This is, without a doubt, the most amazing town we’ve visited so far. It’s not just that it’s up in the mountains, where the air is clear and the clouds are so close you feel like you could catch one with a ladder and a net on a pole; nor is it that the place is filled with bluegrass shops, head shops, street performers in every imaginable genre of music, writing shops that sell quill pens and fountain ink and used bookstores that sell the sort of locally printed indie anarchist pamphlets that my Greenwich Village forefathers read and which I thought had mostly died out. It’s not downtown is a place that seems to go far, far out of its way to appeal to bohemian creative types of all stripes, and that the people wandering that downtown area are warm and friendly and atypically attractive.

What really gets me is that all these people talk to each other. Not just to smile and nod while passing one another on the street, but to actually stop and have miniature conversations as if to say, hey, we’re all friends here, even if we’ve only just met two minutes ago. When we were looking for a place to park the bus downtown, Peter and I stumbled into a woodshop with a big garage and asked the guy who worked there if he knew a spot to park; a couple hours later, we’re parked right in front of his shop, there’s a circle of chairs in front, and we’re jamming on three guitars, a mandolin and a tenor sax with Andy and his friends.

The thing that makes Asheville so amazing is that it’s, in the words of one resident, “the most eclectic place in America.” It’s got the whole crazy, bohemian vibe that people associate with, say, Greenwich Village in the ’60’s, but the fact that it’s surrounded by hundreds of miles of the middle of nowhere and on the top of a mountain in what was, up until very recently, a red state mean that it’s still, to some extent, a hidden treasure. This is what’s saved it so far. New York City’s status as one of the cultural capitals of the world means that the counterculture there leaves a big footprint, and the great corporate image manufacturers of America get to appropriate the style without the substance, broadcasting a sort of twisted funhouse-mirror image back unto itself until all the oxygen and vibrancy has gone out of it and you get the strange hybrid that is the New York City hipster undergrad, racing to set and abandon trends before American Apparel appropriates them but without the ideological/philosophical foundation that made the youth countercultures of bygone days–the beats, the hippies, the punks, etc.–so much more than miniature, alternative churches to a different kind of consumerism.

It’s very likely that, as Asheville grows in stature, the same thing could happen there. But for now, at least, it’s small and indiscreet enough that it functions as the thing which I didn’t totally believe America had anymore: a real artist’s community which seems to have come about organically instead of being packaged and sold.