REPORT FROM AMISH COUNTRY

Kirsten Eve Beachy

The man behind the bullet-proof glass in the hotel lobby asks if we’ve ever been to Holmes and Tuscarawas counties before. We shake our heads. He decides that the boy in the flannel shirt and the girl in frayed Indian-print pants are harmless. He pushes open his office door to bring us tourist pamphlets.

Women wearing prayer coverings beam up from the glossy brochures, men in straw hats and untamed beards carve wood; even the wineries have buggies in their logos. The clerk assumes that we’re here to goggle at the Amish, but we are Amish, practically. Jason and I figured it up: adding our bloodlines together, you get 17/16th of an Amish person and 15/16th of a Mennonite.

We’re here on family business. We want to visit the historical society and ferret out information on Jonas Stutzman, who dressed in white from his hat to his shoes. Jason’s also tracking his great-great-grandmother’s first husband, who died in a boiler explosion. And we might swing by Lehman’s nonelectric store, the mecca of homesteaders, the store that made a fortune during the Y2K scare when folks stuffed their garages full of generators and lanterns and fireplace popcorn poppers.

In the morning, we find our breakfast at one of the enormous feeding-houses built along Route 39. They don’t serve scrapple, but our waitresses wear pinafores, and racks of Amish books, Amish soft drinks, and Amish toys block the way to the cash register.

As we exit, a group of Amishmen enters. I avert my eyes, trying to neutralize the overdose of stares they must receive daily, trying to send out Mennonite vibes: I’m sort of like you, even though I drive a car and watch cable television. Sort of.

You can tell the moment Route 39 enters Holmes county because the brittle, tar-patched road evens out into a smooth ride for tourists, and every 50 feet another sign proclaims Heini’s cheese factory. We turn up Route 77 and stop at the Mennonite and Amish heritage center, Behalt.

Milton Yoder, in the dark, collarless coat of a conservative Mennonite, guides us though the central attraction of Behalt, the cyclorama. The mural encircles an enormous round room with overlapping scenes rendered in Heinz Gaugel’s vibrant—some might say garish—hues. Yoder uses a laser pointer to indicate important events in Anabaptist history.

First, of course, comes Christ, muscular and oddly golden at his crucifixion. After him come scenes of early martyrs; the evils of the institutionalized church; the Anabaptist heroes, Grebel, Blaurock, and Manz. We contemplate a headless neck, cartoonish with the white end of the bone visible, the cut flesh red around it like a rib eye steak. Ulrich Ulman, the first Anabaptist beheaded.

"It’s a bit exaggerated," explains Yoder. He turns our attention quickly to Menno Simons, slipping away to safety on a blue night with his wife and child. Later comes a house on fire, the Hostetlers in Berks County, Pennsylvania, getting slaughtered in a raid during the French and Indian War. "Our ancestors!" we say excitedly. Yoder nods. "There are lots of you."

Finally we reach the man we’ve been watching for: Jonas Stutzman in white coat and pants, gazing up into the sky in feverish anticipation, his white beard wild in hurricane-strength winds, his hands uplifting a chair to the heavens. Because of the overlapping perspectives of the mural, Jonas Stutzman looks to be standing on the backs of two shaggy oxen. It suits him.

"Jonas Stutzman believed Jesus would return in 1853 and set up office in Holmes County, so he built a chair for him. The seat is six inches higher than normal because Christ should be above everyone else," Yoder says, then turns us around so that we can see what was hidden by the central pillar when we entered the room. The chair Jonas built sits on a little pedestal. It’s roughly hewn of a wood I can’t name, the seat woven with strips of cane. Jonas is long gone, but the chair still waits for Jesus.

A final set of scenes shows Anabaptist congregations worshiping: an Amish church, Hutterite and Conservative Mennonite congregations, and Conference Mennonites, with men and women sitting together.

I am what they call a conference Mennonite, but I don’t wear a prayer doily on my head like the long-haired women on the wall. In the gift shop, I have a chance to try on a covering but don’t take it. My mother and grandmother removed theirs years ago, and I’m not eager to go back.

