Footloose in America: Dixie to New England

by Bud Kenny

  In Holmes County I did expect to see plenty of Amish buggies on the road. But our first day there, we only saw one. Lots of Amish people passed us, but they were all in motor vehicles. We could see their hats, bonnets, beards and faces. The Governor said we’d be a hit with the Amish, and gauging by the expressions we saw, he was right.

  A crew-cab pickup truck, full of Amish men, went by us twice that day. The second time a young man, with long blond hair streaming out from under his straw hat, leaned out the window and gave us a thumbs-up, as he yelled, “Keep on rollin’!”

  The Amish weren’t the ones doing the driving. It was either a Mennonite or an English person behind the wheel. Around there, if you aren’t Amish or a Mennonite, you’re English–regardless your nationality.

  The Amish and Mennonites are part of an Anabaptist movement that began in Switzerland and migrated to Germany in the late 16th century. They didn’t believe in childhood baptism. The ones who drove the horse and buggies were Amish. Mennonites dressed the same as the Amish, but they own motor vehicles. The Amish hired Mennonites and the English as their chauffeurs.

  Our second day in Holmes County, as we were taking down the tent, a van pulled up, and two Amish women–who looked to be in their late sixties–got out. The English woman driving was about twenty years younger and she accompanied them as they approached our camp. She was the one who asked, “Do you mind if we stop to visit a bit?”

  The Amish women, Mary and Elsie, were both plump with round faces that beamed out from pleated white bonnets. They almost looked like sunflowers. Mary’s voice was chatty, when she said, “The whole community is buzzing about the English people traveling with a mule. But no one seems to know what you’re doing.”

  Elsie was the tallest and most assertive of the two. “We had Brenda stop so we could find out for ourselves.” Then with the kind of smile you’d expect from a Walmart greeter, she said, “Is that all right?”

  Their husbands were brothers who owned a farm together near Brinkhaven. While I told them about our trip, they listened intently with their hands clasped in front of them. I finished with, “I’ve had this dream for a long time, and now we’re making it come true.”

  Mary was bubbling with excitement. “I think this is just wonderful!” She turned to Elsie. “Don’t you love it? They’re traveling like people used to in the olden days.”

  Elsie rolled her eyes and shook her head. Then she turned to me and asked, “What do you think of the Amish in Holmes County?”

  Patricia said, “You’re the first one’s we’ve met.”

  Mary squealed, “Really?”

  Suddenly Elsie was exuberant. “You haven’t talked to any of the men?”

  “Some have waved,” my wife said. “But that’s about it.”

  Elsie’s fingers laced her hands together under her chin as if she were about to pray. But a mischievous laugh came out instead. “I just love this! The men always think they know so much.”

  Mary bounced as she giggled. “This will be such fun!”

  With an air of brinkmanship, Elsie said, “They just hate it when we know something before they do.”

  Originally, they weren’t from Holmes County. They sold their family farm near Middlefield, in northeastern Ohio, and moved down to Holmes County ten years ago. Elsie said, “It got too crazy for us up there.”

  Mary had a hint of disgust in her voice. “It got so commercial. They treated us like we were some kind of freaks. Always wanting to take our picture.”

  Elsie said, “One time, our neighbors were eating Sunday dinner and an Englishman just walked into their house with a camera. He didn’t knock, or anything. Just walked in and started taking pictures.”

  In the early 1970’s while I lived on a horse farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, one of our Amish neighbors–a woman–had a man barge into their outhouse with a camera and take her picture.

  The Amish first migrated to America from Germany around 1720. They came to escape religious persecution. Now they move due to the lack of shutterbug diplomacy.

  A few days later found us walking into the village of Berlin. It was a gray and blustery Friday afternoon. The date was August 23rd, and the area was rampant with tourists. Sometimes Highway 62 was bumper-to-bumper with them, and I was getting fed up with how inconsiderate they were toward the Amish on the road. I was shocked at how often I saw buggies get cut off in traffic. Everyone wanted to see the Amish, take their pictures, buy their handiwork and eat their cooking. But, God forbid, they should get stuck on the road behind a buggy.

