Running with Sherman

by Christopher McDougall

  It’s a tough life, and it starts early; whenever I grumble in winter waiting for my old Ford to warm up, I quiet down as soon as I look up and see the parade of Amish kids hiking through heavy snow in the cornfield behind our house on their long walk to school. One frosty morning, I picked up a neighbor at five thirty to go to the Amish hardware store, and his three preschool-age sons were already working in the barn with him.

  “Are they always up this early?” I asked Daniel.

  “If they want breakfast, they are,” he said.

  I didn’t really get this insistence on rugged old-fashionedness when we first moved to the Southern End. It was charming, for sure; we loved sitting on the porch in the evening and hearing the soft drumbeat of horse-drawn buggies instead of car horns and the roar of city buses. But seriously—phones have to be in a shed in the cornfield, not in the house? Chain saws and in-line skates are fine, but bikes and Toro lawn mowers are banned? Teens can play dodgeball, volleyball, and ice hockey, but not baseball? No electricity, no tractors—no zippers? Was there some kind of Old Order Da Vinci Code at work, or was it just to make life harder than it had to be for no real reason, like deciding you’ll write only with your left hand or back your car into a parking spot using just the mirrors? Every time I thought I was getting a handle on Old Order-liness, I’d run into another rule that seemed less about revealed truth and more about…well, I didn’t really know. Was it thought control? Sexual denial? Straight-up crazy fundamentalism?

  I was already perplexed, and that was even before I met Sam Stoltzfus and learned about his Nazi espionage library. I ran into Sam for the first time when I got lost on my way to a local cabinetmaker’s house and flagged down a passing buggy to ask for directions. Sam pulled over, and when he told me he also was a woodworker, I hired him instead. I followed him to his barn so he could stable his horse, then brought him back to my house to take measurements for the desk and bookshelves I needed.

  During the drive, Sam was curious to hear how an “English”*1 guy like me had wandered into the River Hills from downtown Philly. Needless to say, I had a million questions for him, too. Like, how come one of my neighbors was shunned for using a tractor, yet the community turned out in force to support a pair of Amish teens who’d been arrested for what had to be the grand enchilada of all Old Order sins: they’d been arrested for dealing crack to other Amish teens, after narcotics officers began wondering why two young guys with soup-bowl haircuts were driving in and out of Southwest Philly to visit the Pagans motorcycle gang. How was that fair?

  Sam not only understood; he added a few juicy tales of his own. Like the one about the cops who showed up at the scene of an accident and found an Amish boy passed out in a buggy with blood on the road but no horse: the boy was so blitzed, he never woke up when a hit-and-run truck driver slammed into the horse and carried it another quarter mile down the road before it fell off the hood. Sam and I were getting along so well, he invited me to come back to his shop and hang out while he explained Amish thinking to me. In return, he had a favor to ask: could I find a few books he wanted?

  “I can try,” I replied, figuring I might locate whatever prayer books he wanted on Alibris or the Gutenberg archive. “What are you looking for?”

  “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” Sam said. “And How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

  “Really?” I hadn’t seen that coming. “Uh—in English, right?”

  “Yes, English. And Nazi spy books. Can you find some of those?”

  Self-help and storm troopers—wow. Sam explained that a few weeks earlier, he’d picked up a box of old paperbacks at the “mud sale,” our fire company’s outdoor auction held each year in a soggy field after the spring thaw. Sam wanted only the gardening and herbal remedy titles, but included in the box were also Frederick Forsyth’s The Odessa File and some personal-improvement books. Out of curiosity, Sam dipped in and found himself enthralled. The self-help stuff I could see, since I’m sure he recognized a lot of himself in the continuous-growth/seek-first-to-understand ethos, but I wouldn’t have expected him to come away with a heightened interest in Israeli revenge killings and West Berlin strippers.

  “Won’t you get in trouble?” I was happy to lend him my own Forsyth books, but I didn’t want to be a coconspirator in my new friend’s excommunication.

