P. L. Gaus’s Ohio Amish Journal

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.

I‘ve been nosing around Holmes County, Ohio, for twenty-five years, looking for those little insights and memories that so often go into one of my Ohio Amish Mysteries, even though I didn’t start writing the mysteries until 1995. So I’ll admit to you that when I started exploring the Amish communities there, I didn’t know I would eventually write about Amish culture. I was just curious, like so many people are, and I would have to say that at first I was no different than any of the thousands of “English” tourists who go there every year. But Amish culture is more popular than ever these days, and Holmes County has become a favorite destination for day trippers in Ohio - so much so that the place is overrun with a congestion of cars and tour buses – all traveling up and down the blacktop roads that used to be quiet country lanes. In fact, in the last twenty-five years, tourism has changed Holmes County more than anything.  But that is a topic for another day. My point here is that I learned long ago to get off the blacktop roads onto the lesser-traveled gravel lanes in Holmes County, and unlike the average tourist, I have learned how to find those special little gems of culture and lifestyle that are necessary to my stories.

That’s how I got this photograph of new buggy wheels stacked against a wall in a wheel shop west of the little town of Benton, Ohio. The young Amish lads who worked there were taking a lunch break when I arrived, and none of them got up to talk to me. Plainly they could see that an English tourist like me was not going to buy a wheel. If they ignored me, maybe I’d go away. After all, it was their lunch time, and I was just a nosy tourist with my camera. But there against the wall was this stack of unfinished buggy wheels, and for my own satisfaction, I grabbed a shot of it before I backed out the door and went on my way.

I’ve been saving that memory for one of my stories. I’ll send Professor Branden into the shop to interview an Amish boy about a murder of some English miscreant, and there they will have a chat while standing beside the buggy wheels that are stacked there for finishing after a lazy lunch. I’ll make the lads in the shop mildly disdainful of the Professor’s intrusion, and it’ll all tie in nicely with the theme of the story – maybe something about a local fellow who grew weary of the tourists. Maybe it will even be a tourist who ends up murdered, with an Amish lad who is suspected of doing it. Of course the professor won’t believe that – no Amish person would ever be a murderer, and my readers all know that when they start one of my mysteries.

So, I’ll just stay off the blacktop roads. I’ll travel those narrow gravel lanes that stretch out over a hilltop meadow or run into a stand of timber. That’s where you find the authentic Amish insights and memories, anyway. If you go to Holmes County, I suggest you do the same. Maybe you’ll find that wheel shop. Maybe those lads will have learned that tourists like to buy authentic Amish goods. You could put the buggy wheel in your garden, and you could put your memory of the purchase in that special, authentic place in your mind where you remind yourself that you explored Holmes County the right way, at least that one time.

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.

What if you lived in a world in which you would never program a DVR, take a call on a cell phone, use a computer, send a FAX, drive a car, watch TV, or heat a frozen dinner in a microwave oven? Can you imagine it? Can you imagine it even a little? I can’t. It’s unthinkable. But the thousands of Amish people who live in Holmes County, Ohio, live in this type of world all their lives, and so far as I know, there isn’t one of them who regrets it.

It’s not that they don’t know about our modern “gadgets” as they call them, and it’s not that they can’t afford such conveniences. Rather, they have rejected them knowingly. They have considered the English lifestyle, and except in cases where one of them has left their Amish sect, they have all decided that they would rather live without the modern conveniences that we all take for granted. They reject the appliances that we English all consider essential.

So, rather than using electric ovens and microwaves, the Amish cook on elaborate wood stoves, available even today at stores like Lehman’s Hardware in Kidron, Ohio. Rather than drive cars, the Amish use horse and buggy transportation. Rather than buying life insurance or long-term care insurance, the Amish take care of their older relatives right on the farm where they grew up.

Quite a few Amish folk have explained to me that all we “English” really have is our gadgets. They advise that if we would examine our lives, we will surely discover that the only advantages we have over the Amish are the modern gadgets that we use.

