Category: Amish Stories

Amish Forklifts

So what is an “Amish” forklift???

 

Let me give you a little bit of a back drop. I worked for a company called Stoll Family Farms for 12 years. SFF as we called it, was an Amish run warehouse that shipped produce to chain stores in Toronto Ontario during the summer months. It all started out as a family business when my grandfather Joe Stoll started selling tomatoes to Loblaw’s in the 1980s. Over the years it grew into a business that sold produce for almost all the Amish and Mennonite communities in the area. When I started working for SFF in 2012 we were shipping around 800,000 dollars worth of produce in a summer. By the time I quit that number had grown to well over 2 million.

 

This was a lot a produce to handle by hand with pallet carts. There was a real knack to getting a two ton skid into a slot 1 inch wider than the skid. Many of us who worked at SFF had continual problems the muscles in our shoulders from jerking on pallet cart handles all day.

 

Anyway, I digress. In the Amish community at Aylmer Ontario, forklifts were not allowed. There was this concern that they would be used as a means of transportation. i.e. going to town for a coffee or to the neighbors with a skid of stuff with the forklift rather than hitching up a horse. Very real concern by the way, and a big problem in some communities, only they generally viewed it as progress instead of as sin. (That was sort of my view on the subject as well but don’t worry, I never said that out loud.)

 

Enter the “Amish” forklift.

 

An Amish forklift was simply a forklift that did not have the power source on the forklift itself. Its power was generally supplied via a hydraulic umbilical cord. Electricity was not an option. Too easy. The logic was simple, if the power supply was not on the forklift there was simply no way that forklift was going farther than the end of its tether. No going to town for coffee.

 

Never mind the fact that a forklift meant to run on concrete would not go more than five feet on a gravel drive. Trust me, I tried it. And I clearly remember the day one the workers got off the concrete pad in the main drive through of the unloading bay. It was six inches off the pad and there was no getting back on the pad. I was called to the scene only after the driving wheel was buried past the axle because the poor fellow who had gotten stuck did not want to admit that he was stuck. Typical….

 

We fastened one end of a chain to the forks and the other to a trailer not too far from where we were stuck and then ran the forks up which tightened the chain and because the mast was sticking up past the top of the forklift it gave the chain a lot of leverage as well. The forklift neatly tipped forward and rolled onto the pad. We thought we were really smart, which may or may not have been true.

 

In my days as a mechanic, I neutered at least 5 forklifts and converted them to run on hydraulics. I would take the electric motors out and somehow or the other monkey patch a hydraulic motor in its place. Then the controls had to be converted to hydraulic as well. Controls were the big thing, hydraulic forklifts were extremely hard to drive (impossible if you aren’t Amish)  if they didn’t have the correct controls and almost none of them did.

 

For example, if you were moving along at a decent speed and happened to let go of the lever responsible for forward motion, the wheels locked up instantly. This usually translated to a skid of produce upside down on the ground. There was no grace, hydraulic motors do not freewheel unless you install a special freewheeling valve. And if you did install that freewheeling valve you had no brakes.

 

The other big problem we had was having to run out to the diesel shanty every time to start the engine that actually ran the equipment. I got tired of that and wired up a 12-volt system, (12-volt was allowed) that could start and stop the engine from several different locations in the building, including on all the forklifts. Well, the next problem was that it was really easy to remember to start the engine, nothing worked if you didn’t, but somehow people just forgot to stop it. This was hard on the fuel bill so I wired a little timer into the circuit that stopped the engine after 15 min.

 

The other problem was that the forklifts were slow. Forklifts were never designed to run on hydraulics and if you wanted to do that you needed a large pump in order to get anywhere at a decent rate of speed. Solution: Larger pump, bigger engine. Well, the cheap alternative to a larger pump obviously is to run the smaller one faster but if you ran the engine at full speed all the time that really showed up on the fuel bill. So whadda we do??

 

We had what is called a pressure compensated hydraulic system. Basically, that means the pump pumps a certain pressure, say 1500 psi and then it self regulates to keep the pressure from dropping. The problem with the forklifts was that they used more than the pump could pump. The pressure dropped and the forklift became sluggish. One day I hit upon the solution.

 

I cobbled together an apparatus that would speed up the engine whenever the oil pressure dropped below a certain level. The first version did not work out too great but it proved the concept. With time we managed to fine tune the system to where you could step on the pedal on the forklift and the engine would rev right with you. The faster you drove the forklift the faster the engine ran.  As soon as you stopped, the engine idled down.

