Troublesome Creek

The ridges rise straight up like steep timber walls, blotting out the late afternoon sun hours before nightfall, and the mountain fog settles into the creek bottoms as thick as wood smoke.

Now, this is the country around Troublesome Creek and Ball Creek, a place where the hollers run deep, the kinships run deeper, and secrets have a way of sleeping undisturbed for generations beneath the hemlocks.

Now, back in the nineteenth century, outsiders just didn’t venture up into those rocky gaps.

There were no railroads cut through the hills, no coal company camps yet built, and the footpaths through the laurel thickets were known only to the folks who lived there.

Oh no.

Old mountain lore began to whisper of a cursed tribe living in the high hollers, creatures born of wood demons, unholy spirits that stalked the mist, or even folks afflicted with an ancient biblical mark of damnation.

Mothers down in the river settlements would warn their little ones not to stray past the mouth of Troublesome Creek after sundown, lest the blue folk of the hills snatch them away into the caves where the sunlight never reached.

The truth, as it often turns out in the high ridges of Appalachia, was rooted not in sorcery, but in the lonely, quiet tragedy of blood, isolation, and the wild earth.

Okay.

Are you going to bear with? So deep in the hills of eastern Kentucky lies a place called Troublesome Creek.

That's cool, isn't

it? I want to

live there.

I want to live there too.

And then we could go to Schitt's Creek for our holidays, wasn't there going to be? Troublesome Creek.

It's brilliant.