Now, when the cops showed up it would be like shooting fish in a barrel.

As I entered the park, I called my mother to explain the situation. She wasn’t relieved to hear my voice this time.

I think that, up until that point, I had done a relatively good job of concealing my precipitous decline from her. By now, I was unable to plug my laptop into hotel sockets to charge for fear my thoughts would be read, my private conversations leaked, my innermost secrets used against me somehow.

Staring at any one thing or any one person for too long triggered waves of deep paranoia. I would hold receipts in my hand for hours, unable to let go of anything that had touched my person. Before I checked out of any accommodation I would take videos, dozens of minutes long, in which I would record every nook and cranny of the room in case I’d left anything behind.

I have always been impressed by how well my mother listens to me talk about things that aren’t actually a big deal as if they are about to cause my sudden and total destruction, if not the destruction of our family and the world at large. In all my years of freaking out over imaginary medical issues, non-existent threats to my person, the fears that I have contaminated others with diseases I don’t have, she has never once said, ‘Oh no, what are we going to do?’ She has never once wavered. She knows I’m not quite right, and she’s smart enough to never be taken in by the same fears that consume me.

She was patient as ever in listening to me spell out my delusion that I was about to be lifted off the streets of Tennessee and God only knew what would happen after that. Gently, she suggested that maybe my mind wouldn’t go to such places if I didn’t insist on travelling alone. Constructive. Boring. Correct. Unhelpful. I thanked her for her counsel and when I hung up I stayed on my phone to google what the story was with moonshine in Tennessee.

Is moonshine illegal in …? Is liquor illegal in …? As it turned out, when I had taken the trolley from Gatlinburg to Pigeon Forge, I had crossed from a normal town into a dry town. Indeed, I found out that Tennessee as a state is dry by default, and that its municipalities have to opt out. Technically, Sevier County, where Pigeon Forge (and Dollywood) is, is what’s legally known as a ‘moist county’. You can get beer at the store and bring it home, and you might, if you’re lucky, be able to get spirits at a restaurant, but probably not.

There was nothing to suggest that I’d be clapped in ankle-irons for being in possession of the liquor, so I came to the conclusion that the security guard with the cut on his face had been trying to scare me, but the joke was on him – I was already scared.

As I wandered the park, I let the incongruent unreality sync up before me, the sun putting new freckles on my arms.

It may suggest a rather deep sickness of the soul, but I feel at home in the opiate and saccharine safety of a theme park.

From the corner of my eye, I saw a band of stage performers dressed like The Lumineers playing banjos and doing some kind of do-si-do move in front of a crowd of pleased elderly onlookers. A distant scream emanated from some unseen rollercoaster. Walking there, I noticed a family of many children, all with matching blue shirts and bowl haircuts and I assumed this was some sort of religious sect or social subset that I wasn’t familiar with.

Nobody else seemed to be staring. Between me and them was another man, with his back to me, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan: Tennessee moonshine! It’s only illegal if you get caught. I wondered about my moonshine in the bin outside, whether it was still there.

This, all of this, was the reason I’d come to Tennessee, I told myself. Whether or not it lived up to my expectations was beside the point. I thought about how my mother had sounded when she’d answered the phone that first time I’d called her from Myrtle–Wyckoff. Proud, maybe.

The familiar smell of benzene rose from the asphalt and I breathed it in and thought I’d better try to remember this. Then I made my way to the lockers to get the straps of my recently lightened backpack off my sunburned shoulders for a while.