Runaway Amish Girl

by Emma Gingerich

  §

  The endless flatness and tropical palm trees of South Texas whooshed by as I approached the college. After I arrived at the school and sat in the classroom, I wondered if my head was going to crack from all the information I now had to retain. When I read the letter from Sarah and Amanda, I wished they were here with me, but not so we could steal any more trucks. I wanted them here so we could take this journey together. I had left the Amish with a very poor eighth-grade education and I did not speak much English, only German. Now I suddenly found myself attending college full time less than two years after I had left. Talk about culture shock! But instead of letting my childhood memories go, they are now more vivid than ever with each step I take to better myself. However, I am constantly reminded of my sisters who are still back home with a future determined only by a repressive tradition stretching out before them.

  Chapter 2:

  Babies Come from Airplanes

  Nothing ever goes away until it teaches

  us what we need to know.

  ~Pema Chodron~

  If only people could see where I came from, they would understand how petrified I was to leave the Amish, the only life I ever knew, and transition into “English” life. The culture shock was bigger than I had imagined. There are many different groups of Amish; my family is from the “Swartzentruber Amish,” which is a group of the least modern and uneducated Amish people on the planet. They are sometimes referred to as the knuddle-rollas (dirt-rollers). They got the nickname because they take a bath only on Saturday nights, and sometimes not even that often.

  Even though Amish have a problem with hygiene, their clothing style is very meticulous and has to be followed to the point. I always thought women were required to cover up way more than necessary, but since I liked to push against the rules, it probably seemed much worse to me.

  Women are not allowed to cut their hair, but are required to wear it under a bonnet that covers the ears. They have to fix their hair into a bun and wear a black or white cap (depending on the age) completely covering every strand. The white cap is worn after a girl turns fifteen; before that age they wear a black cap during the week at home. For weddings and funerals, every girl and woman wears a white cap. For regular church services, only the married women wear a white cap and the girls wear a black one. It gets a little confusing to understand all the different ways to wear a cap, but it is a major essential for Amish women, who are required to wear a cap at all times, except while sleeping.

  There is only one style of wearing hair among Amish women, and that bears very little improvement from generations ago. Their hair is parted exactly in the middle and combed smoothly down toward the back, where a dark-colored cloth band is started and carried around on each side, then their hair is gathered into a bun right in the middle of the head in the back with the band interwoven in the hair and tied. Bobby pins are used to hold the hair up. Some women get a bald spot where those bobby pins have been stuck in place for years.

  The one thing that annoyed me the most about clothing was the dresses. They are long, dark-colored, and have to be long enough to reach down to the ankles with no exceptions. To make things worse, no buttons are allowed on the dresses; only straight pins can be used to keep it in proper place. However, girls under age nine can use buttons. Pins can hurt if not used properly. I pricked myself a million times!

  Men are required to wear dark-colored pants with suspenders and a dark-colored shirt, and they are allowed to use hooks and eyes in place of buttons and zippers for the pants and jackets. Their shirts have buttons, though. Men really have it nice: no sweaty hands trying to put pins in place, no long hair to wash and fix up, no baby to carry in the womb every year. I always thought it would be just as fair if the men had to use straight pins, too, instead of buttons.

  The men cut their hair in a Dutch-boy style, and there are a few rules when it comes to men’s haircuts: they cannot have it so short that their ears show, and their bangs cannot be too short either. They only wear a brimmed hat while outside working, otherwise they do not need to keep their head covered like women do. If they are married, men wear a full beard with no mustache.

  Even though the Amish uniform is old-fashioned, impractical, and uncomfortable, they would never consider becoming more modern because they believe it is disrespectful to their ancestors.

  I remember outsiders and other modern Amish groups making fun of us, making me feel insecure; I reacted by pretending I was someone else and by becoming rebellious. The strict rules left me no room to breathe, which made me lash out in ways I otherwise would not have. I often thought I had a special privilege to break the rules, which happened most often when I was around Eli and his friends. My attitude became “I can do this or I can do that and the law won’t touch me because I am Amish.” This imagined privilege is why I felt so confident taking the truck for a ride. It was my way of being rebellious without caring about the consequences, as well as a way of escaping who I really was. At the time, I did not feel any remorse or guilt for my actions. I thought it was a cool thing to do, and so did my sisters, once the fear of getting caught passed.

  When I look back on the stolen truck event now, I cannot believe I left the house that night, abandoning four little children while they slept. I remember walking towards the house in the darkness hoping the baby was not crying. If the Byler’s knew the sly side of me, they would never have hired me in the first place. Or if my parents had known what thoughts played in my head, they would never have let me out of their sight. I was not a very good role model for my sisters.

  My parents expected me to be a good role model when I stayed home from school to babysit. I was only eight years old then, in third grade, a very common age to take on that responsibility. Mem and Datt would take the youngest baby with them, but would leave three or four young ones for me to care for, including a one-year-old toddler. They went grocery shopping or to the flea market. Even though they would only be gone three or four hours, it felt like an entire week.

