Growing Up Amish (11 page)

I spent the evening watching TV in my motel room—a huge treat. I finally drifted off to sleep, trusting that I'd wake up in due time the next morning. I knew nothing of wake-up calls from the front desk. That night I slumbered, exhausted from lack of sleep and the tension of the previous night. And somehow I blocked it all out—everything I'd left behind at home. I managed not to think about my parents—especially my mother, who was undoubtedly worried, sick to death, not knowing where I was.

I was seventeen years old. A minor. And I had pulled it off. I had just left home. Run away in the middle of the night.

14

The next morning I boarded a bus and headed west into Nebraska. The rolling farmland flowed past outside, followed by the sand hills of the north central part of the state. By late afternoon, we pulled into Valentine. Clutching my duffel bag, I stepped off the bus and looked around hopefully. No one was waiting.

I had called Gary the week before and told him I was coming. Where was he? I waited nervously in the bus station for about fifteen minutes. Then a Suburban pulled in and parked. A short, burly man in a cowboy hat got out. He swaggered up to the door. It was Gary. I walked outside, and he grasped my hand.

“Welcome,” he said, smiling. We walked to where Gary's wife and three young daughters sat waiting. “Are you hungry?” he asked. “How about the Pizza Hut?”

Of course I was hungry. A young Amish kid is always hungry, and Pizza Hut sounded just fine.

“I'd like that.”

After eating, we headed out to the ranch, thirty-five miles due south of Valentine.

Gary took me to the bunkhouse, a decrepit, old, two-story structure with a livable basement. A lanky cowboy lounged there. His name was Leonard Paris, and he was from New Mexico. I unpacked my bag and hung my few clothes on a wire stretched across a corner of the room. That night I slept in the bed that would be mine for the next five months.

The next day I called my sister Rachel back in Bloomfield. She taught at one of the two Amish schools there, and each schoolhouse had a community phone. I called her collect and told her where I was. We chatted. She spoke carefully, choosing her words. She said things weren't good at home. The community was abuzz with shock, and my parents were taking it pretty hard.

Years later, she told me that Dad had refused to pay for my collect call. He said she had accepted it, so it was her responsibility. To me, that's a strange and puzzling thing. I had called to let her know where I was and that I was okay. Surely it was worth the cost of the call to Dad, to know that. But he refused to pay, so she paid from her meager teacher's salary. I still owe her for that.

The first few days and weeks at the ranch were a blur. The trauma of leaving so abruptly, so secretively, was washed away by the excitement of my new surroundings. I was rough, uncouth, and raw, fresh from the primitive Amish life that had been the only one I'd ever known. I was eager, but quite naive. A remote ranch in the sand hills of northern Nebraska was probably about as ideal a place as any for my first transition to English life.

In the next few weeks, I acclimated to my surroundings. Leonard Paris was an amiable fellow. He immediately took me under his wing and very patiently taught me the things I didn't know. He was rough around the edges, but he was a gentleman. He didn't swear much, and he always said please and thank you at the table during our shared meals with Gary's family. I watched and learned and emulated.

I quickly adapted to the ranch work and the brutal schedule. Calving season had just begun, and we had to get up every morning at two or so to check for problem births. Then it was back to bed for a few more hours of sleep before getting up at six for the real day's work.

Leonard regaled me with tall tales of New Mexico and his father's ranch there. He was a true horseman, born to the saddle. His favorite phrase, after telling a tale, was “We have more fun than people.”

Gradually, I settled into the rhythm of English life. We worked from dawn to dark. I was used to working, so that was no problem. I just wasn't used to being on my own. But I was learning. And it wasn't as if I could get into much trouble on the ranch.

My pay was room and board and a hundred bucks a week. Four hundred a month. Not a lot, even back then. I was fed well and worked hard. In many ways, it wasn't that much different from what I was used to back home.

Of course, I had to learn to drive a truck—an old green and white 1972 Chevy. I had never driven a truck before, or any other motor vehicle for that matter. Leonard carefully coached me and allowed me to drive from the bunkhouse to the main house for meals. Within days I was confident and comfortable behind the wheel.

The first month passed, and payday approached. And boy, did I ever have places to put that money. I needed a new pair of cowboy boots and a real cowboy hat. I also needed some shirts, more jeans, and maybe a real belt buckle with a horse or a bull or some such appropriate cowboy icon.