Instead, we plunder the bookstore for genealogical materials. In Some Fascinating Stutzman Ancestors, Gregory Hartzler-Miller tells about two of Jonas Stutzman’s brothers: Jost went into the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Christian to the Ohio Lunatic Asylum.

Before we go, we sign the guest register. "Oh!" says the woman who watches the desk, a Conservative Mennonite, I guess, by her covering. "You’re a Beachy? So was I."

It’s nice to have a name, at least, that links me to the community, even though my clothing makes me incognito. She gives us directions to an Amish library, suggests we stop at the lumber company for help.

Back on the road, we’re surprised by how much congestion the buggies cause, then realize that all the cars are the real problem. It’s not that the buggies are too slow—it’s that the rest of us are far too fast. How could we forget it’s Memorial Day weekend? We can’t tell which of the unmarked houses on a back road is the library, so we backtrack to the lumber company, and Jason disappears inside. I bury my face in a book as Amish folk hurry in and out, afraid they might gawk at me. I’m the minority here.

Jason returns with the key, and we find the place and let ourselves in. There’s no electricity, but gas lights hang from the ceiling and a copy machine sits in one corner. We search the shelves by the light from the windows. Genealogy, Anabaptist literature, back issues of local papers.

Surprises, too. A floor-to-ceiling shelf of National Geographics. Dostoevsky. Turgenev. Along one wall sit two small chairs, just like Jesus’ chair, but kid-sized. The placard says Jonas Stutzman traveled from household to household making chairs without nails, joining green and dry wood together so the fittings would tighten as the wood shrank.

Our second family question resolves when we find, hanging on the wall, the original newspaper article about the 1882 boiler explosion that killed Jason’s great-great-grandmother’s husband, George Stutzman. The boiler ran a steam-powered sawmill, and four men died when it burst. The article, less squeamish than today’s newspapers, unflinchingly describes how one man was "bursted open and part of his internal organs out" and the "fence rail smeared with blood and flesh." The frame the article hangs in was made from pieces of that fence.

We’re hungry for lunch despite the gory account, so we drive down streets of gingerbreaded Amish Treasures and kitchified Amish Kitchens, cars double-parked, sidewalks choked with holidayers. We break out the emergency pretzels and drive to Kidron, where we find a lunchroom under a grocery store and eat our $2-dollar sandwiches surrounded by Amish kids.

Lehman’s General Store. We’ve spent the past few years poring over the contraptions in their catalogue: mills we could use to grind our wheat into flour, if we grew our own wheat; churns for butter, if we had a cow; fruit dryers for preserving the harvest of the peach and apple orchards in our minds’ eyes. We enter the original part of the store, a reconstructed log house. Warehouses attach to the store like barnacles, and a flock of storage barns gathers behind it.

At first I’m skeptical, eyeing pricey pottery and even more expensive Amish-made baskets. But then I enter a room full of bells—sleigh bells of all sizes, brass bells from Germany, cow bells, great black dinner bells to hang outside. The Amish might come here to buy bells. There are wind chimes, too, enormous ones as resonant as church bells, like the ones we bought last year at the MCC relief sale, the ones too loud to hang in the crowded suburb where we live.

As we venture past the imported tin toys and Amish-made marble gadgets, more practical implements appear: walls of rakes, hoes, forks, scythes, spades, a mallet of rolled rawhide, honest purchases, like the jelly jars I think of buying for the strawberries I plan to buy next month.

We find a copper cauldron big enough to boil me in, a giant wooden spoon to match. If I made jam to fill this pot, it would last for decades—unless we had a dozen children. Looking at the cookstoves, I lust, perhaps foolishly, after the Alderfer family stove back on Jason’s folks’ farm, with its shiny enamel, its firebox, the widened margins of error and perfection in bread-baking. I want to know how to use such things.

Such things are all about, hanging from the ceiling, even, to create an old-time ambience: rusty hay rakes and wringer-washers, a funny four-runnered sled. Take a look at the classic Hoosier cabinet with its flour sifter, rollback doors, and spice racks. You could put in a whole set of kitchen cabinets for the price of one of these babies. "We have one of those back home on the farm," says Jason. "We put the mail on it."

