They were the last ones to leave the town (a semi-fictional story I wrote several years ago after visiting the Skeleton Coast of Namibia, in Southwest Africa)
Business in Namibia’s Skeleton Coast had been declining steadily over the past few years, as fewer and fewer diamond and gold panners in the nearby creeks had any luck. Most able-bodied men had already moved away, while some of the older and more stubborn folk and their kin had taken up fishing. For lack of pupils, the small local school had closed two years ago, and Sunday church services these days rarely attracted more than eight or 10 elderly people.
Jakob’s wife had been prodding him with increasing conviction to move out as well. She claimed the couple and their five children would have a better future settling eastwards, where her own brother owned 10 head of cattle and raised subsistence crops at the edge of the Kalahari Desert, which kept his family well-fed. Jakob, however, was an adventurer at heart and much preferred to live by the ocean and sand dunes than as a farmer dealing with the erratic bushland weather.
Ultimately, day-to-day life in their town became unbearable; as the fish catch dwindled because of the changing ocean currents and the town’s general store and the bakery closed, Jakob made up his mind to resettle. By the time they finally left, all the other townsfolk already had gone. There was barely enough hay left to feed the horses on the three-day journey inland, and the wife hastily baked a few loaves of bread, which—together with morsels of ham, cheese and dried codfish and a few kegs of beer—would willy-nilly sustain the family on their arduous journey.
The rusty horse-drawn carriage that led them away had little space for their meager belongings, besides the seven passengers and their satchels. From their cupboards and bedroom furniture, they managed to squeeze into their crumbling suitcases a couple of pots and pans, some raggedy clothes, and a handful of prized work tools retrieved from the disused shed.
The family woke up before sunrise to get a head start on their trip, before it became unbearably hot to cross the Namib Desert. With a full moon shining and the Southern sky brimming with stars, it was painful to trot past the main square and see all the shuttered buildings and stores. Weeds had already taken over the lawns, and the streets were starting to be covered by a thin film of sand dust from the nearby beaches. While the two older kids were eager to start a new life elsewhere and showed no regrets about moving, the younger ones cried hopelessly, grieving for the loss of their home territory, their playmates, and the loyal family dog buried in the back yard.
Several years later, Jakob and his older son came back to the area on a fishing trip in their brand-new 4x4 truck. He tried to go back to the cemetery behind the Lutheran church to visit his parent’s grave, but the whole town had been literally buried under the sand dispersed by the windswept dunes, though you could still recognize the church spire and the imposing water tower. Flocks of seagulls flew back and forth over the ghost town, and a few hundred yards from the coast you could still see the shipwrecks perennially washed by the ocean waves. On the beach, there were only a few like-minded sports fishermen displaying their fancy gear, while in the distance a herd of seals paraded playfully on the sand.
