Menno Moto

by Cameron Dueck

  Neither did most of the Mennonites living in the states off to my right, in Kansas and Nebraska, who came to the Americas from Russia in the same wave as my family. Mennonites are a lot less recognizable than the Amish because Mennonites do not all wear long beards and ride horse-drawn buggies—but some of us do. We’re less homogeneous and there’s a broader spectrum of conservatism among Mennonites than there is with the Amish, as well as a more varied migration history.

  The strictest Mennonite sect is called Old Colony, and they shun technology just like the Amish do. Old Colony refers to Chortitza Colony, the first colony that Mennonites created in Russia when they arrived from West Prussia late in 1789. Old Colony Mennonites were poorer, less educated, and more conservative than the Mennonites who had followed them from Poland to Russia years later. This marked difference in conservatism continued when Chortitza members emigrated to Canada in the same wave as Johann. Many of their social rules were formalized in Canada, creating the blueprint for Old Colony communities across the Americas. Their rules include prohibitions against technology, motor vehicles, and electricity, although some modern farming conveniences are allowed, and the men wear schlaub’betjse, which are heavy denim bib overalls.

  Other Mennonites, like my family, live pretty average North American lives. Regardless of our degree of conservatism, we share language, foods, and migration stories. Most famous Mennonites don’t look different—you’d have to do a Wikipedia search to identify some of the high-profile Mennonites in the world today. There’s Floyd Landis, the American road cyclist caught using performance-enhancing drugs. Or James Reimer, the National Hockey League goalie, who grew up in a village not far from my own. Dwight Schrute, a fictional character in the American version of the TV comedy series The Office, has Mennonite grandparents and lives on a forty-acre beet farm with his cousin Mose and speaks an old Germanic dialect which I can only guess is similar to Plautdietsch. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the thirty-fourth president of the United States, came from Mennonite roots but was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness. Eisenhower’s mother objected to his decision to study at West Point and pursue a military career because it conflicted with the pacifist views of her Anabaptist upbringing.

  In the US, most Mennonites are Swiss Mennonites, who, like the Amish, remained in Switzerland and Germany until they moved to the New World. Their language and customs are slightly different from those of the Mennonites who migrated via Russia. There are also hundreds of thousands of Mennonites who identify with the evangelical religion but not the culture, attending Mennonite churches in places as far away as India and Africa. They wouldn’t know a zwieback from a wagon wheel. Their names are not Penner, Plett, Reimer, or Dueck, and they did not come from Russia or Switzerland. They’re just attracted to the simple, pacifist beliefs of the Mennonite faith. People like author Malcolm Gladwell, whose British parents joined an Ontario Mennonite community when he was a child, and who still identifies himself with the Mennonite faith. There are more than two million Anabaptists around the world, including Mennonites, Amish, and Hutterites. But we Russian Mennonites like to think of ourselves as special. While some Mennonites went to America directly from Switzerland and Germany in the 1700s with the Amish, my ancestors immigrated to West Prussia and then to southern Russia, in what is now Ukraine. Our moves were driven by a search for religious freedom and by the attraction of available farmland. Kings and queens promised us peace and plenty in Privilegia because they needed passive, self-sustaining farmers to help develop their countries, but those promises always seemed to expire, prompting another move. It was in West Prussia where the Plautdietsche language, the foods, and the radical isolationism that Russian Mennonites are known for today came together into a cohesive culture. Mennonites who had come from different parts of Europe melded together and the Mennonite culture, the food, and the ways of life, took root.

  But it was in our next home, in Russia, where the Privilegium, granted largely on religious grounds, came to carry economic and civic meaning. Faith, ethnicity, and civil and economic life were cemented together for all Mennonites protected under the banner of the Privilegium. Mennonite leaders held both religious and civil power, creating a theocracy, and if you were not an upstanding member of the church you might be cut out of business deals and your children might be excluded from Mennonite education and subject to Russian military conscription. For Johann, sticking to the Mennonite faith became a form of survival, not just a way of believing.