  That was when Sam opened my eyes to what I’d been missing. Amish life isn’t about what you can’t have, he explained; it’s about what you can. What are the three things every person wants? Health, happiness, and security. Right? Well, the Amish are happier, healthier, and safer than the rest of us. By a long shot. This isn’t just opinion; it’s hard math.

  Let’s start with health and security. The Amish don’t go hungry, homeless, or broke, because they’ve quietly created their own little semi-socialist Scandinavian paradise right in the heart of red-state America. They adopt one another’s children, care for their old folks at home, build and pay for their own schools, and take in the needy. The Amish dodged the whole subprime mortgage fiasco by avoiding banks and shady brokers, relying instead on “Amish Aid,” a community pot that provides loans and homeowner’s insurance. Likewise, the Amish essentially created their own universal health care a long time ago, paying out of pocket for medical costs and helping their neighbors cover hospital bills by raising funds through auctions, donations, and sales of chicken pot pie.

  But of course they come into health care with one big advantage: better health. The Amish are six times more active than the average American, and half as likely to suffer from cancer or diabetes. They don’t smoke, drink, fight, or mess with drugs. They don’t get fat (the Amish obesity rate is a nearly nonexistent 4 percent versus almost 40 percent for the rest of us) or fool with guns (which kill or injure some 100,000 Americans every year). They’re big on real foods—kombucha, raw milk, grass-fed meats, organic produce, gut-enhancing fermented veggies, home-baked bread—and seldom eat out. They age gracefully, with far superior late-life mobility and overall health. The Amish rarely harm themselves, or anyone else. Their suicide rate is 70 percent lower than ours, and there has been exactly one Amish murder in all of American history, and that by a delusional psychotic. Which poses a sub-question: why is Amish mental health so sound that in three hundred years, they’ve created only one threat to public safety?

  Happiness can be tricky to measure, but if we look at the same metrics as used by the retail industry—customer loyalty and return business—Amish numbers are booming. You might assume that an eighteenth-century society surrounded by shopping outlets would be dying out by now, but the community has steadily doubled every twenty years, a growth rate five times higher than that of the U.S. population as a whole. The Amish have a better retention rate than Netflix: roughly 90 percent of young Amish adults choose to stick with the faith and join the church for life. And thanks to Menno Simons, they know exactly what they’re doing; baptism occurs after Amish teenagers have spent a year or more on rumspringa, or “running loose.” They’re free to buy cars, dress English, fly to Disneyland, pound Jäger at Mardi Gras, and even be forgiven if they’re boneheaded enough to buy drugs from Pagans. Once they’ve experienced the modern world, the overwhelming majority decide, Meh, not so great after all, and return to “living plain.”

  “We’re not perfect people,” Sam cautioned me. And tragically, every so often someone either in the community or affiliated with it will prove it. A few miles from our home, a couple who’d left the Amish church fourteen years earlier was convicted of giving nine of their daughters to a sex abuser who’d convinced them he was the “Prophet of God.” Back in 2011, a splinter group of Amish extremists in Ohio began terrorizing other church members by ambushing the men and forcibly shaving off their beards. Rather than bringing in law enforcement, the Amish prefer to discipline*2 their own through public penance and shunning, and that has left some women dangerously unprotected. An Amish moles
ter in Missouri was stopped only because the church reluctantly called the police after his third offense, and an Amish bishop not far from Lancaster was arrested after failing to report two cases of child molestation because he said it “wasn’t really that bad.”

  When talking and time-outs fail, that’s where Amish culture goes wrong. What’s amazing is how often it goes right. One afternoon, Sam and I went to visit his cousins’ buggy repair shop near Bird-in-Hand. “My uncle made a mistake with this business,” Sam told me. “He earned too much money.” Sam’s uncle was a whiz at salvaging unfixable buggies, even ones that had been crunched by cars in collisions. Since new buggies can cost up to $10,000, he began getting work towed in from as far away as Indiana and Kentucky. Word of his skill even spread to Disney and the Smithsonian, which hired him to restore vintage Wild West carriages. Then, at the peak of his success, Sam’s uncle hit the brakes. He gave away more than $1 million in savings, divided the business among his nephews, and moved his family to a small produce farm. Why?

