“Just that, that’s all you have to cook on?” Helena asked. “Just one burner?”
“People who live in cities sometimes pack all this stuff up, put it in a big sack on their back, and leave the city to walk in circles in the hills for days on end,” I said, standing hunched over as if I was carrying a house on my back.
That had Hans’s attention too. Until then he’d stood back, laughing as he watched his daughters discover my odd equipment.
“But they have cars, right?” Hans asked. Perhaps he wondered if there were non-Mennonites who shunned convenience just for the piousness of it.
“They have cars, but they choose to walk for exercise and fun,” I said. “They walk for ten, maybe twenty kilometres a day through the mountains and then they set up their camp, just like mine here. And then the next day they pack it all up and walk some more.”
“But why? If they have cars, why do they do that?” Hans wanted to know.
We were only 700 kilometres from Buenos Aires, but Argentina’s capital could just as well have been on another continent. When the Loewens referred to the “city,” their voices filled with awe, they meant Guatraché, half an hour’s drive by car—one of which they did not own—and boasting a population of about 5,000 people.
The fun came to an abrupt end when Hans realized it was late afternoon. They had spent their afternoon ogling my camping gear when there was work to be done.
“It’s milking time,” Hans declared. Helena straightened up, grabbed her sister by the hand, and marched off towards the barn.
“Can I come help?” I asked.
Helena stopped, looked at her father, and then walked away without replying. I zipped up the tent and followed her.
The cows, with swollen, pendulous udders, bumped their noses against the back gate of the barn. Helena and her brother Heinrich opened the gate and ushered the cows to their stalls. Heinrich, Hans’s oldest son, was lean and wiry, and his face looked much older than his twenty-one years.
Sitting on low wooden stools, shoulders pressed against warm flanks, they began to milk. The small barn was filled with the thump of hoofs when the cows shifted, the rattle of a chain, the swish of a tail, and the steady tzzzzt tzzzzt tzzzzt as milk hit the bottom of the empty tin pails. The sound deepened in pitch as the pails filled with frothy milk.
“Do you know how to do this?” Helena asked me, blushing just because she was speaking to me directly.
“No. Can you show me?”
She showed me how to begin each squeeze at the top of the teat and work downward in one deft stroke. I fumbled and pinched and pulled. The cow stamped her feet as she sensed that something was wrong. With practice I caught the rhythm, and each squirt became smoother than the last.
“It’s just like dancing,” I joked. “Don’t focus on the steps, just feel the rhythm.”
Helena didn’t laugh. Dancing was more foreign to her than milking a cow was to me. I soon relinquished the stool and still-swollen udders to her.
“Your arms will be sore in the morning because you are not used to the work,” she said, laughing. She sat down and began to expertly massage the teats again: tzzzzt tzzzzt tzzzzt.
Helena was a pretty girl, and she was nearing marriageable age.
“Do you have a schatz?” I asked. A sweetheart.
Helena only blushed more deeply and shook her head as she leaned closer to the cow, hiding behind its flank. All I could see were her pale forearms, which were ropy with muscles.
“Maybe you don’t have a schatz, but I bet a few boys wish you were their schatz,” I teased.
I couldn’t see Helena’s face, so it was hard to tell just how horrified she was that a strange man would talk to her about such a delicate matter.
Outside, the half-dozen steel milk containers that stood on a handcart were filled one by one, their tops screwed shut when they were full. Heinrich lifted Peter onto the wagon beside the milk. The blond boy was the pet of the family and he spent much of his day riding around the farmyard on a homemade tricycle built to look like a Massey Ferguson tractor, complete with red paint, decals, a tractor seat, steel wheels, and a spittle-spraying engine sound made by the operator. He was dressed the same as the men, in schlaub’betjse, a plaid shirt, and a brown unmarked baseball cap.
