At the back of the pasture was a large pond full of stagnant water and a tangle of wire-mesh cages, the remnants of Ed’s foray into fish farming. He had also tried growing oranges, which hadn’t paid off. But what Ed really wanted to show me was the creek at the far end of his property, with gnarled mahogany and Santa Maria trees casting the creek in deep shade. He pointed to a rope that dangled above the sluggish green water, smiling to himself.
“The boys have had a lot of fun here. We’ll come as a family and camp out for a few days once it cools down a bit,” he said. There was a tiredness in Ed’s voice even as he described the good times they’d had there, the boys swimming in the creek, the meals cooked over the fire, the neighbours who came to join them. A weather-beaten picnic table, the steel-tube frame of a large tent, and a firepit awaited the next camping trip. Ed kicked at a clod of grass clippings. “We brought the mower in here to get things ready for this year’s campout.”
“We also have a place like this on our farm, a clearing in the bush with an old cabin,” I said. “Leroy used to enjoy spending time in those woods, so the place became more special after he was gone.”
Ed didn’t respond. He was lost in his own thoughts, looking up at the treetops.
“What do you remember of him? What was he like when you knew him?”
“Hmm.” Ed narrowed his eyes. “Man, it’s a long time ago. I just remember we were good friends. Like brothers. He was funny, I think. Funny and he liked adventure.”
Ed had known Leroy only as a young boy, but I’d still hoped for more. Funny and liked adventure. That could have been any boy, anytime, anywhere. I was disappointed.
“What did you guys do? What kinds of trouble did you get up to together?”
“I guess we must have rode our bikes around. Played in the bush. I don’t really remember.” Ed shrugged. Forty years of time, five sons of his own who were funny and liked adventure and the blinding slash of Chris’s death had pushed memories of Leroy far away. I was grasping for a cord connecting me to a bittersweet past and it wasn’t there.
We wound our way back into the heart of the colony with Ed pointing out the churches, school, and clinic. He stopped at the local airport, the one where Chris had crashed his micro-light, to show me his Cessna. Flying and owning small planes was popular on many colonies due to the expanse of the land and the state of the roads. Ed’s airplane was a small red-and-white four-seater that he flew to business meetings around the country when the rough roads were too slow. We walked around the small plane, Ed describing some of the flights he’d made in it. He opened the logbook and thumbed through its pages.
“Somehow my interest in these sorts of things has disappeared a bit,” he said.
We stood outside the hangar, chatting with his pilot friends for a few moments. As Ed and I had criss-crossed the colony, stopping at the store and pulling to the side of the road to exchange hellos with neighbours, I’d noticed a steady, quiet support. It was only a few months since Chris had died, there was still a softening of the eye when farmers met Ed, a casual hand on his shoulder, a lingering handshake of sympathy. The families on the colony had borne Chris’s death like it was one of their own children, and while life had to go on, they hadn’t forgotten.
But the airport was making Ed restless. His eyes roved the airfield, his answers to my questions grew absent-minded and detached. We climbed back into Chris’s pickup truck and continued driving.
Blue Creek was populated with relatively progressive Mennonites, while neighbouring Shipyard Colony, with over 2,000 residents, was Old Colony. They were far more conservative and were not allowed to use motorized transport, and their houses did not have electricity. However, the colony was well-known for its carpenters, blacksmiths, and machining shops. Ed had a steel shaft that needed lathing, and several steel girders he wanted to sell, so we headed for Shipyard, where they would have the right tools to do the job and would know who needed steel girders.