  We were on the west edge of Berlin, headed into the village, when I saw a carriage waiting for a spot in traffic. It was at a stop sign on a side street on the other side of the highway. Even though it was nearly fifty yards ahead of us, it was obvious that the driver wanted to get in our lane and head toward town. But no one would stop and let carriage get out onto road. They just gawked, took pictures and kept on going.

  While we approached the intersection, I found myself getting angrier with each step. Why won’t they give this horse a break. When we got close, I eased us out into the eastbound lane. Traffic behind us had no choice but to stop. Then, when we got to the intersection, I stepped to the yellow line, held up my hand and motioned for the other lane to stop. They were going slow, but they kept coming. So I yelled at an approaching motorist, “Stop right there!”

  He stopped for a moment, then started to move. I roared, “Don’t you dare!”

  His brakes jarred the car to an abrupt stop. I yelled. “Stay right there!”

  Then I motioned to the man in the carriage. “Right this way, sir.”

  At first, the Amish man just sat there with a look of shock on his face. The carriage was packed with his family, and they were all just staring at me. Again, I gestured for them to pull in front of us, as I said, “Please, sir, we’ll all wait for you.”

  His bearded face beamed as he urged the horse out onto the highway. When the carriage passed in front of me, he nodded and said, “Thank you, sir. God bless you.”

  While the carriage rolled away from us, its open back window was filled with smiling young, wide-eyed faces–each one framed with a bonnet. All of them were waving as their horse clip-clopped off toward Berlin.

  “Are you staying here tonight?”

  I was unpacking the tent from the top of the cart, when Ferman asked me that question. This young A Amish man stood at least six-foot-four, and because he wore a beard, he had to have been married. (Only married Amish men wear them.) And if there was such a thing as a “trophy Amish husband”, Ferman would have been it. He was slender and muscular. His closely trimmed dark beard accentuated the sharp, strong angles of his face.

  We were in Berlin Village Park and it was starting to rain. I had Della pull the cart up next to a picnic shelter where we planned to pitch the tent inside. When we first got there it was just sprinkling, but it was steadily getting stronger. Before long it would be a heavy shower, so we were in a hurry to get the tent up.

  Ferman asked, “Can I help?”

  “Thanks, but we’ve got ourselves a routine.”

  “So, I’d probably be in the way, eh?”

  Three things made Ferman stand out from other Amish men. One was his looks. He was Johnny-Depp-kind-of-handsome–sans the mustache. (Amish don’t wear them.) Besides being the best looking Amish man I had ever seen, Ferman was also the most outgoing I’d ever met. He oozed the confidence of a successful politician.

  The third thing that made Ferman different from other Amish men, was the cell phone clipped to his pants pocket. “I’m a fireman. This is how they get hold of me.”

  An Amish fireman. Okay, here was another first for me. Looking at his chiseled features beneath his straw hat, for an instant my mind replaced the hat with a firefighter’s helmet. And instead of farmer’s work clothes, Ferman was in a yellow fireman’s-suit. No doubt, he could have been calendar material.

  Berlin Village Park was in a rolling valley. The pic
nic shelter was on a knoll on the west side, about a hundred yards from the park’s boundary. At that boundary were the back yards of a dozen homes. Ferman, and his pregnant wife, lived in the one directly behind the shelter. She was due anytime, and this would be their first.

  The houses at that side of the park were various types, sizes and age. Ferman’s was the newest–a brown brick, split level, with three bedrooms. It was so new, the dirt around it hadn’t been leveled into a yard yet.

  Ferman’s father, Jonas Miller, lived in the oldest house adjacent to the park. It was about a quarter of a mile from the shelter, at the park’s north-west corner. A plain two story farm house, with several outbuildings, a barn and paddock for his road-horse and a pony.

  Jonas was my age–in his mid-fifties. We met him just as Ferman was about to leave for home. Had Ferman not said, “Hey, here comes Dad!” I never would have guessed they were related. While Jonas was certainly not an ugly man, he was no looker like his oldest son. And Ferman didn’t get his height from his father either. But there was no doubt where the young fireman got his smile and personality. When Jonas limped into the picnic shelter, it felt like a long lost friend had just dropped in.