  Johann helped bring that culture and meaning of community to North America, and it was this Russian Mennonite culture, the one that I had come from, that I was seeking out on this journey. Russian Mennonites had a reputation for defiance of authority, with more recent stories of persecution for their beliefs than the Swiss Mennonites or the Amish.

  Of the 45,000 Mennonites living in South Russia in the 1870s, about 10,000 left for the United States and 8,000 immigrated to Manitoba in that first wave with Johann. Some were from the Old Colony church, considered the original, most traditional group, others were members of the Kleine Gemeinde, or “small church,” which was a newer group that put more emphasis on spirituality. Canada appealed to the more conservative families because it created a Cabinet order extending a Privilegium to the Mennonites, while the United States refused to put promises in writing. The Mennonites in Canada had faith that Queen Victoria, a Christian, would keep her promise that they would be allowed to run their own schools in German and be exempt from military service. Canada also allowed Mennonites to create large culturally homogeneous areas where all the land was Mennonite-owned, building the foundation for the same kind of communities they had enjoyed in Russia.

  The more liberal Russian Mennonites chose to settle in Kansas and Nebraska, where they gave up their Privilegium in exchange for rich arable land in a more developed country swelling with optimism and growth. The Russian Mennonites settled not far from the Swiss Mennonites who had come before them. They’d been victims of the whims of kings and queens for long enough, and this time they’d try a republic. The US Senate rejected their appeal to buy large tracts of land and live in closed communities like they had in Russia. Those Russian Mennonites who had settled in the American Heartland did not maintain the cultural severity of those who went to Canada. Those early concessions proved telling, as my research had already shown me that nearly all of the Mennonite communities I would find in Latin America had Canadian, not American, roots. As well, the US did not receive a fresh wave of Mennonites in the 1920s like the one that had bolstered Canadian Mennonite society. Instead, the stubborn Russian Mennonites went to Canada.

  So I rode through the Midwest without stopping to visit the Mennonites who lived there. Besides, I had already met them, years earlier.

  A few days after my high school graduation I drove to Kansas to visit a Mennonite girl named Lori. I’d met her the previous summer on a Christian-teen mission trip to Spain, where we spent the summer in work boots, doing volunteer construction at a church camp and singing hymns on the street corners on the weekend. We were all chaste, clean-scrubbed church kids, but I still found the non-Mennonites in the group slightly intimidating, so I was immediately drawn to the pretty blond Mennonite girl from Kansas.

  We returned to our respective homes when the summer trip ended and spent the next year scribbling letter after letter to each other—real handwritten letters. Then I acquired my first car, a red Chevy Sprint, and I promised Lori I’d come visit her. My parents were hesitant, but when they heard she was a Mennonite they relented.

  “She’s a Claassen?!” my father exclaimed. Whenever I met a Mennonite he didn’t know his ears perked up. He was playing the Mennonite Game.

  “What’s her dad’s name?”

  “Mr. Claassen, I guess.”

  “Well, ask her who her grandfather is. If I knew his name I might be able to tell you who she is.”

  I already had a pretty good idea who Lori was, but you don’t reall
y know a Mennonite unless you know their grandparents and which church they attended. Then you can judge them by the sins of their fathers and forefathers and put them in their proper box.

  “Did they ever live in Nebraska?” my father asked. “There are people from your Mother’s side who live in Nebraska, and some of them might be Claassens. We spelled it with a K, but it could be the same family.”

  “I have no idea, Dad.” I hated the Mennonite Game. I didn’t care if he knew her grandfather or great-grandfather. In fact, I hoped he didn’t.

  Turns out some of Lori’s great-great-grandparents came from the same Molochna Colony in southern Russia that Johann came from. Some of her ancestors had lived only a few kilometres from his village of Schoenau. They immigrated to Nebraska the same year Johann came to Manitoba, and several ancestors on my mother’s side of the family—Klasssens—also chose Nebraska over Manitoba. My father had good reason to be curious. Johann’s and Lori’s forefathers probably knew each other, but that had nothing to do with my motives for driving to Kansas.