Heinrich pulled the wagon, loaded with milk and little brother, across the farmyard. They were late with the milking, and the colony milkman was already waiting at the end of the lane. Instead of delivering milk, this milkman drove his horse and trailer around the colony and collected milk twice a day, taking it to the colony cheese factory. Once the milk was loaded the day’s chores were done.
The family was slipping into Sunday mode. I’d felt the subtle shift earlier in the afternoon. The already quiet life of farm and colony was slowing down even more, matching the stillness of the wide-open land. But everything had to be clean and tidy for the Sabbath.
Hans and Lena washed the family buggy in front of the shed, preparing it for the weekly trip to church. It had a single backless bench seat in the middle of a shallow rectangular box frame with a small arched roof. The buggy had narrow rubber tires—allowed on horse-drawn wagons but not on anything with an engine.
Buckets of water, rags, and floor mats were spread across the lawn as Hans and Lena scrubbed the buggy, which glistened in the early-evening light.
“The buggies all look the same to me,” I said as I admired it. “What would happen if you painted your buggy red, so you don’t get it mixed up with others?”
Lena snorted with laughter. She straightened up from her task of scrubbing floor mats, hand at the small of her back, and shielded her eyes against the low sun to look at me. She laughed again.
“Would that be wrong? Is a red buggy sinful?” I asked, goading her into another burst of laughter.
“It wouldn’t be wrong, but we’d be embarrassed. No one uses a red buggy,” she said before bending down to scrub the mats again. Better to just fit in with the rest.
The low sun bathed the farm in a gauzy golden glow, and the air cooled in perfect rhythm with the falling light. I sat down under a tree near my tent and opened my laptop on my knees to write. I could hear the buggy creak and rattle as Hans and Lena pushed it into the shed. A few minutes later Hans appeared at my tent, a kettle of hot water in one hand and his maté cup in the other. We handed the maté cup back and forth, and Hans refilled it each time the straw began to gurgle.
Beside us grew a field of ripe wheat that glowed white in the dusk. “Looks like this is about ready to harvest,” I said. I took a head of wheat and rubbed it in the palm of my hand to separate the seeds.
“Ya, maybe next week,” Hans said.
“What kind of wheat is it?” I asked.
“Hmm.” Hans screwed up his face in thought. “It’s the hard wheat we always plant. I’m not sure what the name is.”
“Hard red wheat? The wheat that’s good for baking bread?”
“Ya, that kind.”
“It’s probably a descendant of Turkey red, the wheat that came from Russia with our forefathers,” I said.
Hans shook his head. “This seed didn’t come from Europe. It’s just seed we kept from last year’s crop.”
“And where did last year’s seed come from?”
“We always keep some of the grain for seed. That’s how we do it.”
“The original seeds, years and years ago, probably came on the first shiploads of Mennonites that came from Russia,” I said. “That wheat was the parent of the different hard red wheats grown across the US now. My family was on those same ships, and so was yours. So we’re all from the same place, we’ve all travelled to different places, and now we’re all here together.”
Hans wasn’t impressed with my allegories. The quietness of the land, his family’s strong bond, and their simple life made me proud to associate myself with
Mennonite culture again. The bitter taste of what I’d seen and heard in Bolivia was not entirely gone, and the useless piousness of moving into the Chaco was still at the back of my mind. But hey, who likes everything about their culture? Embrace what you have. And anyway, it was never my choice to begin with, so I might as well just be proud to be Mennonite. I’d slipped into a reverie of camaraderie and belonging when Hans asked:
“So what do you think of Mennonites? What do you think of the way we live? Do you think we’re crazy?” His question reminded me that he still saw me as an outsider. The bombilla in the maté cup made a sucking sound, extra loud in the stillness of dusk. Hans added more hot water, mashed the leaves, and handed the cup to me, waiting for me to answer.
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” I said before taking a sip of the hot, bitter liquid. “I’m not sure if I would want to live this life, but you have a peaceful, healthy life, surrounded by family. You have a good house, you eat well. You have a good life.”
