P. L. Gaus’s Ohio Amish Journal

Autographing books for fans is one of the most enjoyable things an author does. It never gets old or wearisome, and as much as readers appreciate it, I assure you authors do too. I spent a wonderful day, last Saturday, meeting fans and signing books at the Buckeye Book Fair. That’s one of the best book events in Ohio, and it always draws a great crowd on the first Saturday in November. I was busy all day, talking with people about my Ohio Amish Mysteries and autographing books for fans. One fan club from Holmes County told me about their project to take pictures of all the Amish locations in my mysteries, and several more people who live there told me how much they liked reading about real places in Ohio. Several people brought in their entire collection of the six novels for autographs, and two people bought the whole series at the show. Near the end of the day, my wife Madonna grabbed this shot of me at the table, and as much as I hate to admit it, that’s what I look like. Oh well. What can I say? Photographs grant us permission to linger with the truth. Now, I’m back to the writing. That is, quite differently, a completely solitary undertaking. My next speeches will be in Ashtabula County (Conneaut and Jefferson) on November 15, 2008. Maybe I’ll see you there.

In Holmes County, Ohio, Amish people and others know well the benefits of purple martins and swallows, and many of the yards sport white martin houses on tall poles, often two or three at a time, because a colony of purple martins is very effective at keeping the mosquito population in check. And martins and swallows are the best aerial acrobats, darting and swooping through the air, especially in the evening, to nip mosquitoes in flight. I could sit for hours watching these birds fly.

The martins nest in large communities, in special houses built to accommodate them. Barn swallows nest in the eaves and rafters of barns. A smart farmer knows to encourage their numbers, and the design and construction of martin houses is a highly advanced practice among Amish. Typically, there will be a tall white pole with a pulley at the top and a crank at the bottom. The martin house will hang from a wire that loops over the pulley, to be sent up to the top in summer and cranked down to ground level in the fall for cleaning, after the martins have left. Once they have been cleaned out, the houses are cranked up half way for winter, to discourage intruders. That’s the sure sign of fall in Holmes County – the martin houses have been taken down and cleaned, and they sit about half way up their poles, waiting for spring.

My wife Madonna and I were down in Holmes County a week ago in our Miata with the top down, on a country lane east of Calmoutier, and we found this house where the front lawn sported five of these martin poles. The first photograph was taken from the west, and it also shows a sixth pole in the back that hangs the smaller gourd houses. You’ll also see in the second photograph (a closer shot taken from the east) that there is a TV antenna standing right in the middle of the whole thing.

Curious? Right. Amish people don’t have televisions, and this antenna is not wired into the house. So why the antenna? If you were to visit in the summer, you’d see right away why it’s there. Care to guess? Right again – it’s a perch, and a very good one at that. You’ve gotta love this type of thinking. Why spray with insecticides when you can put up a martin house instead? And why put up a martin house without nearby perches for the birds? That’s down-home ingenuity if I ever saw it.