The Alliance Register

Small town newspapers are a great source for finding characters to write about. The following is a fictional conversation from 2019 with a person who appeared in the Alliance Register in 2021, a weekly publication from western Nebraska.

Hi. My name is Daniel Jacobs and I live at the end of the earth. I know, most people figure the end of the earth would be on some spit of land sticking out into the ocean, or at the north pole or something, but on a ball, anywhere can be the beginning or the end. And it just so happens that where I live is it. The end I mean. It would be nice to think we was the beginning too, but we ain't. Not by half. Merritt's so far away from everywhere that they haven't even bothered to put us on maps. The only way anyone even knows the name of our town is on account of we got a welcome sign. It says “Population 71”, but that number hasn't been updated in years. I reckon it ain't no one's job to count us, so no one does. A few years back, someone painted “Known But To God” on the bottom of the sign. It's still there, but mostly faded, so you'd have to know what it said to be able to really read it. I guess it's no one's job to paint over that either.

Every blue moon, someone from away will drive through town and stop for gas and directions back to civilization. They're all the same. They get out of their cars and stare at their cellular phones and then hold 'em up to the sky. Then they look at 'em again, like something coulda changed. But out here, nothing ever changes.

We used to have TV, back when you could sometimes pick up a station out of Omaha if you pointed your antenna just right. But then it all switched to cable and such. I heard you could get TV through satellites from outer space, but none of them companies wanna come out here to install it cuz then they'd have to maintain 'em. It ain't worth thirty bucks a month or whatever for them to drive all the way out here. Prolly cost them more in gas money. My mom says ain't nothing but trash on TV's nowadays besides. I don't miss it, I guess, since I never really had it. What fun is it sitting inside staring at a box anyway?

We got other entertainment. Not enough kids to put together proper teams or nothing, but we play two on two basketball. And the fishing's not bad at Dry Lake. And we got music. Velma's Diner's got a working jukebox that's got some pretty good tunes. Every so often, Velma'll swap out a record for something new and we'll all go down and play it over and over till she gets mad and unplugs it. The real fun, though, is trying to remember the song that got taken away, cuz it's usually something no one ever much listened to anyway, like something by the Shinelles or ShaNaNas or some such that was big when our parents was kids. Once, she got a new song that had a cuss word in it. She didn't even realize, but we could hear it, so we'd all scream it out loud when that part of the song would come on. She got mad about that too, and threw the record away.

I don't go to school no more. We don't got no place to go in town. We can go to Alliance for free, but they don't run a bus. I went for a while anyways, but it's hard in the winter cuz they aren't real good about plowing the roads. It's easy to get behind when you miss a couple a days. Plus, the kids in Alliance got a leg up anyway since they got a library and a couple of computers. I tried to use one of 'em once, but there wasn't no one there to show me how and I didn't wanna ask. My cousin moved away a few years back. He visits every so often for the holidays and says that everyone's using computers for everything nowadays. They even got this store called The Amazon where you can buy anything in the whole world. Only the store don't really even exist in real life, just in computers is all.

That reminds me of a paper I wrote about these tribes down in South America when I was going to class. They got people there that have never seen civilization and don't know nothing about any of us. They call them “uncontacted”. I wonder how long before we revert back to that? Gonna have anthropologists flying over our heads in helicopters in a few years, taking our pictures while we gawk and wave sticks at 'em.

I hope to be long gone by then, though. I reckon I can get a job driving trucks. Been driving tractors and combines and such since I was fourteen so how hard can that be? And you don't need to be good at using computers to do it, just read a road map. I gotta get me a proper license to do that, but I ain't worried about passing no tests. I got a 'knack' as my girlfriend says. She's a good girl. And we don't hardly fight, just when I talk about going away. We've been going steady since we was fifteen. She's been avoiding me the last few days, though. She's late. Her cousin says that happens from time to time and not to worry, but she's worried anyway. I guess I am too, though we've been real careful about pulling out. I'd use rubbers if I could, but ain't no where I could buy them around here. We got a local market that has 'em behind the counter, but I can't ask. They know me in there since my mom was wheeling me in in a carriage. Even got my picture on the wall from a Halloween when I was a little kid. They got lots of pictures up, but the one of me is in a bunny suit with big pink floppy ears. Mrs. Johnson still calls me “Wabbit” when I come in, cuz in how I said it back then. No way I could ask her for a box of rubbers. And you got to say what size you want? I'd like to die first.

My mom doesn't want me moving away neither. She says they need help around the farm and who else can they get to do it. But I reckon I could make enough money driving rigs to send them some and then they wouldn't have to work the farm no more. They're getting too old for that anyhow. So that's my plan.

Note: Here's the Alliance Register story that ran in June, 2021:

A single-car crash on route 93 claimed the life of Merritt native, Daniel Jacobs, aged 20, on Saturday morning, after his car left the road and struck a tree. He is survived by his mother Agnes, father Paul and a young daughter, age 2 named Mary. The date of the private service was not available at time of publication.