Hans dismissed my compliments with a nod. This too was uncommon talk for him, and it appeared to make him uncomfortable. “How old are you?” I asked.
“I’m forty-four, and with two grandchildren already!” He laughed and shook his head in disbelief. “I don’t feel old enough to be a grandfather, but that’s what I am.”
“Have you achieved what you hoped you would achieve at this point in your life?” I asked. It was a common thought and question in the busy, goal-oriented urban society I lived in, but as soon as I asked, it struck me how odd a question it was in the context of Old Colony life.
Hans laughed, and then hummed and hawed. “It’s hard to know. I’m not sure what I dreamed of when I was young.
“My dream now would be to start a new farm on the new colony we’ve started to the northwest, and to have the money to do it properly. Not do it poor like my first farm here. I’d do it for fun, instead of for survival like we did it the first time.
“And you, you’re not married? Why not?” he asked.
Now it was my turn to struggle for an answer. I made noncommittal noises, as single men of my age are wont to do when asked this question.
“Don’t you want a family?”
“Well, it’s hard when you travel a lot,” I said, offering up the only flimsy excuse I could think of that wouldn’t need hours of context. The way Hans looked at me suggested he thought I must have made some mistake, have some tragic flaw, one that had prevented me from having my own family. He might have been right, but I tried to explain that journeys like this one made me happy. Travel, that hallowed goal of the middle class everywhere, didn’t seem such a worthy goal to him.
“So, you’ll just stay an old jung, then,” he said, using the term for a boy, an unmarried male. But jung meant a lot more, with sexual, social, and maturity connotations. How could I explain to Hans that while in his world a male only became a man when he had a wife, his own family to feed and defend, in my world being single had no bearing on your maturity? I shrugged and said nothing. “Isn’t it lonely, all alone in a big city, with no family?”
“I have friends,” I said, hearing the note of defensiveness in my voice.
My months of visiting tight-knit Mennonite families and communities had made me question my solo existence in a metropolis. I envied the strong community support Mennonites enjoyed. But I doubted I could ever go back to that kind of life and give up my personal preferences and freedoms, my choice to change my lifestyle as life itself changed. I couldn’t go back and live the way Johann had lived in Russia, just like Hans knew he wouldn’t be able to return to his Old Colony life if he adopted the ways of the world. It was a one-way street.
“I’d like to live like this, a simple life on the colony, and I know a lot of other people who live in big cities who dream about this as well,” I said. I’d barely completed my thought when Hans broke out in a cackle of disbelief.
“That’s what you think now, but this would never work for you,” he said, passing the maté cup to me.
“Well, only if I’m allowed to keep my computer,” I said, grinning at him. “Don’t you think it would be possible to live like this, quietly, in a Mennonite community, but still also have better education, maybe a car, lights you can turn on at night?”
The farmyard was nearly dark now. There was no yard light, no light on in front of the barns. Each of the day’s chores was completed before the last of the light was gone, and once it was dark activity was over for the day.
“Once you have cars, people are always on the road, going somewhere, and they’re never home to eat as a family. And going to the city becomes too easy. Once you have electricity you have more lights at night, so people come out of their homes at a time when the family should be at home, together. And with electricity you can have television and all that stuff. It would make our life much more complicated. Once you start allowing those things, it never ends.
“It’s easier for us to live the old way out here, where no one bothers us,” Hans said. “Staying away from that life, living simple, it makes it easier to live a Christian life.”
Hans scraped the sodden green pulp out of the maté cup, threw it into the bushes and turned for the house.
“Na yo, it’s time for supper,” he said.
Inside, the floors were mopped and waxed, and the house smelled of soap. A battery-powered light cast garish shadows on the kitchen walls as Lena and Helena prepared dinner. The dining room was lit by a hissing gas lamp. The family sat down in their regular places while I sat at the foot of the table. We bowed our heads as Hans prayed.
