Growing Up Amish

by Ira Wagler

  On the wheat harvest, there is little opportunity to spend money. All you do is work, sleep, and eat, day after day. This meant my wages would sit idle and accumulate until the harvest was over.

  Ben had four harvesting machines, combines, they called them. Massive hulks of fabricated steel on wheels, painted John Deere green. Each one was as big as a house, with a roomy cab mounted front and center and encased in glass so the driver’s vision would be unimpaired, at least on three sides. Dean and I walked out and inspected them. I was astounded and intimidated. Maybe this time I’d bitten off more than I could chew.

  “It’ll take a month to learn how to drive one of these,” I said.

  Dean laughed. “They’re simple to operate,” he said. “You’ll be driving by tomorrow afternoon.”

  We rode out the next morning in a combine. Dean was at the wheel, and I perched beside him on the armrest of the driver’s seat. He shifted into gear, and the combine shuddered as the thirty-foot-wide cutting blade clacked to life below us. We moved slowly forward into the field; behind us, wheat poured into the combine’s holding bin. Dean coached as he drove. “Keep your hand on the lever, here. You can feel if something’s wrong, once you get the hang of it.” “Keep your eyes on the cutting blade, down below, and make sure the wheat falls in smoothly.” “Watch out for rocks.” And so on. After lunch, he got out of the driver’s seat and motioned me in. Thus began my crash course in operating heavy farm machinery.

  It was a weird feeling, operating such an enormous piece of equipment. A short hydrostatic lever controlled the ten-ton machine. Push the lever forward to move forward, pull it back for reverse. And that was about it. We throbbed along that afternoon, Dean keeping a careful eye on things. I remained tense and alert, always scanning for any sign of mechanical trouble.

  Dean stepped out of the combine sometime during the second day, leaving me all alone in the cab. He moved over to the job he loved, jockeying Ben’s semi-tractor hitched to double trailers, hauling wheat to the elevators in Great Falls, while I trundled along timidly in the fields, driving the combine on my own. For a few days after that, Ben kept a close eye on me. When he saw that I was responsible and careful, he relaxed, and I grew more and more confident with each passing day.

  In the comfort of my air-conditioned cab, I drove and drove through endless acres of waving gold. And in that private zone, alone in my cab, the recent past gradually receded from my mind until it seemed far away—another world, in another life. Physically, I was a long way from Bloomfield, and emotionally, the distance lengthened each day.

  I immediately connected with Donna, Ben’s wife. The year before, she had emerged from a long battle with cancer. She’d licked it, at least for the moment, although within a decade or so it would return and claim her. She was a strong and beautiful woman, exuding fortitude and courage. Perceptive and intelligent, she instantly saw through my smiling facade and sensed that I was running from something in my past, that I was lost and searching. And in time, she openly confronted me. Not as a hostile force but as someone who was genuinely interested and concerned. I remained guarded at first, but as time passed, I began to confide in her. I told her who I was. What I was. The things I’d done. And she was intrigued.

  At the time, I was deeply immersed in the works of Leon Uris. During our conversations, I cautiously mentioned as much. She immediately went out and bought one of his novels and read it cover to cover in a few short days, and then we discussed our opinions of it.

  Ben, too, lightened up a good deal as the weeks rolled on. He was a good and decent man, slightly dour, with a dry sense of humor. He was a businessman, a farmer, and above all else, a man who walked forward into life, tall and confident. He had been born in the Hutterite colonies in Alberta. A communal branch of the Anabaptists, this society was even more closed than the Amish. His parents had left the colonies, and Ben grew up mostly outside the confines of that isolated culture. But he knew and understood what it was to break away. Through the course of many decades, he had seen his parents grapple with the pain, the struggles, and the stress of it.

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but this Mennonite couple from Magrath, Alberta, were providing exactly what my hungry, traumatized mind craved and cried for at that moment. Ben provided me with work, a job that required many hours of physical effort each day. He looked me in the eyes and treated me like a man. And Donna, well, she provided intellectual challenges and a tentative place to communicate, even though at that time I had little grasp of how to do so. They were there, Ben and Donna, and to a large extent, they were safe. Safe, as in a place for me to unwind from and absorb the stress and strain of all that I had just fled back east.