  “I trust my boy gave you a proper welcome.” Jonas patted Ferman on the back, then extended that hand to me. “Jonas Miller. It’s a pleasure to have you in the neighborhood.” Then he aimed his thumb over his shoulder, and said, “I live in the place at that end of the park. If you need anything just come on over. Do you want to put your mule in a barn?”

  It had been a hot, muggy day, and it looked like Della was enjoying the rain. So I said, “Thanks, but I think she’d rather be near us. And the rain will do her some good.”

  Jonas nodded as he sat down at one of the picnic tables. “My horses have the choice of being inside or out, and they’re all out in it right now.”

  Hoisting his right leg up onto the bench, Jonas said, “Every veterinarian I’ve known says, the more they’re outside the healthier they’ll be.”

  For the first thirty years of his working life, Jonas had been a horseshoer. “But it was getting to my back.” So he went to work in the logging woods driving a team of horses. Last February he got his leg caught between a skidding log and a tree. It shattered the leg, so he was laid up for several months. When we met Jonas, he had recently gone to work as a tour guide at nearby exotic animal farm. He drove tourists around the eighty-eight acre farm in a wagon pulled by a team of horses.

  “I didn’t think I’d like dealing with tourists all the time.” Jonas pushed his straw hat back and laughed. “But it’s the most fun job I’ve ever had. I love going to work. Too bad I had to cripple myself up to find a job that I like so much.”

  It rained most of that night, then off and on throughout Saturday. So we spent most of the day in the picnic shelter. Because of the rain, there were no wagon tours at the animal farm. So Jonas had the day off–he spent part of it visiting with us. As you would expect, I asked him a lot of questions about Amish life.

  “What I don’t understand is, if you are against modern things, like cars and telephones, how do you justify riding in somebody else’s car–or Ferman carrying a cell phone?”

  “We aren’t against those things,” Jonas said. “It’s what those things can do to our families and our community that we don’t like.”

  I had just perked a pot of coffee on the camp stove, and was pouring Jonas a cup when I asked, “Like what?”

  “The most important thing to us Amish is our family. We believe if our families fail, so will our community. So we avoid anything that threatens to tear our families apart. We see things like cars, telephones and televisions as a threat to our families.”

  Jonas’s spoon clinked against the insides of his coffee cup as he said, “Cars carry people too far away from their family. With a horse and buggy, you have to stay pretty close to home. And when there’s a telephone in the home, children don’t talk to their parents, or brothers and sisters. Instead they’re talking to someone who isn’t there. With TV, rather than being involved in their own lives, they sit and watch somebody else’s.”

  Jonas paused and laid the spoon on the picnic table next to the cup. Then he said, “How can a family survive, when the people in it are not living in the present?”

  I sat down on the bench across the table from Jonas. “Okay, but I see Amish riding in other people’s cars all the time. How do you explain that?”

  Jonas chuckled. “I knew you were going to ask me that. Like I said, we aren’t against cars. We don’t see them as evil. They’re tools that sometimes we have to use. I ride back and forth to work in a van every day. But we hire someone who has one. It’s part of their family, not mine. When I’m done using it, it’s gone. It’s not sitting in my yard so we just can hop in it and buzz around. If my children want to visit their friends, they can walk or ride a bicycle. The older ones use the horse and buggy. My youngest has his own pony. So it’s not like they don’t have a way to get around.”

  Bringing the cup to his lips, Jonas said, “Keeps them closer to home.”

  “What about Ferman and his–”

  “Cell phone,” Jonas finished my sentence. “That was a big event in our community. Everyone in the district, the Bishop, all of us talked that over for nearly a month.”

  A district consists of twenty to forty Amish families who live in close proximity. They have services every-other Sunday at a different home, which is usually led by the Bishop, or a minister that he appoints. Bishops preside over several districts.

  “Ferman had his heart set on being a fireman. Since he would be helping the community, we decided he should do it. When there’s a fire, they have to be able to get in touch with him. So he had to have a cell phone. It’s good for the community.”