Segne, Vater
diese Speise,
uns zur Kraft
und dir zum Preise.
Amen.
Lena had made reahre ei, a hybrid of scrambled eggs and pancakes, an easy meal to make on an evening when work was kept to a minimum. She apologized for the simplicity of the meal; I thanked her for making a dish I had not eaten since I was a young boy, back on the farm in Canada. Lena served it with tomatoes and onion, a slice of cold sausage on the side.
“This is good, but my mother always served reahre ei with Rogers Golden Syrup. That makes us different—a big enough difference for me to start a new colony, I think.”
Hans and Lena both laughed, but the children only grinned, too shy to laugh at the joke.
We ate the last of the meal in silence, and when we were finished, I thanked Lena and began to rise from the table. Hans looked at me and cleared his throat. Helena broke into giggles, which she tried to stifle when her mother shot her a stern look. All the children sat with their hands folded in their laps. I dropped back into my chair, embarrassed. I’d forgotten the tradition in many conservative homes, where they prayed both before and after the meal. I bowed my head and Hans said a quick prayer. When he was finished, I raised my head and looked around, unsure if there was more to come. “We’re done,” Hans said, chuckling.
Helena’s face was red with suppressed laughter as I thanked them for dinner and turned for the door.
A nearly full moon had risen, so bright it cast shadows. The tipa trees shone with the lustrous patina of old silverware. In the middle of the yard, where hoofs and steel wheels held the grass at bay, the packed earth glowed like hallowed ground. The dog, lying beside the house, lifted his head as I passed, and then dropped it on his paws with a gentle clink of his collar. Christmas crickets, called that because they sang the loudest at this time of the year, buzzed and hummed their wavering tune.
I walked down the driveway, stepping carefully to keep the silence. Across the road a dim yellow light flickered from a window, but the rest of the village was dark. I stood in the lane for a long while, breathing in the smell of dust, hay, and livestock. I could hear the muffled sounds of sleeping farms all around me. The shuffle of horses in the barn, the slow creak of a turning windmill, the hollow thud of a closing door. Sounds and smells just
like those Johann knew in Russia more than a century ago. The farm, the layout of the colony, the language and foods, the nineteenth-century conveniences, all very like they were when Johann migrated, and it was the only life that Hans and his family would probably ever know.
I craned my neck and stared, open-mouthed, at the wide sky. Constellations so bright they pushed aside the darkness, other segments of the sky where the stars were nearly drowning in black, but still blinking, twinkling. This patch of Patagonian soil, the sounds and smells and people, felt as close as my heart and as far away as the stars. It was me who was caught in the middle. I’d come looking for myself in other people’s lives, in other people’s interpretations. Yes, I’d found my people, made new friends, and discovered things about us, and about me, that I’d never known before. But the answers, what there were of them, weren’t as neat and tidy as I’d somehow imagined they might be. Those expectations seemed naive to me now. But I felt satisfied. Content. I didn’t feel the need to ride on, to search any further.
I opened the zipper on my tent, frozen for a moment by the loud screech it made, and then I fell onto my sleeping bag. My ears reached out beyond the thin dome of nylon to search out the night sounds, seeking out those that I knew as I drifted off to sleep.
On Sunday morning I awoke to the clank of milk cans. Beside my tent was a small water tank. Hans and Heinrich set the tall steel cans of milk into the water to keep them cool over the Sabbath until the cheese factory reopened on Monday.
When the chores were done the whole family disappeared into the house to get ready for church, and I retreated to my tent to get dressed. The best I had in my wardrobe was oil-stained jeans, a black shirt, and my black leather riding boots. I looked like a biker. I crawled out of my tent just in time to see Hans stride across the yard. He looked like a true gentleman, in a dark suit with a tall white cowboy hat. He climbed aboard his buggy carrying a small wooden box of hymn books, which he gently tucked under the seat.
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