Creeker

I want, at the outset to differentiate between those Appalachians who grow up in the towns and those from rural areas—the creeks and the hollers… This is a story from rural Appalachia, recently brought to consciousness, and reported by a creeker.

But at my alma mater in West Virginia, we had a unique "Us & Them" sorting classification: you were either a “hiller” or a “creeker.”

Children of the old Vikings, or "Creekers", they took, in their great need, to the seaward and the estuaries, as other conquered races take to the mountains, and died, like their forefathers, within scent of the salt sea from whence they came.

Wick, a creek or bay - Ipswich, Greenwich, Berwick. (Viking = a creeker.)