That Friday, Robert, the head of the investment group from Kansas that ran the ranch, stopped by with our paychecks. It was a gray, cloudy day. Robert handed Gary his check, then Leonard his. Then he turned to me.

“Here you are, first paycheck,” he said.

“Thank you, sir,” I replied, taking it from him.

His eyes glinted mischievously. “It's a nice check,” he said. “How would you like to double it?”

I stared at him, uncomprehendingly.

“We'll flip a coin,” he continued. “Double or nothing.”

He would have done it too. I considered his proposition for about two seconds. I held the slip of paper in my hands and looked at it. My first paycheck. Four hundred bucks. A small fortune for me. I could double it. Or I could end up with nothing.

“Nope,” I answered. “Don't wanna do that. I can't afford to lose this.”

They all laughed, as did I. Many times since, I've wondered what would have happened if I had taken him up on it. Knowing my luck, I would have remained penniless for another month.

Soon after that, Leonard, who had come to Valentine from the huge feedlots in Kansas as temporary help, returned to his old job. As he left, we shook hands, and he smiled and said he hoped we would run into each other again. I was sure we would. Of course, we never did. He left me with his patented saying, “Remember, we have more fun than people.”

Leonard was replaced by a cowboy a year younger than me. A local tough named Allen Hazen. At sixteen, Allen's reputation as a first-rate cowboy and a hard drinker was already well established throughout the Valentine area. He smiled at me with a loopy grin and took it upon himself to coach me throughout my short-lived career as a cowboy.

Up until now, I had not socialized much in Valentine because I didn't know anyone in the area. Gary had introduced me to the neighbors, and everyone was friendly, but I had no social life. And that was okay for a while. I saved a few bucks and bought the basic necessities. But that all changed after Allen arrived.

On his first Saturday night at the ranch, we quit a bit early, cleaned up, slicked up in nice clothes—or at least the nicest ones in my meager closet—and drove to Valentine in his old Ford pickup.

Allen knew all the local kids, and he was quite the stud. The girls loved him. By hanging around him, I soon got to know many of the town kids. On Saturday nights, we hung around partying until the morning hours. I usually drove the thirty-five miles back to the ranch, while Allen slept soundly on the seat beside me in a comfortable drunken stupor.

Life on the ranch had gotten increasingly interesting. While I was perfectly comfortable herding cattle, tending sick cows, and mending fences, I clearly had a lot to learn when it came to socializing.

* * *

Meanwhile, back in Bloomfield, my buddies were continuing in their wild and wicked ways. They called me sometimes, usually on a Sunday morning. Back then, it cost much less to call on Sundays, so that's when they contacted me. They filled me in on the latest, and after a time, I began to feel a tinge of homesickness. I missed them. And I missed my family. But not enough to lure me back.

After I gave Rachel my mailing address, the letters started flowing in—from Mom and, of course, from Dad. Mom wrote from a broken heart. Told me she missed me and wanted me to come home. Dad wrote masterfully, laying on every guilt trip he could devise. Of course they weren't perfect as parents, he wrote. But they did the best they knew. He had hoped his sons would be happy and settled in Bloomfield. Now I had left, and that was a big disappointment to him and Mom.

And always, he waxed poetic about my spiritual state. I had chosen a path of wickedness. What if I were killed in an accident? Where would I go? How would I fare when I faced the judgment seat? And so on and so on.

I believed that what he said was true—that I had left the protection of the Amish fold and was as good as lost. That there was no hope for me, should I die. That there would never be any chance of salvation outside the Amish church.

That's what he wrote, and that's what I believed. The fires of hell awaited me. That was a fact I never even tried to dispute. But despite that knowledge, I had chosen to leave. And despite that heavy mental burden, I really did not want to return.

My father knew how to write in a way that always cast a cloud of gloom, even on the sunniest day. But I tried hard to shake it off.

I rarely, if ever, wrote back.

Then one Sunday morning, while I was enjoying a rare hour of sleeping in, Gary clattered into the bunkhouse, hollering for me. There was a phone call for me back at the house. I stumbled from the bed, bleary eyed, and got dressed. Gary said the caller would call back in fifteen minutes, so we drove to the house, and I waited. Then the phone rang. It was Vern Herschberger, one of the gang of six in Bloomfield. He had left home early that morning and was at the bus station in Ottumwa. He was heading out to join me.

