Our first day on the road was rainy, dreary, and cold.  As we pulled out of our driveway, patches of snow and ice remained from the storm over 3 weeks earlier.  Even though we have promised ourselves we would take byways as often as possible on this trip, the heavy clouds meant we wouldn’t see much, so we took to the interstate instead.  Driving through southwest Virginia, we were traversing another part of our own history, including Botetourt County and Salem, where my parents had lived for over 20 years, and Fincastle, where we got married in 1977.  Off the highway, we headed down the winding road through the mountains and past struggling farms and dirt roads winding up into “hollers,” to Floyd, a place known for arts, alternative lifestyles, and music.  

Picking our way through puddles to the centerpiece of town, the Floyd Country Store, I had a moment of wondering why we were doing this.  But we left the dismal world outside and entered a warm, vibrant, and welcoming space, and my spirits lifted.  The Store is an old-timey general store meets tourist stop meets community gathering space.  We sat at a table eating comfort food while the Sunday afternoon “jam session” got set up, and then for the next several hours while two separate groups of local fiddlers, banjo players, guitarists, and bass players let loose and audience members got up and danced.  It was lively but not noisy, friendly but also a world unto itself.  The dancers were self-contained and stately as they moved their feet but not much else to the tunes they knew so well.  One fiddler would start toe-tapping and running the bow across the strings and somehow everyone else knew how to join in, how to add to the overall sound, and how to improvise on songs that it seemed the whole room but us knew in their bones.  Mountain music or bluegrass or hillbilly–doesn’t matter what it’s called, this is the essence of a traditional culture.  

Between the music at the Country Store and an open mic night later at a pizza joint, we walked around the funky, personality-filled town where we found some beautifully curated shops of fine art and crafts, and also some with tie-dyed everything and bulky hand-knitted hats with earflaps.  Floyd is a collage of authentic, deep tradition, plus a whole lot of quirky individualism.  We learned that the area has been called “the end times destination,” and that in the 1970s a lot of people moved in, bought land, and began to live alternative lifestyles of various kinds, from Christian communalism to homesteading and organic farming.  

In the few hours we spent in Floyd, we were fascinated by what seemed to be a community where culture and counterculture live together.  We wondered how it works below the surface—are there resentments and mistrust, or do the two somehow enrich each other?  We also wondered whether this type of community hidden away out of the American mainstream is indicative of something strong about our country, or is it an anomaly that is fun to visit but isn’t really who we are?  In any case, it was a good place to start our trip into the American South.