 

That was, unfortunately, my main job while I was Amish, fix imaginary problems created by the system. Self-inflicted problems. Problems that really did not exist. Like hydraulic forklifts.

 

I am more and more of the persuasion that the Amish are not the only ones who create their own problems. Humanity as a whole does it. When are we going to take responsibility for and fix the problems in our own little corner of the world. Starting with the ones we have created personally.

 

But I will have to admit that I miss the innovation that these problems, imaginary or not, created. Innovation that makes the world a better place,  makes things more efficient is always a good thing. Above all innovation needs to free people to be who they really are, allow them to be creative, to pull them together and help them collaborate. Humans are humanity’s most important resource.

 

I hope to never lose that Amish innovator/hacker mindset.

In the Eyes of a 5 Year Old

Church when I was 5 was never something I looked forward to. First of all there was the big rush in the morning to be ready in time. (Sunday was anything but relaxing) Then we would all pile into the buggy and rattle off to wherever the services were held that day.

 

The men would stand in a big circle in the barnyard or in a shed if it was cold or raining. Everyone went around the circle and shook hands with every one else. I would become just plain tired of standing there while the elders did their thing. To me it all looked pointless but I never doubted that there was a reason for it all. I was only 5 after all, and the ways of the elders was unfathomable.

 

Then after everyone (hopefully) had arrived the Bishop would make his way to the house or wherever the services were being held, followed by his ministers. Then the older men would straggle in, then the rest of the men in the order of their age. Last of all came the young boys. Through my 5-year-old eyes they appeared to be evil giants of some sort. I’m not sure why I had this feeling about them. Possibly because my parents did not approve of all the things that the young folks did. Not that anything really bad every happened in Aylmer….. Hrrmm, Cough Cough…… At least nothing that couldn’t be swept under the rug. (There were a lot of rugs, big ones.)

 

After everyone was settled onto the pine benches, the Bishop would say his thing, wishing God’s blessings on the day and could someone please give out a song to sing. It was always said exactly the same way. Then the song leader of the day would give out a number, in German of course, and the singing would start. It was a slow sleepy kind of singing. Something handed down from the mists of time. It could be the most disgusting sound or it could be downright beautiful. What made the difference I am still not sure.

 

As soon as the first line of the song was sung the Bishop would get up and go out for Abraat. (council) The ministers would follow him like so many sheep. In my 5-year-old perceptions they appeared stern, distant, not unkind, but certainly to be feared. There was something, something mysterious, something to be dreaded like a deep dark secret, about that line of men filing out to the do whatever they did while we sang.

 

We sang until the ministers came back in, which was a long time for a 5-year-old, and then as soon as the current song was done one of them would get up to deliver the opening sermon. The opening sermon was supposed to be short, 15 minutes at the most culminating in a prayer. Unfortunately, some of the ministry had more to say than could be said in that time period and so it often lasted longer. That was never a huge deal with me because I always zoned out and went off into my imagination. Which was quite lively.

 

One day the minister got started expounding on the topic of “Redda mitt Gott” (Talking with God). Well the word “redda” in German is not often used in our day-to-day Pennsylvania Dutch so I didn’t understand it in the context it was used. “Redda” is also very similar to the word “raat” (wheel) in German. I pondered the quandary ( I’m a weirdo btw and think completely in visual imagery) and finally created the solution to the problem. In my mind I saw a great big wheel like one of those old water wheels only it had handles in place of the paddles and on one side of the wheel was the grand old gentleman who was delivering the sermon, on the other side was God himself. Together they were turning the wheel by pulling on the handles. The wheel was on a shaft and the shaft went off into the distance, obviously turning the mysterious gears of God’s great kingdom. Wheeling with God. My translation of the sermon that day.

 

It took me a long long time realize that the church and God don’t always pull in the same direction on the Great Wheel of Wheeling with God.

 

After prayer the deacon got up to read a chapter from the scriptures. Sometimes he spoke a few words and sometimes he too had a problem with talking too long. Made for a long service if all the ministers felt very inspired. Or, may I say it, had a bone to pick.

 

After the deacon was done with his thing another minister got up to deliver the main part. This lasted for an hour or so depending on how much time the other speakers had taken. This was considered the main spiritual meal of the day, but a lot of folks partook of it by settling down for a good nap.

 

After that there was Zuegniss. Where the minister who had delivered the main part asked a few of the other ministry to corroborate what he had said. After which we sang another song, usually a fairly joyous one, as in anticipation of freedom, and then, Yay! Church was out.

