All Summer Long

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And we were trying different things
We were smoking funny things
Making love out by the lake to our favorite song
Sipping whiskey out the bottle, not thinking 'bout tomorrow
Singing Sweet home Alabama all summer long

“Mansur, Chippewa County, Michigan, USA. Never heard of it? Yeah, we didn’t expect you to have. No one has. Except the 489 people stuck here. Well, not all of us are stuck. The old people seem to enjoy the quiet, which is the reason we, the teenaged residents, hate it. Our parents call it quiet, we call it empty.”

Mansur is a small town, 25 miles southwest of the nearest big city, Sault-Sainte-Marie. Twenty-five miles, and I’m stuck here. That’s a common saying between the small group of high school students in Mansur.

Mansur Junior and Senior High, which is just the fancy way of saying “Our town is too small so the middle school and high school are in the same building.” Founded along with the town in 1963, it’s the cause of much of the local teens strife. They spend 9 months of the year with the same 30 students they have gone to school with since kindergarten, associating slightly with the other grades. Serving roughly 180 students, grades 6 to 12, Mansur J & S High barely meets state standards for a school. Barely, but it still does.

30 kids in one grade, 180 in a whole school. Mansur is the definition of small town. And nothing ever happens in a small town. Never. Every kid just floats through the year, dreaming about getting out, taking solace in the stories of their friends’ older siblings that moved away. They just go along, doing what they can. Seeing movies at the PixelPlex, even though they came out in real cities six months ago. Going to the beach, even though the water is too cold to ever swim in. One bar in town, the owners so old they don’t care or even notice the underage. The few with cars go to S.S.M as often as they can, but that’s still not often. Maybe once a month. No one has the money to buy a car, since nearly every penny they earn is being saved for their bus ticket out of here at 18.

Someone new moving in always send ripples through the community. But it doesn’t happen often. And when it does, it’s normally an old couple with nothing better to do but live in a tiny old town and wait to die. But Summer came. No, not the season, but it was at the end of the school year. Summer Greeley, seventeen, was relocated to Mansur. Sent to live with her father, Peter Greeley, owner of the only bank in town, for reasons unknown. And she was the only interesting thing in town.

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She was seventeen and she was far from in-between
It was summertime in Northern Michigan

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