Here, everyone’s working so hard to care for their families and keep their heads above water that, if they wasted time on the petty dramas, scandals and personal grudges that seem to define small towns in our nation’s imagination, they would not survive. Cold Creek is home to a quality of life we’re raised to aspire beyond, if we’re born privileged enough to have the choice. There have been some success stories, college graduates who moved on and found well-paying jobs in distant cities, but they tend to be the exception and not the rule. You live in Cold Creek because you were born here, and if you’re born here, you’re probably never getting out. It’s hard to imagine feeling trapped here. The sheer amount of space is humbling, almost divine. Its sunsets are spectacular: electric golds and oranges, pinks and purples, natural beauty unspoiled by the insult of skyscrapers.

Cold Creek is surrounded by a beautiful, uninterrupted expanse of land and sky that seem to go on forever. There’s a quiet to it that’s startling if you’ve lived your whole life in the city, like I have. In the summertime, a food bus comes with free lunches for the kids until school resumes, where they are guaranteed at least two subsidized meals a day. The highway out is interrupted by veins of dirt roads leading to nowhere as often as they lead to pockets of dilapidated houses or trailer parks in even worse shape.

From there lies a rural sort of wilderness. They take in students from three other towns.īeyond its main street, Cold Creek arteries out into worn and chipped Monopoly houses that no longer have a place upon the board. The rest have to look a town or two over for opportunity for themselves and for their children the closest schools are in Parkdale, forty minutes away. Cold Creek’s luckiest-the gainfully employed-work at the local grocery store, the gas station and a few other staple businesses along the strip. Population: eight hundred.ĭo a Google Image search and you’ll see its main street, the barely beating heart of that tiny world, and find every other building vacant or boarded up.

Sadie by courtney summer