  The days and weeks rolled by, and August came. Day after day we rolled through the fields, from midmorning until midnight or later, when the call would come over our two-way radios to stop for the night. Then we would park our machines, get out, and wait for the pickup to fetch us and haul us back to camp, where we would fall into our beds for a few hours of exhausted, dreamless slumber before getting up the next morning to do it all over again.

  Sometime in August, Dean left for his home in Daviess. He did not travel the wheat harvest because he had to, but simply because he enjoyed it. He didn’t need the money. It was unfathomable to me that he could afford to travel for almost two months without any concern about his future. Wherever he went and whatever he did, he was never really alone. He had his family back in Daviess. A secure support structure, always there for him in case of emergency.

  And I knew they would have been there for me, too, in an extreme emergency. But in the normal course of things, I had no one. Unlike Dean, I was alone in the world. Whatever happened, he would be okay. He would somehow make it back to his family. I would not—because there was no family to whom I could return. Not in my current state.

  With Dean’s departure, the fact that I was alone, at least symbolically, was even more obvious. I had people around me, of course—Ben and Donna and the crew. But except for Donna, they didn’t know that much about my past. I was on a clean slate, alone, among those I had never known before. No connection whatsoever to Daviess or Bloomfield. What little Dean knew of my past stayed with him and went home with him. And in the vast Montana landscape, I felt a strange new sense of freedom in the here and now. The past was behind me. Who knew what the future held? In the moment, I simply lived.

  In the spirit of this vagabond life, I decided to grow a beard and a mustache. It actually looked pretty tough, especially after I took to wrapping a bandanna around my head as a standard part of my daily attire. I could have been a mean biker, the way I looked. Definitely not someone you’d want to meet in a dark alley late at night. But it was just image, with no real substance. I wondered if all the tough guys I had ever seen felt the same way. Or even some of them. Maybe it was nothing more than a sham, dressing like that.

  Late August came, and with it, my birthday. I was twenty-five years old, and I celebrated alone, quietly and reflectively. I don’t remember if I even mentioned it to those around me. To me, twenty-five had always been some distant, mystical age by which I figured I would be settled into the Amish faith and lifestyle. A young Amish husband in my own newly established household, perhaps with a son or daughter, moving forward into the future, content in the quiet life. That’s where I had always thought I’d be at twenty-five.

  But that’s not where I was. I was in the remote country of Montana, vagabonding my way through life, thousands of miles from the land of my father’s people, because I could not abide there. It was a bit of a jolt to realize, at twenty-five, that life was not turning out as I’d always imagined.

  After the wheat harvest was done, Ben planned to travel from Great Falls over the border into Canada. He asked if I would come along and work for him. By then, I was considered an experienced, battle-hardened hand—just the kind of guy Ben needed in Canada to harvest his own crop. With my Canadian birth certificate, I could legally cross the border
and work. I agreed to go on one condition. I needed a guarantee—fifty hours a week, at five bucks per hour.

  Amazingly, Ben agreed to my terms. I figured his local labor market must have been pretty bleak or he wouldn’t have agreed so readily. But his risk was low. They’d never worked fewer than fifty hours a week in previous years. How could he go wrong?

  And soon enough, we harvested the last acre and wrapped it up in Montana. During the next few days, we disassembled machines and loaded them on trailers for transport up north. And when we left, I got my first and only experience as a trucker. I proudly drove Ben’s ten-wheel dump truck, pulling a thirty-foot combine head on a trailer. I reveled in the experience. Bearded and bandannaed, I gripped the steering wheel and shifted gears like a pro. When we reached the border, I handed over my paperwork, and they waved me through—a boring moment for a real trucker, an intense, once-in-a-lifetime moment for me.

