Floyd, VA

There is a place where mountain men and musicians mingle on a picturesque city street. There is a place where hippies and hillbillies inhabit the same space in a cultural melange that defies stereotypes. There is a place where both your incense and your overalls are welcome.

That place is Floyd, Virginia.

While on our four-day rest last week in the Blue Ridge mountains of western Virginia, we accepted the advice of the guidebook in our cottage and drove half an hour to the wee village of Floyd. There, we were told, is where the nearest coffee shop that also hosted wireless internet service. (When your days of rest include the composition of blog entries, you can't abstain totally from the internet!) Floyd is a gorgeous hamlet of pioneer-style storefronts surrounded by rural hills and forest. And every Friday night in this nestled corner of Appalachia, the main street hosts a jamboree. Everybody brings his or her banjo, guitar, dulcimer, and voice to share with the neighbours in a street-long bluegrass jam.

So we decided to check out the Friday night scene. After the requisite web work and a satisfying supper of Mexican food (real Mexican, served by people speaking Spanish, as it was meant to be), we walked through the renovated 19th-century building at the end of downtown Floyd and onto the street. Passing the storefront next to the Mexican restaurant, we got a good dose of patchouli in the nose. Inside the store hung the bright colours of flowery skirts, beads, and tie-dyed tops.

We walked down the sidewalk and took a seat on a newly-fashioned concrete bench--part of the effort to renovate and gentrify the whole of Floyd. Just after we sat down, a gentleman pulled up his beat-up red pickup truck to park in front of us. The bed had a couple of garbage bags and a muddy house fan reclining in it. The driver got out of the truck and revealed himself to be a large, rotund man wearing grungy overalls, long yellowish hair and a long white beard.

Now, I'm not a really seasoned veteran of Appalachia, but I know a hillbilly when I see one. And he walked past us to the storefront from which we had just emerged. Perhaps he went to buy a lava-lamp or those stones that tell you what your mood is?

A glorious place, Floyd: If the hillbillies and the hippies can live together, perhaps there is hope for the human race. You too can find it, tucked back in the woods of western Virginia.

~ emrys