He arrived the next day, and instantly landed a job at a neighboring ranch about six miles away. A few weeks later, Mervin Gingerich and my best friend, Marvin Yutzy, arrived. By now, the Amish boys from Bloomfield were causing quite a stir among the local ranchers. Gary made his rounds and bragged loudly about how hard we could work. They all wanted a piece of us. Mervin and Marvin landed jobs the day they stepped off the bus. A week or two after that, the last of the six—Willis Herschberger and Rudy Yutzy—arrived. And just like that, there we all were—all six of us—in a radius of about twenty miles, working as cowboys in the sand hills south of Valentine, Nebraska.

It had been a month or two since I'd seen any of them, and I was thrilled to talk to them and hear the news from Bloomfield. As it turned out, things were about as bad as they'd been when I left—maybe even worse.

Our exodus caused a huge uproar in Bloomfield. Five families were affected. Five families left in shock, absorbing the sudden loss, the abrupt disappearance of certain sons. Five sets of parents, including Bishop George, whose son Mervin had left with his buddies. Tongues wagged. The community staggered from the shock and the shame of losing so many of its young sons to the world.

And people in the older communities from which the Bloomfield families had emigrated sadly and dramatically shook their heads.
See how it goes when you move to an untested place like Bloomfield? It's no better than the place you left.

The Aylmer people, too, I'm sure, smirked silently.
David Wagler moved far away for the sake of his sons, and now look at how they repay him. Better he had stayed in Aylmer and confronted the problems there instead of uprooting his family in such a futile move.

As for our little gang of six, well, we had done it. Done what we had claimed we could do, back there in the safety of our Amish world. Many Amish kids threaten to leave and never do. They never have the nerve or the guts to go. We did, and no one could ever take that away from us. We were far away, safe in another world. Safe and free.

15

We quickly settled into the cowboy life, though the reality was a far cry from my idealized childhood perceptions of it. It was tough work, with long and dreary hours. We rode the range for days on end, herding cattle. Within two months, I was walking bowlegged—and not because I wanted to. Even when everything else was done, there were always endless miles of old, rusty fences to repair. Sometimes Allen and I worked together, and sometimes I went alone, driving the fence rows in an old four-wheel-drive pickup loaded with fencing tools and rolls of barbed wire.

It's a harsh and desolate land, the sand hills of north central Nebraska. Remote and empty, and brutally lonely. The people who live there and scratch a living from the land are tough and hard. They have to be to survive and keep their sanity. It takes many acres of sand hills to sustain one cow for one year, but the very desolation, the emptiness, is a thing of beauty, too. The hills are alive with mule deer, jackrabbits as large as dogs, and coyotes.

And, of course, cattle. On many a day I worked alone, sometimes riding miles through vast empty stretches to retrieve a stray bull or a few cows.

In late May and early June, it was branding time, and the ranchers all got together and helped one another, kind of like the Amish do with their threshing. We loaded the trailer with our horses and headed out, arriving shortly after daybreak. All the cows with calves were corralled and ready. Amid much frantic bawling from their mothers, the calves were then separated, roped by their hind legs, and unceremoniously dragged to where the brands were heating on a fire.

Two cowboys grabbed a calf and stretched it out, helpless, on the ground, while a third approached with the red-hot branding iron and applied it to the calf's rump. Once branded, all the calves were vaccinated, and the bull calves were castrated.

The air was filled with smoke, the smell of burning flesh, the sound of crying calves and bawling cows, and the riotous shouts of the cowboys. It was all quite exciting. Usually by noon or a bit later, the task was done, and we all assembled at the ranch house for the noon meal. After the meal, we sat around outside, and a bottle of whiskey was passed from man to man. Any cowboy was free to take a few swigs. It was an exciting time for the six of us. We were young—kids, really. At sixteen, Rudy was the youngest. Willis was the oldest at eighteen. He was the only legal adult among us all. Such a thing would probably be impossible, not to mention illegal, today, to hire minors to work a man's job. Back in 1979, though, life was a bit less complicated.