  Staying inside the big white three-story farmhouse scared me, so I would take everyone outside to play. I always heard creepy noises in the house even though it was brand new. The house had four bedrooms upstairs, and the main floor contained the master bedroom along with a big living area, kitchen, and pantry. We used the basement for general storage and a place to stock canned goods.

  I felt better outside, but I would make everyone hide behind the house or a tree whenever a vehicle drove by. One day a car pulled over and stopped in front of the house. It was a small golden brown station wagon, and to me it looked like the type of car a kidnapper would use. Friends had warned me there were two types of vehicles to watch out for: a station wagon, and any vehicle with an open sunroof. We all scurried into the house, locked all the doors, lowered the window blinds, and waited for over an hour until the car left. What a relief—we had not been kidnapped! I sequestered the little ones indoors for the rest of the day in case the car came back.

  I always tried to be the brave one at home, and since I was the oldest of the girls, I was expected to be courageous. Sometimes my parents would visit the neighbors in the evening during the week. When they left, I took care of the kiddos. It scared me to be the one in charge when it started to get dark, so I would stand on the porch and yell as loud as possible, hoping Mem and Datt would hear me. In Ohio, before we moved to Missouri, we had neighbors all around us, but the neighbors my parents visited that evening lived about two miles away. My hollering never did any good; they came home when they were ready, not when I was.

  Not only was I scared of the dark, I was also horrified when thunderstorms or tornadoes rolled through. It was not the storms I feared, but rather that one of the children would get too close to the chimney and stove. My parents had warned me that people died from standing or sitting too close to the chimney during a storm. We would even keep our dogs from hiding in this area, and yet it seemed like it was the first place they ran to when a storm roared in. Of cours
e it turned out there was no truth to the warning, but at such a young age I not only believed it, I acted on it.

  It seems every Amish family is on a mission to see who can raise the most children. My grandfather on my datt’s side was best known as Gingerich Dowdy. He had twenty-one children, seventeen with his first wife, who died of cancer, and four with his second wife. On my mem’s side, there were only ten children, although it is very typical for a family to have twelve to fifteen children. I did not get to know any of my grandparents very well, mostly because they were too scary. Gingerich Dowdy looked like he came from pure evil. If looks could kill, he would have been a mass murderer. He had a long crooked nose, a wrinkled face, and shoulder length gray hair that was always greasy and uncombed. He had one deaf and mentally challenged son, Noah—my uncle—whom he abused by beating or grabbing his beard and pulling him around like a dog. I could not stand being near his house because it would upset me.

  I can remember one instance where Dowdy grabbed Noah by the beard at a bus station where the public could see it, but no one did anything about it. Soon after that, Noah came to stay at our house for a while. He was in his thirties at the time. The very first night after he arrived, I woke up to a crying sound from across the hallway, so I jumped out of bed to see what was wrong. Noah stood in the middle of the moonlit bedroom with his hand between his legs. My jaw dropped in disbelief. Since he was deaf, I did not know how to explain to him to go downstairs to use the outhouse, so I bolted down the dark stairs on my tip toes so I would not wake up anyone, ran out to the cold washhouse, and found a little dirty bucket. I ran back upstairs in less than a minute and handed Noah the bucket; he quit crying and motioned me to leave the room. I was only eight years old and proud that I could help Noah with his needs without having to wake up my parents.

  I did not visit Gingerich Dowdy’s house often, but when I did, I never saw Dowdy smile—he remained in a perpetual bad mood and always complained about something. I was thankful my datt had a sense of humor, and many Amish people liked him. I was even more thankful Datt never abused us like Dowdy did his kids. At the time, I was too young to see my datt’s faults, but as I became much older he came across as lazy and unapproachable.

  On the other hand, my mem’s datt, who we called Miller Dowdy, never physically abused his children, but he was not a very friendly person either. He hardly ever smiled and was very bossy. I remember him hovering over my brother Jacob as he tried to fix a buggy, barking orders and telling him he did not know what he was doing. Miller Dowdy wore old round glasses and suspenders to keep his pants up. He looked like a typical Amish grandfather, unlike Gingerich Dowdy.

  My parents had a total of fourteen children. I was around fifteen years old before I realized my mother actually carried the baby inside her body, and I had no idea what caused her to have a baby. Amish parents do not talk to their children about having a new baby on the way. Many times I would wake up in the morning and there would be a baby crying in the bedroom, which is how I found out I had a new brother or sister.

  When I was around nine years old, I assumed that in order to have a baby, parents would choose from a long line of babies in a store and bring it home. I often wondered where I would be if they had not chosen me. I could not imagine being someone else’s child. I thought of all my aunts and uncles and I would not have wanted them to be my mother or father.

  During my third year in school, around the same time I stayed home to babysit, Anna, one of my best friends, told me that an airplane had flown over their house the night before and dropped a baby girl into the house. I believed her.

  “How did the airplane know your parents wanted a baby?” I asked.

  “Uh, I think the airplane just flies around and drops babies wherever they want to,” Anna answered.

  One day my curiosity got the best of me. “Hey,” I said to Mem, “Why don’t you and Daddy get a baby from an airplane like Anna’s parents did?”

