P. L. Gaus’s Ohio Amish Journal

If you’re like me, you are worried. Times being what they are, we are worried about the economy, we are worried about the election, and we are worried about global conflict. It’s an almost irresistible sense of worry that draws us to the news reports each day to learn what the latest crisis has been. Or to learn what has become of our retirement accounts. Or to listen to the presidential debates to try to decided who should be our next president. I think it is an affliction—this modern, electronic, hyper-sense of doom. And I often wish I were immune to it. Like the Amish are.

For the most part, the Amish people of Holmes County, Ohio, where I have set my Ohio Amish Mysteries, don’t have retirement accounts. They mostly don’t even have any money in the banks. They aren’t paying interest on a credit card, and they don’t ever worry about the Stock Market. They are immune.

The Amish people of Holmes County don’t vote for President, so they are not caught up in the frenzy of national politics. In fact, they don’t vote for any office that has control over life and death, because they do not believe in killing of any kind. So since the president has the authority to make war, they don’t vote for president. They don’t vote for sheriff, either, or for anyone who might carry a gun. They are pacifists of the first order, and they will not participate in any aspect of killing, not even to vote. So they are immune, you see, from the political frenzy that grips so many of us English.

Amish people also do not worry about global conflict. They are fatalists for the most part, much like the dwarf Enos Erb, a character in my sixth Ohio Amish Mystery, Separate from the World, where I examined the near-Zen nature of their devotion to God’s will in their lives. Global conflict? Why worry? It is in God’s hands.

So, the Amish have immunity. They live separate from the world, and they are immune to troubles like finances, politics, and war. That sounds pretty good, I think. You’d almost think that living Amish might be better. But the conversion is nearly impossible. Few of the English who have tried to live Amish have ever succeeded.

And that’s the story line in the new story I am crafting now, the seventh Ohio Amish Mystery. I don’t have a title, yet, and my editors have always proved better at giving a new story it’s title, anyway. I’ll just call it OAM-7 until they tell me what title I should use. In the meantime, I am wondering and writing about a thoroughly English fellow who has decided to give it a try—to become Amish—to try to find the immunity that these days seems so alluring.

That phrase probably means something different to the Amish than it does to you and me. Whereas we might think of it in terms only of a metaphor, Amish people think of it as literal, too, because you do need to make your hay when the sun shines. Take it up in the rain, and you’ve got a real problem

We’ve had an ideal growing season in Ohio this year, with plenty of rain interspersed with periods of bright sunshine. The corn in Holmes County is over fifteen feet high, and it is only the end of July. There was an abundant wheat crop, and fields of hay have been cycled through the sequence many times since spring. First you cut it at just the right time. It lays in rows, then, and looks green. Then, after it has dried a while, you rake it to turn it over, and let it dry some more. Now it starts to brown up. Amish farmers know just how it should look at this stage. They have to, because if you don’t have enough sunlight, and you take up your hay when it’s still too wet, it’ll decompose slowly and exothermically in the barn, ignite spontaneously, and burn the barn down. So nobody wants to put up wet hay. Thus, you have to make hay while the sun shines. You need it to dry out on both sides before you can bale it.

I got this picture as an Amish lady was working her team of horses through a field of cut and raked hay. She used a gasoline baler on her wagon, and you can see that the bales are nice and brown. The children came through later and helped the family load the bales onto a cart with iron wheels, and then it all went into the barn. It took the whole family to do it. There had been warm sunshine for several days after it was cut, and the hay was not too wet when they took it up.

So, you have to “make hay while the sun shines.” We think it means to take the opportunities that present themselves. The Amish know better. Or at least they know more.

There’s a country lane I know south of Fredericksburg, Ohio, just over the Wayne County border into Holmes County, where in the stretch of a few short miles, there are a dozen different types of Amish and Mennonite families living on adjacent farms, in a wide pastoral valley where there are few electric lines or TV antennas to mare the horizon. The gravel of the road there is perpetually laced with the thin, wispy lines made by buggy wheels, and the pace of life is as slow as a team of horses pulling a plow. I was there last December, on a cold and raw day when the sky was white with overcast, and the families were all tucked inside with fires burning in their wood stoves. I was just out for a drive, looking for the kind of stories I use in my Ohio Amish Mysteries, and I thought maybe I’d see something or meet someone interesting. I wasn’t disappointed.

In the farmyard of a Schwartzentruber family, nosed up against the red bank barn, there was a postal service truck, stuck in the mud about twenty yards down a steep slope from the road. I could see the tracks of the truck in the mud, tracing down into the barnyard and spinning this way and that, showing the evidence of all the maneuvers the postal lady had tried in order to run her truck back up the drive. But there the truck sat, sunk into the mud, and obviously going nowhere. I decided to watch. It was exactly the sort of thing I go looking for in Holmes County – the type of little story I like to gather for the mysteries I write. I’ve been doing this sort of thing for twenty years.

I stood up on the road and watched for a while. The driver tried several times to get the truck headed the right way up the hill, but she always found herself nosed back up against the rough red boards of the barn. I called down to her once to offer encouragement, and she said, “I think they’ll come out to help.” She meant the Schwartzentrubers inside. Those are the most conservative of all the Amish sects, living as close to the earth as they can figure out how to do. They don’t often go to town, and they don’t have much use for us English. I’ve spoken to the father there a couple of times, and the mother and grandmother of the family have sold me produce from time to time. The children are taught not to speak to people like me, and although they smile a lot when I say hello, not one of them has ever said a word in reply. So, I thought the mail lady was overly optimistic about their helping her up the hill. In all, I stood there about fifteen minutes, waiting to see what would happen. That’s usually the best way to travel in Holmes County, standing in one spot for a while. Tourists don’t know that, and they miss a lot by hurrying from one shop to another. I have leaned to wait.

Eventually, the Schwartzentrubers sent out a lad of about fourteen years. He was dressed in plain Amish denim, and he wore his black winter hat and pair of high muck boots. Without speaking, he walked into the barn, hitched a team of horses to a block with a hook and chain, and drove the team out into the winter day with a whip. He hooked his rig to the rear bumper of the truck, snapped his whip, and coaxed the horses to pull the truck around to face up the drive. That’s when I got my camera out.

Next, he unhitched and came around to the front bumper with his team and hooked on again. He never said a word. He just snapped his whip, marched that team up the drive, and pulled the truck out onto the gravel lane, with the postal service lady sitting behind the wheel. He kicked his hook off the bumper, put his team away, and went inside. They had sent a boy to handle a man’s job, and he apparently had thought nothing of it. That’s just how it is on an Amish farm. The children work, too.

I don’t know, yet, how I’ll use that story in one of my mysteries. I tell about it when I give talks to literary and library groups, and I like the reaction that the story always gets – the lad who reversed the Postal Service Slide. And it wasn’t particularly unusual. Rather, it is perfectly common in Holmes County. The Schwartzentrubers live a hard life intentionally, and a boy of fourteen is expected to know how to handle a team expertly.

But I will always enjoy the exasperation on that lady’s face as the horses pulled her truck out of the mud, and I will always remember how that young fellow did the job without saying a word – like you’d expect from a Schwartzentruber. They’ll tell you, if you can get one to talk, that God expects us all to live on peasant farms.