  I pulled into Ben’s huge farm complex and parked out by the shop. This was my first time in Alberta, three provinces west of Ontario, the place of my birth. Ben pointed me toward a small travel trailer set up behind the shop, where I unpacked my meager belongings and got mentally set for the long days ahead.

  Then a strange thing happened. Great cloud banks rolled in from the west, and it began to rain. And rain. And rain. Day after day, then week after week. Such heavy, persistent rains were a rarity for the season, and as the days passed, the soggy wheat bent heavy on the stalk and then bowed to the ground. There was nothing to be done except wait. And wait. Restless, I puttered around the shop, swept, cleaned, and asked Donna for projects she wanted done. Eventually, I was stuck. There was no work. But I didn’t sweat it. Ben had guaranteed me fifty hours a week. So whether I actually worked or not, I knew I’d get paid.

  It rained for a solid month. It was the first time in anyone’s memory that such a thing had happened. Ben stirred about uneasily, looking at the dark, spitting skies. But there was nothing he could do.

  In an effort to pass the time, I commandeered Ben’s farm pickup and headed off to the town of Lethbridge, about twenty miles away. There, I hung out with the other harvesters, local guys who gladly welcomed me into their group. I loved spending time with them, absorbing the clamor of their Canadian dialect. They were good guys, all of them. One of them owned a house in town, where I ended up staying for days on end, partying, vegging, and just hanging out, waiting for the rain to stop.

  After four weeks of incessant rain, the skies finally cleared. This time, it was not a temporary halt, as had happened a few times before. The sun came out and stayed out, drying the earth and the soggy wheat. After a few days, we geared up for work, silently, almost desperately.

  And then we attacked—one vast field after another. The largest one was two miles square. We cut that field and many others. Day and night for four weeks we worked. And then it was done. We had finished the Alberta harvest.

  It was time for me to leave that world and head back east. Back to Daviess and the people and places I had not seen for months. Ben and I settled up. He never winced, but paid me through all those weeks of rain, plus the actual hours of labor on the harvest.

  It was a nice, fat check. At least to me it was. A good chunk of money. More than I had ever owned before. With the help of my new local friends, I went shopping for a vehicle. I wanted a pickup truck. A man’s wheels. We located one at a shady, small-time dealership. A Chevy, built in 1979. Blue, trimmed with a wide gray stripe on its sides, and dual exhausts. It was a classic truck with high mileage. But most important, it was priced within my budget—twenty-five hundred bucks. With what I had earned from Ben, I could buy the truck, get it licensed and insured, and still have enough left over to make it back east.

  It was my first vehicle since the Cougar with the 351 Cleveland engine, back in Florida. All I had to do now was come up with a fitting name. It didn’t take long. On the blue, hard-plastic bug shield mounted on the hood front, I glued reflective letters spelling the word Drifter. It seemed so fitting for who and where I was at that time.

  In the next few days I packed up to leave and said good-bye to Ben, who offered me work the following spring.

  “Come on up and help me seed my fields,” he said. I felt good about the offer and promised to consider it. Then I stopped at the house to say good-bye to Donna. She wished me safe travels and invited me to return again, as a friend if not a worker. And then I left them.

  30

  It was late October, and the nights were chilling. From Canada I headed down to Montana and stopped for the night at the Rossmiller farm, where I had learned to drive a combine mere months before. They greeted me cheerfully and put me up for the night. The next day I headed east.

  I took my time, meandering back. A week or so later, I arrived in Daviess, where I discovered my friends in a tizzy. They had not heard from me in more than a month. This was, of course, before cell phones. You couldn’t just call someone whenever you wanted. I had not communicated much with Eli or the Wagler family since the summer, and not at all recently. As the days and weeks passed and no word came from me, they imagined something terrible must have happened. They were ready, they claimed, to send someone on the road to find me.

  I settled into the trailer house with Eli and his brother, but not for long. I could not rest in Daviess. I itched to move and to travel. And within a week or two, I was making plans to head south to Florida for the winter.