  “Raising his children rich wasn’t fair to them,” Sam explained.

  And right there, in the moment that Sam’s uncle closed up shop, you can find the secret to Amish success. Sam’s uncle knew that happiness, health, and security come from devoting yourself to two things—your family and your friends—and anything that doesn’t bring you closer to both is pulling you in the wrong direction. Distance and envy are two poisons that can destroy any community, and that’s why the Amish have a problem with cars, fashion, and even electricity: they let you travel too far, show off too much, and stare at screens instead of faces.

  Sam’s uncle loved his craft, but he loved his community even more, and when he felt himself being drawn away by constant praise, easy work, and fat paychecks, he had to make a change. His decision was a declaration of faith in the five words that define Amish life:

  Slow down. Savor your world.

  Most of us whipsaw back and forth all day, racing to save time so we can sit around and waste it. The Amish are skeptical of speed, so before accepting any new technology, they question whether it makes life better, or just go by a little faster. They don’t automatically reject new things; instead, each Amish district debates for itself whether this new thing will help them learn patience, self-control, and empathy. If not, maybe the smart play is to avoid it.

  But even while Sam’s lips were still moving, I was arguing with him in my mind. I was on board with his logic about TVs and cell phones and maybe even air travel, but c’mon: enough already with the buggies. I kept my mouth shut because I felt that challenging him on this point was cutting a little too close to his core beliefs, but think about it: if the goal was to spend more time on your land and with your family, savoring your friends and God’s green earth, then what was the sense of creaking along in a black box for two hours because you needed to pick up a pound of flour? Especially when there was nothing stopping you from hiring a car whenever you felt like it. Sticking with the buggies was silly and stubborn, a pointless knee bend to a lost past—or so I thought, until a donkey that was afraid of puddles arrived in our backyard and suddenly the whole Rubik’s Cube machine of Amish interlocking logic clicked for me.

  It’s no coincidence, I realized, that the only Americans who don’t need cops, fists, or therapists to settle their differences are also the only ones who haven’t abandoned their business partnerships with animals. Patience and kindness don’t show up on demand; they’re disciplines that require constant practice, and there is no better boot camp for learning those skills than hitching your survival to your ability to discern—and respect—the needs of another creature. My Old Order neighbors understood that horses are less about transportation and more about education; for every hour they devoted to training their animals, their animals were quietly returning the favor. If you wanted to yank out the one piece in the Jenga tower that could make Amish culture and character come tumbling down, it’s easy: take away their horses, and watch centuries of fellowship and nonviolence begin to fray.

  There’s a lot I will never adopt from my Amish neighbors (long black pants in summer and a cap on education at eighth-grade spring to mind), but Sam opened my eyes to the difference between rules that hold you back and rules that help you grow. That was why he could read thrillers if he felt like it and had no qualms telling me that he’d seen (and kind of enjoyed) the movie Witness. Amos, our closest neighbor over the hill, dropped in one evening while friends were over for dinner. “This is wine?” he asked, never having seen it before. “Can I try?” Before I could reach for the bottle, he’d filled a water glass to the brim. He drank it off like it was lemonade, then set off to walk tipsily home in the dark. “Yeah, I don’t think I’ll be having that again,” Amos told me the next day. “Not enough evenings in life to spoil another one.” The Amish aren’t closed to the world, he’s saying; they’re just a little more goal-oriented about how much of it to let in.

  *1 By now, everyone knows that the Amish refer to all non-Amish as “English,” right?

  *2 If you’ve seen Amish Mafia, by the way, you’ve enjoyed a complete serving of fiction. No one has ever patrolled Lancaster County cornfields with shotguns or strong-armed errant Amish bishops.

  13

  Full Mooning

  The Naked Mennonite, though; that one had Deal Breaker written all over his bare chest.

