This was no tourist show, no siree, this was real-life rodeo. They take their rodeo seriously in Franklin, Tennessee. The audience was 100 per cent fully-paid-up, true-blue redneck, everyone dressed in cowboy hats and cowboy boots, blue jeans and red bandanas, arriving in their big pick-up trucks with their pint-size cowboy sons and mini-skirted cowgirl daughters.
We tend to be overly influenced by the US's self-image as confident superpower, economic giant and land of the free. But in many ways it is early days for the melting pot, as we were fast discovering. A pretty lady dressed in stars, stripes and spangles rode out on a pinto pony, carrying the biggest US flag you've ever seen, to start the show. She spoke through a radio mike to the audience, saying "Ah ahm Old Glowery" and explaining how hurt she (as the flag) had been by the US supreme court judgment that decided burning her was not an offence. She said the US supreme court could burn their judgment. She listed the US soldiers the flag stood for - Vietnam, Korea, Somalia.
A deep mutter of approval came from the attentive stands, where the audience stood, hands on hearts. And we hissed "don't snigger" at each other: the mood discouraged displays of scepticism.
After that, they got down to some more pedestrian insanity. Everyone knows what happens at a rodeo. Men ride on bulls and other men dressed as clowns distract the bulls when the riders fall off, or when they can't fall off because their hands have got trapped in the strap round the bull's belly. Steers get roped and tied up in seconds. Horses buck like crazy, flinging riders high in the air, chaps akimbo.
In real life, it's all far more strikingly dust-and-true-grit than you would assume from episodes of Dallas - far less a spectacle and far more an expression of Americanism, far more dependent on the approval and participation of the audience. It's very impressive.
It's as dangerous as it looks though, thanks to the incredible skill of the cowboys and the courage of the clowns (as well as a certain professionalism on the part of the bulls and the bucking broncos), nobody got seriously hurt except for a cowgirl whose horse fell and then wriggled on her when she was barrel-ridin'.
Everyone else seemed to be composed entirely of steel and stern stuff and other injuries were mostly of the bad bruising variety. One cowboy wrestled a steer into his crotch by mistake: pain radiated almost visibly from him but he just walked, bowlegged and blank faced, to the gate and swung himself up by his friends. None offered any comment.
Once the cowboys and cowgirls had done their stuff, the little injuns got involved. Small children - some still in nappies - poured into the arena, a peat-covered patch about twice the size of a football pitch, and lined up. Then someone let out two calves, each with $20 tied to its ear: first a little calf for the little children, then a bigger one for the older children. The whole gang hared after the beasts, twisting and turning like a shoal of fish. It didn't look very kind to the calves, and it didn't look easy on the kids either. But then, we hadn't come to Nashville for the scenery.
So the next night we went Nascar Racing - stock car racing, the sort featured in the Days of Thunder film, where a bank of cars races round a huge, canted track at 200 mph until they run into the wall, or one another. The noise is unbelievable, like having a 747 take off down your alimentary canal.
One of us (not me) wore a newly-acquired cowboy hat.
Big mistake. These were homeboys, not cowboys, industrial workers with baseball caps and cans and cans of beer (the rodeo had been held in a dry county, so everyone there drank cola and ate tortilla chips smothered in bright orange cheese substitute). We hid the stetson under the seat, hoping that as long as we kept our mouths shut and continued to look reasonably like everyone else, the large, loudly aggressive ladies in front of us wouldn't beat us to a pulp just for fun.
Although the majority of people living in Nashville are black, we saw only one black person in either place. Presumably rodeo and Nascar racing are white people's things. We wondered what were black people's things (and don't say church - everyone in Nashville goes to church, all the time) but nobody seemed able to enlighten us and the depth of self-segregation we discerned throughout the states of Tennessee and Georgia continued to mystify us.
But it wasn't all social comment and dangerous natives. We mixed it with the treacherous weather and the dangerous wildlife too and found that camping in an American wildlife park is not the same as setting up tent at Larch Hill.
Take poison ivy. I'd read about it in The Hardy Boys Mysteries, and gathered it was a bit like nettles but worse. Wrong. In fact, it's a bit like industrial acid, but worse. It leaves a kind of oil that doesn't wash out of your clothes - except in the sense that it can spread to your entire wardrobe in the washing machine. It can also blister your whole hand and just when you think it's healed, it can blister again.
Then there are the bears. You're not meant to leave rubbish out where the bears can get it, because that brings them poking around - and they can kill.
We asked the park ranger, a summer-job student who sold us trail maps for a few dollars, about bears. He said they mostly stayed in the mountains but that we should watch out for coyotes. And for snakes. "Don't put your haind ner yer foot where yer aah hasn't been," he warned. He meant look where you're going. Or leaning. Or what you pick up in the woods. Ugh.
Woodland camp sites are fitted out with latrines (which looked like a haven for enormous, deadly spiders) and some stones for round the fire. Wood can be gathered from nearby, preferably wearing disposable gloves.
That night we ate raw vegekebabs or charred sausages, according to personal attitudes to eating things with faces, then sat around the fire as the mom and pop of all thunderstorms drew in. Lightening illuminated the woods for 200 yards. The thunder was cacophonous - like being shut in a biscuit tin with a Lambeg drummer.
Mad, huge, monsoon-class raindrops crashed through the canopy - first one or two, then torrents. The humidity in the tents was about 100 per cent and they weren't very big, either - not for two people, two rucksacks and a 10-gallon hat. Outside, the rubbish hung limply from a tree. Playing at pioneers, we realised that, while Americans can be scary, sometimes it's blindingly obvious how they got that way.
Getting there
American Holidays in Pearse Street, Dublin estimates that, based on travel in low season, an average price for a package including return flights from Dublin or Shannon to Nashville, flying with Delta Air Lines via Atlanta or New York and staying five nights at the Doubletree Hotel on a roomonly basis, costs about £637 per person sharing, plus the usual extras of tax and insurance. Flights are daily with Delta Air Lines either via Atlanta or New York ex Dublin and Shannon