Curiosity About the Amish

I have just survived a few days of obsessive and seemingly insatiable, almost morbid curiosity about the rural Old Order Amish in Western Pennsylvania. I’m almost cured now. I've ascertained that my sole frame of reference should not have been the movie "Witness" with Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis dancing around that car in the barn in one of the sexiest movie scenes ever. The Amish are people like any other, it seems. The fact that their life-style persists in our midst, and apart from the more commercialized and polished Amish populations elsewhere, can come as something of a shock to a sheltered Easterner.

At first they can seem to the uninitiated like a different species: aliens, inbred, backward or odd. But when the Lancaster County Amish were brought into the public eye last year after the school shootings in Nickel Mines, as they went voluntarily to the family of the shooter and offered acceptance, love and forgiveness, it became apparent that many of them are paragons of good breeding and behave with dignity and moral compasses superior to most.

This week we went in search of quilts, furniture, lumber, home remedies. We were fortunately and coincidentally dressed in blue jeans and black jackets and coats- no hats or sunglasses- so I hope, no I believe, that we were not too grating in the tableau. I’ve been to the Amish many times before. My mother and grandmother often engaged the services of the Amish for carpentry and needlework. In the sixties, of course, I thought sympathetically that the Amish were better than most people and knew the truths about the world. After all, they lived off the land, didn’t use electricity or running water, eschewed all modern conveniences and for starters, made their own clothing and soap, butchered their own meat, and could cut and plane wood better than anyone else. They were the real hippies. They were authentic! I wanted to be Amish!

If I saw them in the grocery store in town, their horses and buggies parked outside, I averted my eyes when I saw grocery carts filled with bushels of cheese curls and dozens of loaves of inexpensive white bread. I tried not to notice the Amish men standing outside the open barroom doors, staring in casually at blaring TVs. When I heard that Amish women were rarely treated in the area hospital, but the men were, I attributed that to a belief that women knew better how to cure and heal and that men got scared and bailed by going to the hospital. It never occurred to me that the women weren’t always allowed to go.

I eyed the local hustlers who “hauled Amish” in their vans and SUV’s, making a living by driving Amish anywhere they want to go more quickly than buggies can carry them. I wondered suspiciously if these free-wheeling entrepreneurs respect the religious tenets of the Amish or if they ever have, horror of horrors, lured vulnerable innocents into the seamy side of life where addictions could be lucrative for an amoral hustler: sex, drugs and rock n roll, whiskeys and cigarettes from the civilized world, porn on the backseat TV? Who regulates these things? Who protects the highly independent Amish from the outside world? I'm reacting emotionally, completely uninformed about all this, and am sure that local good citizens and the government protect the Amish. Nevertheless, it was a real shock for me, a semi-citified intruder, to encounter this subculture.

The Amish I've seen are bilingual - they switch back and forth from a German hybrid to a heavily-accented English. Last week I saw happy Amish children playing in a light snowfall in their schoolyard, next to two outhouses with handpainted signs for "Boys" and "Girls." This is possible in the U.S in 2007?!? The Amish pay some taxes but not Social Security taxes, as they take care of their own people during old age.They long ago hammered out that agreement with the U.S.government. They have their own insurance. However, in certain parts of Pennsylvania at least, they apparently don't put dental care high on their list of priorities for expenditures. Are they like other rural poor, uninsured because of expense, or do they neglect dental care because they believe it's too worldly ? Their businesses are lucrative, I've heard. They are hard to contact because their names are few, and shared. In one area you may have John Miller, John A. B. Miller, John B. A. Miller and John C. Miller. They all seem to be pretty much under the radar. It's a puzzle.

The Amish are usually hard-working and honest businessmen and women, but I have heard horror stories too. In one case I know of, an Amish woman accepted ten unfinished antique quilt-tops from an "English", as we non-Amish are called, to be quilted, she said, "after harvest and over the winter." The customer accepted the deal on faith, with no receipt. When springtime came the Amish woman denied ever having received the quilt-tops.

I guess what it boils down to is that the Amish are just like the rest of us in terms of character. There are the good, the bad, the high-minded, the low. Parents wrestle with the cultural influences affecting their young. They try to instill the highest values. Some fall by the wayside, some reach for the heights of ethical and meaningful living. When I think about the Amish, I'm awfully curious and I swing back and forth from wonderment and admiration to bafflement and disillusionment. The people who live near them and see them daily seem to accept them without much curiosity. But for those of us who have been drawn into a life where few or no Amish co-exist, they are surely startling, and worthy of our contemplation and consideration.