Most people have the idea that the Amish lifestyle is very laid back and simple. They speak yearningly of the good old days when life was not so complicated. Well, I hate to bust your bubble but the Amish lifestyle is anything but simple.
It is a total rat race. It is always going as fast as you possibly can, only to see your neighbor whip by with his pickup truck. It is working all day as hard as you can, wet with sweat, only to see your neighbor move his pile of manure in one evening with a front end loader. And his pile was twice as big as yours. It is a constant searching for loopholes in the system. Ways to hack it. Ways to make life easier without breaking any church rules and getting into hot water.
You make your horse go as fast as you can, then you give him steroids. (Lets not talk about the side effects…) You fill the wagon to over flowing and add one more. You feed the thrashing machine till the belts slip. Then you tighten the belts and feed the machine till the engine smokes black. And of course, sometimes you over do it and break something, but if you don’t max things out you aren’t getting anything done.
I’ve often wondered why we are wired that way. Seems to be bred into our genes. Life is about taking things to the limit. We seem to think that everything has built in safety features. Just like our church rules for example. We seem to need to know where the limits are. If you never stall the engine you will never know how much power it has. Or more importantly, how much smoke it can produce.
One place this tendency really shows up is when we go traveling. We feel like we aren’t getting any good out of the vehicle we are paying for unless it is full to the brim. Goodness! I’ve been in vehicles so full we had to take turns to fart.
Another simply complicated situation I remember was us trying to move a truck with a long cable and a forklift. The truck was 6 inches too far from the dock and we could not load it. Unfortunately, there were no “english” folks around to drive it for us. The forklift we had was properly neutered to keep it from going farther than the end of its umbilical cord, (lest someone drive it to town to get a coffee) and therefore couldn’t get to the truck. Hence the cable. If I remember correctly the operation ended in failure because of a torn cable. In retrospect I’m suspicious it was because we forgot about the parking brake. We ended up waiting until someone came to move it because, driving a truck 6 inches, was considered a crime.
Or how about the fellow who took a backhoe and disabled the transmission so it is no longer self propelled, and therefore Amish “legal”. He then hires someone to pull the backhoe from one residence to the other and does custom manure loading for the community. Yep, he handles manure with a backhoe. Beats a pitch fork any day.
Life on the outside can be frightfully scary. No longer can you expect a man in a black hat with a long beard to tell you if you go too far. No longer can you take everything and max it out to the uttermost with the assumption that there will be a built in safety feature. That you will run up against a fence somewhere before you pitch over the edge into hell. Life is now my responsibility.
Not that it has ever been anyone else’s.
Weirdly enough, the things I miss most are the stupid moments. The horse on steroids dancing a jig on the roof, the neutered backhoe rooting around in the manure pile, the clogged trashing machine the moment before it breaks, the frantic forklift desperately yanking on the cable attached to the stalwart truck……
That my friend, is the epitome of Amish. Simple in a brilliantly complicated heartwarming way.