“One time I had a broken hydraulic-drive pump for one of our earth-moving machines,” Ed told me. “I had all the books, the manuals for it, and I read them again and again. I adjusted this valve, that one, I tried everything, but I couldn’t get the thing to work properly. So I took it to a shop on Shipyard. I showed it to the owner of the shop, but he said he didn’t have time to look at it himself. ‘I’ll have my boy look at it, he’s pretty good,’ he told me. This skinny fourteen-year-old kid in schlaub’betjse comes over. I was a bit annoyed. I figured, okay, fine, if this kid wants to tinker with it while I wait for a real mechanic, let him. He didn’t even look at the manual I showed him. He starts fiddling with the pump. The pump is disconnected now, lying in the back of my truck. He can’t even see how it fits in the machine. This kid, he had no clue what that pump was supposed to do on the machine. So I tried to tell him, this goes to this bit, this valve does whatever. And he was just quiet, sticking his fingers in here, there, feeling around. He played with it for a long time, and then he pulled out a screwdriver and made a few adjustments. ‘There, it should work now,’ he told me. I laughed, I thought, Ya, right. But his dad was still busy, so I took the pump home. And it worked! I have no idea how that kid figured it out. They don’t go to school long, but they’re not stupid.”
We arrived at a shed that had started with wood, then grew with concrete and steel as the business flourished. Carriages littered the yard, the horses tied to posts in the shade of the trees. Next to the horses were rows of modern machinery, gleaming beasts of burden driven by the latest technology. But the red, yellow, and green machinery stood on steel wheels from a century ago. Some as tall as a man, others narrow and delicate, all made of steel with treads welded from iron.
Old Colony Mennonites are not shy about embracing technology when it comes to farming, but anything driven by an engine has to ride on steel. Anything pulled by a horse, or trailers pulled by tractors, can ride on rubber tires. This forces a slower pace of life, because even the relatively slow ride of a rubber-tired tractor might be too much temptation for young men eager to explore the nearby towns. The shuddering ride of a steel-wheeled tractor is not suitable for joyriding. The few tractors outside the shop that were on rubber tires belonged to others—weltmensch or more moderate Mennonites—and had been brought here to this schmiede for repairs.
Inside, the high-pitched whine of blades cutting into steel was measured by the crash of metal being stacked and moved from station to station, men shouting to be heard over the din. The air was filled with the acrid smell of smoke, of hot metal and grease.
Henry, the manager, had an ebullient red face held down by a grubby white cowboy hat. A bright orange measuring tape hung from the pocket of his dark trousers, and his legs shifted and twitched with energy. He engulfed my hand in his thick calloused paw and pumped it heartily.
The shaft was unloaded from Ed’s truck, precise instructions and measurements were conveyed. But there was still the matter of the steel girders. Ed had taken photos of the girders with a digital camera, and now he, Henry, and a worker bent over the screen, discussing their potential uses. Henry knew a few people who might want them.
He walked off through a side door of the schmiede and pulled a mobile phone out of his pocket. He dialled a number and leaned against the red flanks of a giant forklift with one hand, staring alternately out to the fields beyond the tree line and down to his boot, which kicked at the dirt.
Henry made several calls, then turned back to the schmiede. He looked up and saw that I was watching him.
“I noticed you were using a mobile phone. That’s allowed on an Old Colony?” I asked.
Henry laughed, his hand patting the phone in his pocket.
“It’s not my phone. It’s one of the workers’, so it’s okay,” he said. “I use it sometimes, here at the shop. But I never take it home.”
Old Colony farms and businesses often employed weltmensch, in part because they could bear th
e sin of carrying a mobile phone or driving the pickup truck to town. That distance from the activity—registering a phone or truck in someone else’s name—was enough to negate the sin of using the technology.
“I’ve called a few guys who might want the girders,” Henry said. “Someone will take them, I’m sure. They’re perfect for building a nice strong trailer.”
As we said goodbye and turned to leave Henry remembered something.
“Do I have your number?” he asked Ed. Henry fished his phone from his pocket and checked his contact list. “Ya, I have it. I’ll be in touch.”
I smirked at Henry. So it was his phone, not his employee’s. Double lives, one for the church and one for themselves. It was a duplicity that I’d soon see the Old Colony Mennonites put to far more sinister use than mobile phones.