So the father and three sons in this picture know that they will never own a car, rely on a computer, carry a credit card, or program a DVR. They know that they will never struggle through the security checkpoints in an airport, backup all their documents on a remote location, pay someone else to safeguard their identity, or spend their first hour at work checking emails. Starting to get the picture? Right. Maybe they do have it all figured out.

The three sons on this wagon were headed with their father that day to a small grocery store at Becks Mills, in the Doughty Valley of Holmes County, Ohio. That’s a little place few English even know about. It’s worth the drive, but stop at the County Engineer’s office (across from the courthouse in Millersburg) to get a map of Holmes County. You’d need that to find Becks Mills. You might even need the map to find your way back out of the Doughty Valley, once you find it. But I promise you, once you’ve been there, you’ll wonder if you really do need all those gadgets in your life. You do, surely, and I do too, but you’ll wonder. You’ll wonder what life would be like if your days were no more complicated than a wagon ride with father, to the grocery store down the lane.

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.

The first two reviews of my sixth Ohio Amish Mystery (Separate from the World – Ohio University Press, July, 2008) have been published – one in Publisher’s Weekly and the other in Kirkus Reviews – and they are both very good. Authors are usually nervous (at least I am) waiting for reviews of a new book, and when they come in, you read them so fast the first time that you don’t really get it all. Good, you’ll say to yourself – nothing bad there. Take a breath. Relax. Now read it slowly so you can see everything that is there.

It’s the bad reviews that cause you to do this. Every author gets one sooner or later, and you just have to learn to accept it. It’s not like there is a suitable place for an author to make counter arguments or complaints. Reviewers know what they like and what they don’t like, and they are good at spotting weaknesses. So, when good reviews come in, it is all the more gratifying.

This time both reviews contained accurate summaries of the plot. The names of the characters were all spelled correctly. Both reviewers understood the implications of the work. In one for instance, it was stated that the story presented “A perceptive look at problems that have no easy solutions.” Hurray! That’s what I set out to do two years ago when I designed the plot sequences for Separate from the World. In the other review, we read: “a convincing plot and credible, sympathetic characters” make this “another winner in this fine regional series.”

So, that’s excellent news. I’ll take these first reviews out on the porch this evening and read them again with a cool drink. There are other reviews to come, no doubt, and I’d like to savor each good one that comes in.

It’s iconic, don’t you think – an Amish barn raising. Kids scamper here and there, but never venture too close to the work. They’ve been told to stay back for safety, but you just can’t expect a boy to stay out of the rafters. Girls are the same, so all around the framing and hoisting, the kids scamper in and out.

The women stay back too, but for a different reason. There is food to prepare and serve, and everyone has brought something to contribute. There are tables set up in the shade, sometimes dozens of them. There are benches set around the tables, usually the same benches used in the Sunday services. Iced tea and coffee are available as soon as the sun comes up, and the men come down out of the rising structure when they need to. But that seems to be improbably seldom. The men stay at the work relentlessly, the women stay busy with food preparations, and the kids play, or work at assigned chores like tending the horses or carrying supplies. When noon approaches, the men start coming down for lunch in shifts. They will have already been at it for six or seven hours.

That’s when you’ll see of few of the more determined men clustered at the peaks in small groups, unwilling to lose the momentum they have acquired, and unwilling to come down for lunch until that last brace has been fit or that last joist has been set. And that’s a good time to take a picture from a distance, so long as none of the faces can be recognized.

The foundation of this barn was laid a week earlier by stone masons from Pennsylvania. The wall studs were nailed into place to make whole sections, on the ground the day before. The last man came out of the barn sometime around midnight, but I know that only because I went back out the next day and asked around.

We have a lot of these barn raisings in Holmes County. The Amish are particularly good at it. But they need to be. They don’t use lightning rods on their structures. The bishops don’t allow it. There’s a religious reason for that, but it borders on plain superstition, and the logic of it will not stand up to careful scrutiny. The most plausible explanation I have heard is that lightning rods are thought to invite attacks from the Devil. The irony is that Amish barns, lacking lightning rods, therefore burn down more often than the English ones. So of course the Amish become very adept at raising new barns for their neighbors and families. They have good reason to be experts.

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.