Beyond

Past the edges of town, the land around Anchor Rock is untamed and inhospitable. When the farmers' goats find their way through a hole in the fence, it becomes an event, the scramble over rocky mountain terrain and dense thickets to bring the animals home to tidier pastures. While this won't stop the occasional rebellious teen setting their sights on striking out on their own into the wilderness, it certainly has them coming home fairly quickly—there simply isn't much worth striking out for.

It's not that the denizens of Anchor Rock don't know anything about what goes on beyond the edges of the town—they are living in the 21st century, after all. The phone lines and the library's computer keep the community loosely connected to the rest of the world during the stretches between the train's shipments of news that always comes in along with supplies. When major news does arrive in the town, however, it's not often met with much more than a raise of an eyebrow or contemplative “huh” and a knowing nod. After all, sporting matches won and lost, celebrities rising and falling, or even wars started or ended rarely have a tangible impact on this remote community.

This is not to say that the world beyond Anchor Rock isn't full of life and color or that what happens there isn't incredibly important, of course. Across the world, there are billions who have never heard of Anchor Rock because their own lives have given them neither desire nor cause to concern themselves with the goings-on of a tiny mountain town. Their lives are full of social networks large and small, movement about places near and far, and all the thousand other little joys and sorrows of modern existence. True, their cares and fears may at first seem strange to those locals who have only ever known life within the close embrace of Anchor Rock and its community, but there is undoubtedly an allure to the foreign and the unknown. What must it be like, living life in their shoes?