It was late afternoon when we returned to the farmyard. Ed excused himself to look after some paperwork in his office. Carolyn was not in the kitchen and the house was quiet. I walked out onto the veranda. The sound of machinery, the rev of a diesel engine, and the clang of metal drifted up from the meadow that held Chris’s grave.
Ed’s son Anthony had been working for days, mowing lawns and cleaning up the farmyard in preparation for his wedding. The wedding was to be held on the same open field where Chris was buried, and Anthony was removing the rusting hulks of old machinery, tangles of old fencing and vines. I walked down the hill and watched him behind the wheel of a tractor, lifting the remnants of steel machinery high in the air and then dropping them onto a trailer with a screeching crash.
Carolyn sat nearby, beside Chris’s grave, her arms wrapped around her knees. I held back for a moment, and then went and sat down beside her. The grave was so fresh that grass had not yet overgrown it. A grey scar on the green meadow. Carolyn’s eyes were red-rimmed, her nose running. We sat silently, letting Anthony and his machinery fill the void.
“He would have loved to be here for this wedding,” she said. “The boys are all very excited, all playing a part, and we really feel Chris’s absence now.
“It’s a happy time, to see my son get married, to welcome a daughter into the family. But it’s also hard, because the accident is still so recent. And it’s a reminder, that there will never be a wedding for Chris.”
Leroy was nearing his own wedding when he was killed. My parents had objected to the wedding—she wasn’t a Mennonite, a born-again Christian. She was a weltmensch. But after his death they embraced her, and they mourned together until she was able to move on with her own life.
“What do you remember about our family and home from your visit after Leroy’s death?” I asked.
“It’s a long time ago,” Carolyn said. “We weren’t at your place for long, but I know it was important for Ed to come see your parents. I mostly remember the community, how they surrounded your family. Your parents were grieving, but you could feel the strength, the faith that was still there.”
“That’s the same thing I feel here, now, with you and Ed,” I said.
“I can’t imagine what it would be like without the community we have around us here,” Carolyn said. “They, and our faith, have kept us going.”
“My mom and dad, for years after Leroy died, they found a lot of comfort in supporting other families who lost children. Dad always said that you couldn’t imagine what it was like to lose a child if you hadn’t experienced it. We went to a lot of funerals and they took me along to some of them. A lot of young people that they barely knew, Mennonites and non-Mennonites. They visited people in their homes, wrote cards. I don’t think they had much to say, no special advice or anything. They just wanted to tell these parents that others had felt this pain and lived through it.”
The machinery was turned off and its noise was replaced by the creak of settling metal and the clatter of chains as Anthony secured the load. We alternated between watching Anthony at work and staring, blankly, at the overturned earth of Chris’s grave.
Ed appeared, walking across the meadow from the house. During the day, as we’d driven across his land and he’d conducted his business, there were moments where his face would break into a careless smile, when the tasks at hand absorbed his full attention. He was a confident man, respected and well-liked in his community, and he carried himself with pride.
Now I watched as he approached. His body drooped as he neared the grave and saw Carolyn curled up in a defensive ball. He greeted me quietly, then sat down and put his arm around Carolyn’s shoulders, and together we waited for darkness to fall.
CHAPTER 11
Central and South America
Fronteras
For the next few weeks I could forget about Mennonites. I knew there were few, if any Mennonite communities in the rest of Central America, so I focused on making miles south. I crossed from Belize into Guatemala and watched the countryside roll by. Shaggy fields of bananas and sugar cane were hewn out of the landscape by hand, and every bit of available space between the small homes and the mountains was turned to food production. Passing trucks groaned with loads of corn, melons, and palm fruit. I slowed to pass women walking on the sides of the road, colourful shawls wrapped around their shoulders and huge bundles of firewood and hay balanced on their heads. Children shouted and waved from schoolyards. Untethered horses grazed beside the road and bolted with a snort of alarm when I tooted my horn.