  I set off a few days after my high school graduation, and when I got to Kansas I marvelled at how Mennonites could be so different, so worldly. Lori’s family didn’t speak Plautdietsch and didn’t appear to have the same feeling of being under siege from the rest of the world that we were taught was the way Christians should feel if they were living truly righteous lives. The Mennonites in Kansas moved free and easy among the weltmensch—they didn’t worry about maintaining a sense of us and them. Weltmensch, people of the world, included anyone who wasn’t Mennonite. The others. Lori wore a short skirt and was a high school cheerleader—dizzyingly exotic to my sheltered mind—just like a weltmensch would do. Her family had the Christian faith, they prayed and went to church and read the Bible. But they were so free! It didn’t seem to matter if there was a line around their community or not.

  Where I grew up, in a small Mennonite community near Lake Winnipeg, remaining separate wasn’t that hard. The nearest store, and our postbox, was twenty kilometres away. We went to town by car once a week to pick up the mail, buy oatmeal and spotty bananas, do the banking, and to catch a glimpse of the weltmensch going about their lives. Our only other exposure to weltmensch was when insurance salesmen came to the farm or the Watkins dealer arrived with his battered car full of soaps and potions. Strange accents, the fragrance of tobacco smoke, women who wore their hair short, and the glint of jewellery were ample signals that these people were different.

  We had no television and little access to popular culture. Our Mennville Evangelical Mennonite Church bought its first piano was when I was in Sunday School—it was thought too worldly to own one until then. Military service and the language of our education had become moot points long ago, but the three-room, church-run Mennville School still refused to fly the Maple Leaf, a small jutting of the jaw towards the government. If we didn’t fly the flag we weren’t their slaves. The school board had a sudden burst of nostalgia and reintroduced German to our curriculum one year, but it didn’t last. There were few, if any, non-Mennonite students and my class totalled three people—Nathan, Joell, and I—all boys, no girls, just our bad luck. Nathan and Joell both played hockey in the nearby non-Mennonite town of Riverton, but my father forbade me to join, because he thought the town boys might be a bad influence on me. Mennonite farmers did not harvest their crops on a Sunday, even if it had rained all week and it was the only dry day in the forecast for the next month. Business dealings with other Mennonites were still preferable to those with a weltmensch, but business was done, either way. Our parents grudgingly sent us to Riverton for the last two years of high school, but by that age they expected us to have perfected the art of holding the world at bay.

  As outward appearances became less pronounced, inner rhetoric became more important. Faith, being “born again,” living for the Lord, was the steel lightning rod for all else in life. We were different because we said so, and we wore it like a badge of honour. And because we believed we were different and separate, it became so. But moderate Mennonite communities such as Mennville have changed a lot in the past twenty-five years. My generation was the last one to speak Plautdietsch fluently, if at all. Intermarriage with non-Mennonites became the norm. Religious practices and doctrine became indistinguishable from those of other conservative North American evangelical churches. Technology, alcohol, and working on Sunday became common, but Mennonites are still, on average, very bad dancers.

  Another thing that didn’t change was Mennonite generosity. Mennonite communities are some of the most generous donors of cash, expertise, and volunteer labour across Canada. We took in Southeast Asian refugees in the 1970s and today Mennonites are once again taking on more than their share of refugees from the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere. Tithing, the giving of 10 percent of your income to the church, is only the starting point for many generous Mennonites.

  My summer trip to Kansas didn’t bring the wished-for everlasting romance, but it did give me an inkling that the Russian Mennonites who moved to Canada must be especially stubborn. So stubborn that when things changed the most adamant of us felt an irreconcilable sense of umbrage, packed up, and went off seeking new promises in Latin America, always leaving a few Mennonites and kernels of wheat behind.