  I took what money I had, loaded the Drifter, and headed down to Pinecraft, the Sarasota Amish suburb where my brother Nathan lived. There, I rented a room and found a job as a mason’s helper. I had not been back to Florida since Marvin and I lived there in 1981. Nathan and his friend Eli Yutzy lived in an apartment in the very center of Pinecraft, and we hung out almost every night, playing cards and partying.

  I’m sure I appeared relaxed to those around me during those winter months. I enjoyed life and, to some degree, enjoyed living. But always, deep down, a thread of desperation pulsed inside me. I was a drifter, a rolling stone with no goals and chronically short of money. I was living day to day. I had zero long-term plans, or short-term plans for that matter. It was not a good place to be—financially, emotionally, or spiritually.

  And always the old thoughts crept in and tormented me. I could not squash them, could not escape. I brooded quietly, intensely. What would happen to me if I were killed? I knew, deep down, there was no hope, none at all, that I would ever make it to heaven. I’d done so many bad things, hurt so many people. I had left the Amish church for the world after promising—on my knees when I was baptized—to be faithful. Breaking those vows was a very serious thing. There could be no hope of ever righting those wrongs. Not unless I returned and repented and rejoined the church, which was not an option.

  But I could not shake the thoughts of my sins and of the afterlife. I knew I was lost and frankly admitted as much. There was no salvation for me. Not in my current state. I had escaped the box of the Amish lifestyle. That was a simple matter of making a decision and walking away. But the box that bound my mind wasn’t that easy to escape. Entrenched inside my head, powerful and persistent, my fear of eternal damnation would not be denied. And I could not shake it off.

  Once again—in spite of myself and in spite of the fact that it had never worked out before—thoughts of returning sprouted and grew. Frightful thoughts of returning to the fold of the Amish church. It was the strangest thing. I had returned three times before over the years, and not once had it worked. In time, I always despaired, always chafed at the confines of the culture. And yet I felt that this time might be different. This time, I could make it work.

  It was tricky, the way things played out in my mind. The Amish have always taught, always preached, that once the desire to return leaves, that’s when you are truly lost. Because that’s when your conscience has been seared with a hot iron and you won’t know right from wrong. You’re a walking dead man. Preachers have polished off many a sermon with tales of such people,
people bereft of hope who yearned for the desire to return and could not grasp it. Tales of woe and loss and tears of regret and eternal damnation.

  And in my head, I still held on to that spark, that remnant of desire to make it work. I seized on that remnant as proof that I could make it work. Simply because there was a shred of desire. Desire based on fear to be sure, but desire nonetheless. I could return. I would return. In the future, of course. At some distant date, maybe the next summer. That was still far enough away that I could consider it without freaking out. Inside me, the restlessness stirred, as it always had. Wherever I was, I wanted to return to where I’d been before. Not the real place, but the idyllic place in my mind. The place that could be, if only I could get it right. And do it right.

  I mulled over the issue and mentioned guardedly to my friends that I was thinking of returning once again to the Amish church.

  Their reactions were pretty unified, mostly a mixture of horror, disbelief, and astonishment. My “wild” buddies were incredulous. Why would someone do such a thing? I’d just torn away from Bloomfield. How could I even think of going back into that mess? It wouldn’t work. Even my Christian friends, the Wagler family, responded with polite disbelief. They were much nicer about it, but clearly skeptical nonetheless. From their perspective, why would someone ever want to return to the darkness of that cold and legalistic world?

  And so, surrounded by doubters, I found myself alone again. Alone and confused. But I could not shake the idea. Why couldn’t I go somewhere else and try it? Some other community instead of Bloomfield? That way, I wouldn’t have to face all those people from the past. Especially those I had hurt so cruelly. Especially my parents. And Sarah.

  I still thought of her sometimes. Mom wrote to me of her and how she was doing. In one letter Mom dramatically informed me that Sarah had had a date with someone else. Another guy. Now she was gone, Mom wrote. It was too late for me to ever get her back. Mom’s message was crafted to make me feel bad, but instead, I read her words and felt nothing.