  On hot evenings, one of the Mennonite runners who invited Amos to the Tuesday night track sessions would shuck his sweaty shirt, just like most other guys, but most other guys aren’t surrounded by 63,000 neighbors whose bodies are banned from exposure to sunlight under penalty of eternal damnation. Jim Smucker enjoyed watching Amos develop his remarkable talent, but he knew that getting spotted with the Naked Mennonite was bound to land him in serious hot water.

  Jim had seen it happen in his own family. Jim’s uncle was Old Order Amish, and as a teenager, he’d become a hell of a baseball player. Amish kids love the game, and just about every Amish schoolhouse has a chain-link backstop in the play area where the kids, boys and girls alike, split into teams during recess. Amish youngsters became such strong hitters and fielders that by the 1980s, word had spread to semipro leagues in Pennsylvania and Ohio that instead of recruiting in, say, the Dominican Republic, all they had to do was drive around Lancaster County and they’d find a literal farm system thriving among the cornfields. A few enterprising teams managed to sign these Amish fireballers and issue them uniforms, and that’s when the hammer came down. As soon as photos of the Amish players began turning up on the sports pages, the Old Order elders decided things had gotten out of hand. Only kids could play baseball, they decided. Teens would be limited to pond hockey, volleyball, and “eckballe,” an Amish dodging game using human targets and a rock-hard leather ball. There wasn’t much risk of any Amish skaters, spikers, or eckballe players going pro, which meant they’d wear their own clothes, stay out of the papers, and compete for fun, not fame.

  But Jim Smucker’s uncle went rogue. He was a gifted pitcher who’d been signed to a team along with his best friend, a catcher. For years, the two young Amish men had to sneak away and play under fake names so no one in the church would find out about their secret second lives. They never got caught, but it forced Jim’s uncle to spend a good part of his life ashamed of his talent, hiding the thing he loved from the people who loved him most.

  Jim Smucker knew that if Ame pushed things too far with the running, he could bring the same judgment down on his head. Ame was still a single guy living with his parents, so he had a little leeway. But at twenty-six, he’d reached the age when it was time to settle down and decide whether he was in the church or out, and from the looks of it, running was so far out that it could qualify for its own circle of hell. How could Ame justify racing in a 10K, where he would not only be vying for personal glory but hanging around a flesh-baring mob of women in sports bras and men in sausage-hugger shorts? Running was so
litary, speedy, and show-offy, a devil’s playground ruled by the false idol Strava. And hanging out with a Naked Mennonite, of course, wasn’t making his case look any better.

  But Jim had learned one thing about Ame: when you think he’s beat, that’s when he’s at his best. Maybe Ame couldn’t convert the Amish to running, but what if he converted running to the Amish? What if he turned baseball into volleyball?

  Like most dating-age Amish, Ame belonged to a youth group. On weekends, the gang would get together to hike and picnic, maybe go to the demolition derby up at “the Buck,” and definitely, whenever the weather was nice, set up a net in a big pasture and divide into coed teams for hours of volleyball. Amish elders have no quarrel with volleyball, because so far, it hasn’t gotten out of control: the youngsters wear their own clothes, stay out of the news, and compete for fun, not fame. So if you’re Amish, single, and ready to mingle, you can’t beat volleyball. It’s the perfect way for an Amish gal to flirt with that cutie she’s got her eye on by “helping” him with his serve, because everything is right out in the open. All Ame had to do was keep the spirit of volleyball and get rid of the nets, and he might be on to something.

  When Ame’s youth group went to Lancaster County Park one Sunday afternoon, he pitched them an idea: instead of hiking the trails, why didn’t they just cut loose and run? “I didn’t know what to expect,” a member of the group named Liz would later tell me. “I don’t know how the guys talked us into it.” But yeah, she does: she kind of fancied Ame. Off they went, tearing through the woods, the guys in their long black pants and suspenders, the gals in their long dark dresses and starched white headcoverings, taking on the rocky trails in whatever sneakers, boots, or shoes they happened to be wearing.