  That Saturday night we had visitors from one Mennonite and three Amish families in our camp. While it rained outside, the picnic shelter rang with stories and laughter until nearly midnight. Stories told by men with wide brimmed hats, suspenders and mustache-less beards. Ivan Moore was one of the Mennonites. He was in his early seventies, squatty and the first person in Holmes County to ask if I was a Christian. His house was one of those that bordered the park, and his son lived next door. They both visited us a couple of times while we were there. It was on the first visit that he popped the Christian question. I guess he was all right with my reply. Both he and his son came back and were part of the Saturday night crowd.

  The funniest topic of the evening was tourists. After seeing how inconsiderate the motorists were, I would have thought the Amish would be as disgusted as I was. But this group was more amused by them than anything.

  “My daughter had a real corker a couple of days ago,” Ivan said. His daughter worked at the Berlin Visitor Center. “A woman came in and asked where she could find the Amish. My daughter gave her a map and showed her which roads she most likely would see some.”

  Ivan’s short, thick body began to heave with laughter as he said, “She threw a fit and said, ‘You mean they’re just out running loose? Isn’t that dangerous?’”

  The picnic shelter reverberated with laughter as Jonas piped in, “Oh, that’s us. Dangerous Amish. They really should lock us all up.”

  “And throw away the key,” Ivan added.

  A little later Ivan stood up and announced it was time for him to go home. Then he turned to me and said, “You’re welcome to join us for church in the morning. I know none of these Amish invited you to their service.”

  “You know good and well we don’t have service until next Sunday.” Jonas said.

  Ivan laughed. “See, we Mennonites aren’t nearly as good as the Amish. They only have to go to church every other Sunday. Us poor Mennonites have to go every Sunday.”

  The picnic shelter exploded with laughter again. The Amish and Mennonites seemed to laugh a lot. Every time I saw them greet each other, or us, it was always with good humor. It wasn’t just the adults. Several times Patricia and I remarked how
happy Amish children seemed to be. And they were always polite.

  Earlier that night, as rain pelted the roof of the picnic shelter, Ivan read a poem to the group. The gist was, “Always greet your neighbor with a glad face.”

  Sunday, instead of going to the Mennonite Church, we had dinner with Jonas Miller and his family. It was a great honor to have Ohio’s governor invite us into his mansion, but it paled in comparison to being invited to an Amish home for Sunday dinner.

  It was at one o’clock and fifteen people showed up, too many to sit around the table. So folks sat on chairs, sofas, stools and the floor with their plates in their laps. In the middle of the Miller’s kitchen table was a platter piled high with pork chops. Some were barbequed, others baked and a bunch were fried. Big bowls with two different pastas, steamed corn and a heaping pan of tossed salad were also on the table. Before everyone helped themselves, we all went into the living room, held hands in a circle and said the traditional Amish grace–a few quiet moments for silent prayer.

  I think “quiet grace” is a perfect way to describe the Amish. They go about their lives simply, without pretense or trying to impress the rest of the world. I have never known an Amish person to push their religion, or their way of life, on anyone. They just live their lives the way they think they should.

  “Can someone who isn’t born Amish become Amish?”

  I asked that question of Esther Mullet. She and her husband Bennie drove up to our camp Sunday morning in a two-wheel cart pulled by a pair of Haflinger horses. Esther said, “Yes. But as an adult, it would be a hard thing to do.”

  “You mean giving up their worldly ways?”

  “No. I think the language would be the hardest part.”

  Esther went on to explain that the Amish in America speak three languages. Growing up they learn English, “Pennsylvania Dutch” and High German. Actually Pennsylvania Dutch is not Dutch at all. It’s a type of German. Originally it was known as Pennsylvania Deutch (Deutch meaning German). But Englishmen mistook the word Deutch for Dutch. So these days even the Amish call the language Pennsylvania Dutch. That’s what they speak in their homes and within their community. High German is used in their church services. It’s the type of German that was spoken in the fifteenth century. Esther said, “These days most Germans don’t understand High German.”