In the somewhat redundantly named city of Antigua Guatemala, in the country of Guatemala, I met two local riders who offered advice to passing riders via an Internet motorcycle forum. Richard and Suzanne were Americans who had moved to Guatemala to escape the rat race seventeen years earlier. They were just two in a sprawling fraternity of motorcyclists who welcomed me to their towns, directed me to hotels, helped me find repair shops, and allowed me to sleep on their couches. The simple fact that we all rode motorcycles meant we were never strangers.
Richard and Suzanne led me through Antigua’s quaint Spanish Baroque streets and up a mountain road to the Earth Lodge, an eco-resort that overlooked the city.
“You have to try the sausage burger at this place. It’s the best you’ll ever taste,” Richard said as we sat on the veranda with Volcán de Agua, Acatenango, and Volcán de Fuego all visible in the distance, puffs of white smoke against the clear sky.
I ordered the sausage sandwich and when it arrived I took one bite and grunted in surprise. The smoky, salty flavour and firm texture were unmistakable.
“This is foarmaworscht. Mennonite-farmer sausage.”
Before setting off on this journey I had researched where I would find Mennonite colonies, marking them on maps taped to my apartment walls. There were no Mennonite communities marked on my map of Guatemala. We called the chef to our table, and he told us he had bought the sausage in a nearby village.
In the morning we drove to the village of Tecpán. We couldn’t find the butcher the chef had told us about, but we were directed to a small bakery. The women behind the counter, including a few Guatemalan employees, wore long dresses and head coverings. Unmistakably Mennonite.
They told me there were a handful of Mennonite families living in Tecpán and nearby Chimaltenango, where American Mennonites had run a mission since the 1960s. The Guatemalan women wearing Mennonite garb were evidence of their success.
“Tjenne jie Plautdietsch vestohne?” I asked them.
They stared at me blankly. No, they could not understand Plautdietsch. The mission had been set up by Swiss Mennonites from the US Midwest, descendants of Mennonites who had migrated to the Americas directly from Germany and Switzerland two hundred years before Johann had migrated. Their language was slightly different, and they didn’t keep moving all over the Americas in search of cheap land and wilderness to hide in. The ethnic Mennonites in Guatemala were now outnumbered by the Kaqchikel and K’iche’ Mayan people that had converted to the Mennonite faith.
I asked the women behind the
counter if they knew about the large Mennonite communities in nearby Belize. They knew they existed, but little more. Swiss Mennonites have their own diaspora of missionaries, but not colonies like those created by Russian Mennonites.
The discovery that they were Swiss Mennonite rather than Russian instantly erased my sense of familiarity. Even though their lives would closely resemble those of conservative Russian Mennonites, their faith and religious practices nearly identical, their history was different. Their history did not include the vehement rejection of state control, the repeated international moves in search of seclusion, the cultural mix that created, which was cemented into our identity. At one time we decided we were different enough to split from them, and that was enough to destroy any sense of community I felt standing inside the warm bakery.
This was a very Mennonite thing to feel, this clannish view of people. The Swiss Mennonites really were still my people, but they were different, so I focused on the differences. Us and them. We built fences, and you were either on one side or the other.
In southern Manitoba the Mennonite community is divided by the Red River. Johann arrived on the east side of the river, but a large group of his shipmates soon moved to the other side of the river in search of better land, and Mennonite towns on both sides have prospered ever since. That created an us and them. They’re jant’ sied, the other side. In the western towns, they refer to the east as jant’ sied. The term is not just geographical but is used to explain and describe the minutiae of differences that develop among villages over time. Often it is used in jest—I’ve heard my family accuse those on jant’ sied of defiling hallowed Mennonite culture by adding syrup or using strawberries instead of plums in traditional recipes. It’s fair play to discredit someone for being from jant’ sied.
This was not one of the Mennonite traits I hoped to find in myself on this journey, but there it was. Swiss Mennonites were not my Mennonites. It dawned on me like an upset stomach that this feeling was about as Mennonite as I could get. Dismay, familiarity, and a humbling acknowledgement of one’s weaknesses.
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