Downtown Mill Creek offers a diner/gas station, the ubiquitous Family Dollar Store, an IGA Grocery, Liggett Hardware, the Post Office, a bank and three churches with billboards out front. On the day I arrive into town, one church broadcasts a spiritual uplift for all passers-by:
Let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God that is the fruit of our lips.
—Hebrews: 13-15
Turning off by the IGA, I wander down a country road labeled “Dead End.” Some fancy houses sit on hilltops then further along a thin macadam road diverges and wanders deeper into the hollow where an assortment of ramshackle mobile homes line the road, some looking abandoned yet flocks of chickens and tools left about suggest otherwise.
I park my Jeep at the edge of a small settlement and look for kids out playing or people on their porches. There’s a young girl on a porch with her father. As I approach, I say hello and ask if I can photograph. Her father eyes me with suspicion but says yes. His daughter, Hailee, around eight-years-old, poses for her photograph leaning seductively into the porch rail while her dad aims his phone at me taking a video. After three photos, I feel I am wearing out my fragile welcome and move on up the road where a man sits on his front porch. Brian agrees to a photo posing on his steps beside a wooden trellis of cut-out flowers. He wears thick jeans with bulky folds, a no-nonsense cut, giving a laborer freedom to move. He looks out at me shyly, perhaps wondering why on earth I want to take his photo.