Move on to the laundry room. Here’s an expensive, eco-friendly Staber washer that uses less water and detergent to wash bigger loads with a shorter spin cycle. For the hardcore Amish, there are galvanized steel laundry tubs with hand wringers attached.

We buy nothing but stagger back out to the car to nap until the next rainstorm passes. When we return to the Amish library, I sleep some more as Jason goes next door to see if the caretaker is home. I wake to hear a generator kicking on. So that’s how they run the Xerox machine.

I pick up the book about Jonas Stutzman. He once broke his leg cutting wood five miles from home, made a splint and crutches, and hobbled home. Later in life, he had his visions of Christ’s return, used the "science of numbers" to pin down the date, and wrote five different Appeals to his fellow men and women.

There’s no record that Jonas ever had a following inside or outside of the church, but on the other hand, no one ever tried to put him in the Ohio Lunatic Asylum. I get the sense that people tolerated his visions. He called for support of his ill-conceived cause in his third Appeal:

But 1853 came and went without Christ’s return, but Jonas continued to wear white for the rest of his life. His confidence in "the science of numbers" and his ability to predict the proper time were dashed. A friend discovered Jonas’s grandfather clock in the pigsty.

Jason returns from the library victorious, with copies in hand, and we start the long drive home. He tells me the boiler explosion happened because George Stutzman, his almost-ancestor, weighted the escape valve so that the boiler would provide more power. The men knew it wasn’t safe but joked that if it blew, only four would be killed and plenty of workers were around to take their places.

I watch the farmsteads pass the window, clean and green from the rain. Sometimes I think civilization is like an overweighted boiler. We know it will blow sometime, at least run out or boil over; it’s a great pyramid scheme that doesn’t account for the reality of limited natural resources. Sometimes I think I should go home to the Amish, beg them to take me in now, before the refugees come streaming over the hills from the cities.

It’s not that I want to be Amish, to wear long sleeves on summer days and submit to one rigid version of goodness. But I want to step outside the economy of useless possessions, work that uses only a small fraction of my capabilities as a human creature.

I’m soft, easily tired. My muscles don’t know what it is to work, barely remember the joy in the power of stacking wood with my dad. I want a piece of land, a garden, wheat fields, chickens. I want a windmill and solar panels. I want to kill the meat I eat. But I’d still like to write, to make phone calls, to read shocking novels, to go to the theater.

"Wouldn’t it be neat," I ask Jason, "To live off the grid? We could run a Staber washer with solar power and bake with the family wood oven."

"Seems like an expensive hobby," he says, even though he agrees.

We pass a silo with an advertisement painted on it—a bear stealing away with a roll of carpeting in its paws: Bear Country Floor Coverings. Bear Country. We’ve left Amish Country behind.

It’s nuts to even think of giving up the cushy jobs, inexpensive commodities, the energy of the thundering heavens straight from Dominion Power for $50 a month. We’d need a community to support us, a remote location to protect us from gawkers— and vision. We’d need to find people who don’t mind wearing white shoes after Labor Day, who wanted to build something for Jesus—something nobody’s built yet, a divine toothpick in preparation for the day when he stops in for dinner on his stroll around the kingdom of heaven, which, as he said, is here.

I appeal to all those individuals, who sincerely and seriously desire to take active interest in this great cause of God: please inform me thereof via e-mail, and advise me somewhat more in detail of the various circumstances of your situation, to enable me thereby to perceive more clearly and judge more correctly how, where, and in what manner your cooperation may be rendered most available for the promotion of this holy cause. Please direct to: Kirsten Beachy, thekirsteneve@yahoo.com, Subject: Neo-Amish Utopia.

—Kirsten Eve Beachy, Harrisonburg, Virginia, is completing her MFA in creative writing at West Virginia University and this week took tentative steps toward utopia by acquiring three laying hens to go with her borrowes backyard and blind cat in the Shenandoah Valley. She and Jason are housesitting in the country for a year.