P. L. Gaus’s Ohio Amish Journal

What is quiet to you?  A city at night, the background noises muffled by thick walls?  A distant train whistle in a small town?  Or crickets at night, nothing else around?  How about a place so quiet that you can hear the clipping of a horse’s hooves, two hundred yards away, on the blacktop of an isolated country lane? 

Here is a picture that speaks quiet to me.  Snow mutes both near and distant noises.  The countryside is asleep, everyone inside where a wood stove provides the heat.  There is no clanging from the metal parts of a windmill.  There is nothing happening on the farm.  And only once in a while does a buggy happen by. 

You hear the hooves first, and then the rattle of the undercarriage and wheels becomes audible.  It seems loud as it passes, but that is a relative thing.  After it has gone, the quiet returns.  If you stand there long enough to let your ears adjust, you pick out the faint trill of water running in the drainage ditch beside the road.  It’s still winter, but you want to think spring.  In Ohio, that means that it is still possible to have a deep freeze that silences even the noise of the snow melting. 

That is true quiet – a place so cold that nothing moves.  I’m sure it’s coming again, maybe one more time before the end of March.  But for now, quiet is that little trickle of water beside the road, the snow melting for the moment, in a rare February thaw. 

It seems almost to be a racket, once your ears adjust to the silence all around.  And if you live in the city, it’s a quiet you’ve probably never heard.

Would you hang laundry out to dry in winter?  Sure, if you were Amish.  The question is how do you wash it first?  Remember the old ringer-washers?  If the answer is yes, you’ve dated yourself.  The ones I remember were mostly electric, though, and many Amish forsake the use of gasoline generators for such appliances, using only those square galvanized wash and rinse tubs, often with a corrugated washboard and a hand agitator, too:

(http://www.lehmans.com/store/Home_Goods___Laundry).

How does that sound for an afternoon’s labor?  And remember – for a large family, that’s probably every afternoon.

It took a while, but I finally was able to finish constructing my author’s website, and perhaps those of you who have been following my blog will find it interesting.  The launch of my website is timed to precede the release of the new Plume (a division of Penguin Group USA) editions of my stories, which are all going to be re-published as trade paperbacks, beginning on September 28, 2010.  Details of the publication dates are available on my new website.  These Plume editions have been edited lightly to remove a few intemperate words and passages, making them considerably more appropriate for the Christian book market.  The essence of the original stories is all still perfectly intact, so I was pleased with the opportunity to improve the writing.  At any rate, check out the new website at www.plgaus.com, and if you are inclined, use the email link listed under contact information to let me know what you think of it.

 The wheat and barely harvests in Holmes County are well underway, again, and on most farms, one finds a field like this one, where the shocks are out to dry.  It’s quite an amazing thing to watch a family bring in the crop.  Everybody works at it, from grandparents and parents, down to the toddlers.  First, a sheaf is made by laying a bundle of stalks lengthwise, and then tying it in the middle.  One group works at this task.  Then behind them, others gather the sheaves and stand them to make a shock, something like seven to twelve sheaves stood up together.  Father comes last, spreading the last sheaf out over the top to make a cover.  The shocks will stand like that for several weeks, so that the grain can dry and cure in the open air, and a field like this is a common sight this time of summer.  Mostly it is wheat that is done this way, but other grains are also shocked, as is the feed corn in the fall. 

 Such a field plainly marks this farm as Amish, and this one is typical of those in Holmes County, Ohio.  There is a windmill to pump water, and several outbuildings for hay and livestock.  There is also a Daadihaus for the grandparents.  Then, the roofline sports two chimneys, one at the back for the wood stove in the kitchen, and one in the center, for wood stoves, probably on each floor of the house.  But other things mark this as an Amish farm, too.  First, there are no cars and no wires.  There is no TV antenna and no cable service.  It’s hard to see in this photo, but there are several clotheslines near the house, and on the back side of the house, there is the typical shade porch running the full length of the dwelling.  It is all very plain, old-fashioned, and simple, like an Amish farm should be, but to my way of thinking, wheat fields like this one give Holmes County an exotic flavor, in a curiously old-world sort of way.  I never grow tired of seeing it, but I guess you could have predicted that by the fact that I’ve blogged about it before.  It just seems to me that some scenes are worthy of repetition.

The contrast of the modern on the old is quite high in Holmes County, Ohio, just like the contrast of black on white in this photograph.  Here, the old world and the new operate side by side, Amish living separate lives, dispersed among the English of the county, and sharing the roads and towns as if there were nothing unusual about the contrast between the old world and the new.  We who have lived in this part of Ohio don’t even notice the contrast any more.  There seems nothing improbable about the seventeenth century and the twenty-first being interlaced.  The integration of cultures is so successful that we are not surprised to crest a hill on a snowy lane and find a horse pulling a wagon loaded with sacks of grain.  We were out that day with an SUV with four-wheel drive because we thought that was the only way to drive through the deep snow.  Guess we were wrong.

