They came to Floyd to get back to the land, to be alone, to find community, or to make music. They fit in here because they didn’t quite fit in anywhere else.
Here the counterculture met the mountain culture and something unique was born.
The two lifestyles had something in common, lack of money. The locals wanted it but didn’t have it. The newcomers with the tie-dyed shirts didn’t care much about the dollar _ some despised it _ but, like everyone else, they had to pay the bills.
So together they took something ancient and made it new. It worked, and still does, like this: I’ll do this for you if you give that to me. The practice is bartering, defined as trading goods or services with no money involved.
Today the barter system courses through Floyd, an Appalachian town that still attracts people who are off the beaten path in life.
At Dr. Susan Osborne’s Barter Clinic, people have brought in firewood, meat and soap to trade for her medical services.
In Floyd, goods tend to be bought the usual way, with cash. But trade has its place.
A man dropped by the Harvest Moon natural foods and exotic gifts store, worked for 15 minutes on the grounds, and claimed a few croissants as payment the next day. “He’ll show up for our smoothie test run,” said Tom Ryan, who runs the two-story, cedar-planked store with its founder, his wife, Margie.
Out in the country, Dawn Shiner and her family spend a day helping a farmer cut or bale hay, in return for taking all the hay they need back home to their garden, and work at a market for the five pounds of almonds she wants for baking.
And when Erika Johnson and her husband wanted to open a restaurant and music place downtown, they got the space by offering the seller a $2,000 worth of food and drink at their place, Oddfellas. Payment in full.
Many oddfellas inhabit these hills. Scores of artists have been drawn to a town where many people can’t afford what they create. Noses are pierced, a new generation of Earth Shoes is sold. On the other side, the old-time corner hardware store sells Red Flyer wagons and a country store hosts a Friday night bluegrass jamboree.
Political extremes tap toes to the same tunes.
“It used to be very rugged,” Ryan said of relations between the farmers in overalls and the alternative crowd. “Now there’s an across-the-board general tolerance.
“The locals have gotten older. The alternative people have gotten older. There’s less to fight over.
“The Chamber of Commerce,” added Ryan, a ponytailed vice president of the group, “is an interesting mix.”
Economists believe informal commerce, including bartering, baby-sitting, lawn mowing and unreported moonlighting, make up at least 6 percent and even as much as 20 percent of the national economy, according to an analysis done for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. And that doesn’t count criminal transactions.
In Floyd, as anywhere else, money still drives the bulk of commerce.
But in 2002, Floyd took the leap and created its own labor-based currency, the Floydian Scrip, also known as Floyd Hours, inspired by a pioneering effort in Ithaca, N.Y. Two denominations were printed on recycled denim _ a note that valued one hour of labor at $10, and one that valued 15 minutes of labor at $2.50.
In theory, a customer could pay for groceries with a $10 Floyd note. The store could use that note to pay for an hour’s worth of service from an electrician. The electrician could then take the note to the local masseuse for a rubdown. And so on.
In practice, it didn’t turn out that way.
Stores found their registers stuffed with blue notes they couldn’t pass on. Margie Ryan took up to $500 worth of scrip but was hard-pressed to use it. “Once my building’s built, I don’t need carpentry anymore,” she said.
Without universal acceptance, a local currency breaks down at the weakest link.
And it turned out that informal bartering, a natural development of the hardscrabble economy and the freethinking newcomers, didn’t lend itself so well to a formal structure.
“It’s like trying to keep track of karma,” said Kalinda Wycoff, 56, running the Blue Mountain Mercantile store and selling the wares of artists and craftsmen.
Now the Floyd scrip is a conversation piece, accepted as partial payment at best in a few places.
Resourcefulness pays off here. “It depends on your skills and how much drive you have,” Wycoff said. “Your beliefs create your reality.”
A native Virginian, she was drawn here by the way people pitch in, whether it’s a roof-raising event in the community, the parent-run school or the barter.
Johnson moved here at age 5 from Michigan, her parents part of the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s. She grew up in a house down a mile-long road with no electricity or an indoor toilet. They grew much of their own food.
“Floyd was an energy spot,” Johnson said, stopping in a coffee shop to hand out flyers for FloydFest, the multicultural music and arts festival she created with her husband.
Now she lives in that house with her husband Kris and their two children. They have power but still no toilet. Her kids hear the same whippoorwill calls she heard as a girl.
Shiner, born in Massachusetts, settled here on three dirt-cheap acres and lives in a trailer with her handyman husband and 18-year-old son. She was the driving force behind the scrip, and still barters with enthusiasm.
Her ethos: “Minimum amount of money, maximum amount of good everything else.”