  She looked up from the sewing machine where she was making a bonnet for my sister, Rhoda. She looked at me as though I had gone crazy. Instead of telling me anything different, though, she said, “I didn’t know they got one from an airplane.”

  I was confused as to why Mem would not know anything about it if that was really where babies came from, but I was too young to question anything. In fact, my family did not encourage asking questions about anything, which became a big problem for me as I got older. Nonetheless, from then on, I watched for airplanes, hoping to see if my parents or our neighbors would get a new baby. I would lay out on the lawn for hours staring up into the sky, but after several months my curiosity wore off.

  In fact, when I got older I did not want my parents to have any more babies as I realized how much work it was to take care of so many. They already had ten of them. Every time I heard an airplane buzzing over our house I would silently say, “Drop the baby somewhere else, we don’t need it.”

  Some days I would complain about the gigantic piles of laundry we needed to wash, or the oodles of dishes in the sink that had to be cleaned three times a day. There was never a dull moment with so many siblings. One time Mem had enough of my whining and asked, “Well, what do you want me to do about all the work?”

  “There are way too many kids,” I retorted.

  “Which one do you not want?” she asked, sounding disappointed.

  After pondering her question, I realized all my siblings were too darn precious not to want them. “Umm, I–I want every one of them,” I stammered.

  I was ashamed of my complaining. I thought of each sister and brother carefully. Even though I had grown annoyed with all nine of them, the thought of giving away one child was unimaginable, because at the end of the day I enjoyed having them around. I was glad Mem put me in my place. She had four more children after that, and after putting my selfish pride away, I willingly welcomed them into the family.

  §

  I was born in Mount Eaton, Ohio and we moved five different times while in Ohio. My datt finally started a successful sawmill business, and I thought that with the nice house we lived in we would surely not move again, but we did. This time, my parents decided to leave Ohio altogether and relocate the whole family to northern Missouri in late winter 1998. I was almost 11 years old then, but I felt much older because of my family responsibilities.

  The move to Missouri started badly. First, we were crammed into a drafty, freezing-cold trailer house. Then it snowed about four feet, which was more than we had ever seen, especially for the month of March. To make it worse, frigid cold crept into every part of the trailer. The trailer contained only a small wood stove used to heat the living area. Moving from a three-story house to a little two-bedroom trailer with a tiny kitchen was like taking six giant steps backwards in life. There was no room to put all the furniture so it stayed outside covered with a tarp.

  About a month after we moved, Grandma Sarah, my mem’s mother, died. Mem and Datt sent us to stay with our cousins so they could go back to Ohio for the funeral. Our cousins had just moved to Missouri too, but we did not know them very well and it made for a difficult week. I wished Grandma could have waited several more years to leave this earth, until we were at least settled into our new home. I was used to babysitting, but I was not used to doing it day and night for a week. We were all homesick by the time Mem and Datt returned.

  Shortly after the move to Missouri I began to get irritated very easily with Amish life in general. One aspect of daily life which seemed to irritate me the most was having to ride three miles to school in a horse-drawn buggy, especially on cold days. The Amish community sprawled a far distance, so the schoolhouse was located where everyone had a fair amount to travel for school. There is nothing worse than riding in a buggy with a cold wind howling in from every direction. Six of us piled into a buggy at one time, and I felt sorry for the younger siblings because they had to endure the cold and long rides back and forth, just as I did. We did not have heaters in the buggy, just ice-cold seats to sit
on and frozen blankets to cover up with.

  Despite my irritation with traveling in the wintertime, I would actually get excited when we hitched two horses to a sleigh instead of a buggy. One particular time brings a smile to my face: it was our first day to hook up the sleigh and plenty of snow blanketed the gravel road. My oldest brother, Jacob, drove the sleigh. He was only thirteen, and just like any other teenager, he thought he was tough, but he soon learned otherwise. After a cold, dreary day at school, we could not wait to get home. We climbed into the sleigh and bundled in blankets while Jacob called to the horses. Shortly after we started heading home, Jacob let the frisky horses trot too fast around a corner and the sleigh flipped onto its side. The overturned sleigh threw us all into a big ditch filled with several feet of snow. The younger children started to cry immediately, but no one was hurt, just scared. Luckily, the horses stopped and stood still like nothing had happened. I do not know how we did it, since we were so small, but we all pitched in and managed to set the sleigh upright and continue home. We rode to school with the sleigh several more times after that adventure, but Jacob drove the horses slower around every corner.

  However, it was not just the buggy rides to school that irritated me. As I got older, I grew more and more annoyed as my Amish life became more and more boring; there was just not enough going on to keep me occupied. Instead of acting like a young lady, as was expected of me, I began inventing ways to make life more interesting. As a result, I began to make mischief behind my parents’ backs.

  As I grew older and my responsibilities reached the full level of household duties, my younger sister, Rhoda, became old enough to help, and that is when she decided it was her turn to boss me around as I did to her when I babysat. Sometimes when I got in trouble, Rhoda attempted to provide the parental guidance she thought I needed.