Do you remember recess at school?  Do you remember the swings?  I do, and I remember how I used to pump those swings as high as I could go.  Amish kids are just like that, too.  But here is a pair of girls who have figured out a better angle on pumping a swing – one girl on each side, taking turns to pump from a standing position.  I saw several pairs of girls work this swing that day, taking turns on their way back from the outhouse at the edge of the school yard.  Kids at recess at a one-room Amish parochial school in winter?  They’re just like the kids I used to know – the more air under that swing, the better!

In Holmes County, Ohio, the largest Amish population in the world can be found sprawled across the rolling hills and down in the narrow valleys that so much reminded the first Amish settlers here of their homelands in Germany.  It’s a diverse Amish population, and we have everything from the most conservative Schwartzentruber Amish to the rather more urbane and liberal sects who interact extensively with the non-Amish, or English, population.  Modern conveniences range, according to sect, from the very slight accommodations to modernity that the Schwartzentrubers practice (such as sometimes using Coleman gas lanterns, instead of the more traditional oil and wick lamps), to the use by other sects of sophisticated electronic devices such as phones and computers.  And the “discernments” that make one accommodation agreeable to the Amish – whereas another accommodation is not yet agreeable – can be puzzling to say the least.

One of the nods toward modernity that most makes me chuckle is the neighborhood phone booth, often parked near the road where no one has to admit to owning the thing.  Here is a photograph of one such “neighborhood” Amish phone booth, and right away I suspect you’ll notice the most astonishing aspect of the thing.  Right, you got it.  That’s a solar panel mounted to the side of it.  Inside, there is a phone with an answering machine, and a fax machine, too.  Once you know what you’re looking at, you’ll begin to spot hundreds of these little phone booths peppered around the county.  Some are quite nice, and others are nothing more than little roofed enclosures attached to the back side of a barn.  I know one Amish fellow who has a phone mounted to a tree some hundred yards back into a stand of timber, so nobody can see it.

So there is progress in Holmes County.  Slow progress to be sure, but measurable nonetheless.  Who knows?  Maybe one day we’ll see radio-controlled airplanes for the kids to play with.  No, wait – I’ve already seen that.  Go figure.

In my Ohio Amish Mysteries, soon to be republished as the Amish-Country Mysteries by Plume (a division of Penguin Group USA), the old red-brick Holmes County Jail is featured prominently, and I thought my readers might like to see what it looks like. Here is a picture taken just a few years ago, after Holmes County moved its real jail to a modern facility in the countryside north of town.

Just inside the main door to the right is where I placed Ellie Troyer-Niell’s front counter, and that window on the first floor at the right corner of the building is where I put Sheriff Bruce Robertson’s large office. Many of my characters (Professor Michael Branden, the sheriff, and Pastor Caleb Troyer) have stood looking out from that window, to think or talk about a case.

The rest of courthouse square is taken up by the sandstone courthouse (off-camera to the left) and the tall civil war monument (off-camera to the right), and I’ll soon post photographs of those, too, so you can see the locations where many of my Millersburg scenes are set. In months to come, I’ll try to post photos of other scenes from my novels.

Courthouse square in Millersburg, Ohio, is often a setting used in my Ohio Amish Mysteries. On a prominent block in the center of town, there is a red-brick jail, a civil war monument, and the ornate sandstone Holmes County Courthouse, all surrounding a central lawn. I thought you would like to see pictures of these landmarks, and I have already posted a photograph of the jail. Here is one of the courthouse. They say that when it was first being built, you could see the gleam of the shiny copper top from the high ground in Salt Creek Township, twelve miles to the north. Today, that roof has gone the way of all such copper domes – oxidized to dull green – and it is not nearly as pretty as they say it used to be. Even so, I think it is an impressive building.

In what has lately been a very hard winter here in Ohio, we got a break in temperatures these last few days, and I made a trip to Holmes County to see what the Amish people there were doing with the respite.  In typical fashion, they were out using the day to good purpose, mucking out the stalls and loading up manure spreaders.  Almost everywhere we turned, we saw teams hitched to red spreaders, walking slowly over the fields, pitching manure left, right and aft, preparing the soil for spring planting, or working over a field planted earlier with winter wheat.  At one farm, the lad had used a front loader to stack manure outside the barn, and he had a pile of aromatic fertilizer that was easily eight feet high and thirty yards long, all of it destined for the fields across the way.  I got this picture of him bringing his team back for another load, and I thought how remarkable it was that he’d do little else that day.  Move a pile of manure as big as an eighteen wheeler?  There’s only one way to do that – one trip at a time.