  Much of the wheat I’d seen, driving through the US Midwest, was a variety of hard red winter wheat, which has a similar migration story as Johann and my family. The original strain, called Turkey red, was bred from a variety of Old World red wheats by the Ottomans, who occupied the land between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov periodically from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. When Russia annexed the Ukrainian steppe in 1783 and moved Mennonites onto the land, the Mennonites grew the wheat that the fleeing Turks had left in the granaries. When Johann and his neighbours migrated to North America in 1874 they brought a few sacks of Turkey red wheat seed with them, ready to start their new farms.

  In North America, where the land and climate were very similar to that of the Russia we had just left, the drought-resistant wheat was the first thing the Mennonites planted. The next year, in early summer, they had fresh bread. The high-gluten Turkish wheat was especially good for baking, and it soon gained popularity across the Plains. About a decade after they arrived, a clever Mennonite grainsman imported 10,000 bushels of Turkey red from the Ukraine, and today it is the most common variety of wheat grown in the United States. Turkey red died out as a popular variety in the 1940s, but it is the granddaddy of modern wheat. It has been modified and crossbred to suit modern tastes and production, but the wheat beside the road I was riding on was very likely a distant cousin of a kernel that came to America with the Mennonites.

  Hard red winter wheat was so important it had its own futures contract on the Chicago Board of Trade. I knew it well—I’d once been a Chicago-based commodities journalist, writing about pork bellies, beans and wheat and other things we eat. The wheat on either side of my motorcycle told me I knew this place, sliding by, green turning to yellow, as I followed the Mennonites’ path south.

  Each day of riding began early, at sunrise if possible. I had a book of highway maps and as I drove I tore out the travelled pages and stuffed them into fuel station rubbish bins, leaving miles and maps behind in equal measures.

  Old America still lives on its secondary roads, where barking dogs tried to sink their teeth into my tires and people waved from porches as I passed. Sturdy red-brick buildings built close to the road, their lush lawns planted with so many American flags I wondered if they grew wild around these parts. I rode through little towns, with one diner open for lunch and ramshackle fuel stations staffed by pimply-faced teens who ran out to serve me when I drove across a black hose that rang a bell. The trucks on main street came from surrounding farms, with mud on their fenders and a jumble of tools in their boxes.

  By the second week my body had become accustomed to life on the road. I no longer noticed the steady, jarring vibrati
on of my bike’s knobby tires and single cylinder engine. When I became cramped and stiff, I stood on the foot pegs, bracing myself against the rush of wind to wiggle and stretch in an awkward form of highway calisthenics. Then I’d sit down again and watch the rush of the road for another hour.

  I discovered what bikers meant when they talked about brotherhood. In America, motorcyclists greet each other with an upside-down peace sign, flashed low and beside the engine, a wish for safe riding that means “keep two wheels down.” I learned to flash the biker salute to every motorcycle I met, but there were also greetings at gas stations, offers of help, and directions to tire shops. I’d never considered myself a biker before. I didn’t ride on a daily basis at home, and I didn’t even normally own a bike. But now strangers greeted me like they knew me because I was travelling on two wheels.

  All my impressions came from the saddle of my motorcycle and the rapid stops to refuel and gobble down greasy diner meals. But I was travelling in the right direction. The Appalachian Mountains led me into the southeast. The dead roadside deer of the north were turning into dead armadillos. Accents were slower and rounder. The dusty smell of ripe wheat turned to loamy, sultry gardens. The road beneath me grew hotter with every hour of driving.

  The simplicity of me plus bike plus road equalled pure joy. I stopped when and where I liked and sought out dodgy small-town bars if I was staying in a motel. I sat beside campfires, eating dinner straight from the cooking pot, the golden firelight glinting off my bike. I felt like a cowboy riding the range.

  My only steady companion was my motorcycle. I’d chosen it like a lot of Mennonites chose their wife—it was sturdy, simple, and with a long history of reliable performance. The Kawasaki KLR650 model had probably made more trips through the Americas than any other model because of its proven ruggedness. But I was still in a constant state of worry over its well-being.