 

I think no true blooded Amish would admit it but the best part of the day was the noon meal and the conversation that flowed around it. The children playing, the adults talking in scattered groups, the atmosphere of friendliness and community, the deafening buzz of conversation. That really was what Amish was all about. It was not about the abstract and vague doctrines or dialogs about the correctness and importance of the Ordnung. Not that the sermons were all bad, they were just too stern and severe. Too distant. Jesus was all about life and love after all. And he told us to live as he did.

 

Fast forward 25 years. That little Amish 5-year-old now sits in front of a MacBook Air, an iPhone on the desk beside him. The desk is covered with the paraphernalia of the modern office, printers, cords and routers. Less than a year ago he first laid hands on a laptop. In that time he has gone from innocent Amish to software developer/consultant/contractor, and in a way, he is more Amish than ever before.

 

His children are playing on the floor behind him. Playing just like he did when he was 5. With pencils, paper, scissors, glue and most of all, a copious imagination. 25 years have passed and everything is different, but really nothing has changed.

 

The unwritten Amish creed states that those who embrace technology lose their faith. They always get trapped up in porn or some other form of dark evil. I’m sure there is porn on the internet, and all kinds of evil, but I’ve never seen any. I have had interaction with plenty of Amish who use technology just like I do and I simply fail to see it happening. Technology will change the Amish culture. Drastically. But I don’t see them loosing their faith in the process. The leadership has gotten faith and culture mixed up that’s all.

Billy and the Pallet Cart

I used to work with a young fellow whom we shall call Billy. He was a very likable young fellow of about 17, and I really enjoyed working with him, possibly because he had an affinity for getting into the most hilarious situations.
My cousin (the one from Lindsay) and I were repacking zucchini. Repacking zucchini was one of the most detested jobs at Stoll Family Farms. It was very time consuming, you had to pick up every blink’in zucchini and scrutinize it to make sure it didn’t have spots plus if it had a runny nose you had to chop it off.  In short it was boring as a wet rag in a dark hole.

 

As I was saying, Lindsay Cousin and I were working away, bored to death in a doghouse. I faintly heard some racket from Billy’s direction but I paid it no heed. It was quite normal for Billy to make a tremendous amount of noise. It was when he didn’t make noise that it was time to pay attention.

 

My Littlest Uncle was working away in the cooler on some other job of great gravity. All was relatively quiet except for the dull roar emanating from Billy’s general location. But no one paid him any mind.

 

My Other Uncle’s Oldest Daughter, (I called her Queen Anne when I wanted to annoy her and so she will be called in this story) had to leave the cooler on some errand of importance. In her travels she passed Billy in the midst of his difficulty. He was having trouble with his pallet cart. It simply would not go into the skid. He pushed harder, harder yet, and again. Pulled the cart out and took a run at the skid. Still no go. How long this had been going on no one really knew, Billy was not one to give up easily. However, Queen Anne passing in her travels took one look at the situation and immediately divined where the trouble lay.

 

But….. Now what? For her to accost the boisterous Billy might be construed as showing an interest in him. That would never do. Dear me!! What a situation. Billy kept hammering. Queen Anne, after a moments reflection, fled to the cooler and agitatedly said to the Littlest Uncle,”Why doesn’t he look at the other end of the skid??!!” Littlest Uncle left his job of great gravity and followed Queen Anne outside to where Billy was doggedly determined to blast his pallet cart through the skid with dynamite if that was what it took.

 

Littlest Uncle got a look of great amusement on his face, then concealed it (barely) with a look of great compassion and took Billy by the hand,” Come let me help you,” he said. He led Billy around to the other end of the skid, and behold, the problem, another pallet cart was inserted into that end keeping Billy’s cart out.

 

Billy let out a great roar of disgust. All that hard work for nothing.

 

And we…. Lindsay Cousin and I, we literally laughed ourselves into oblivion. There is something about going from utter lethargy to utter hilarity in several seconds that is dangerous to human existence.

The Old Outhouse

Way back when in my early years of working for Stoll Family Farms, I was probably 16 or 17 at the time, my friend and I would go swimming in the creek that ran right behind the warehouse. At one point in time we used to go swimming almost every day. I’m not sure how we got away with it as it was a rather public place and the Amish tend to frown on the lack of clothes that swimming generally entails.
Well one day when got back we were a little slow in changing out of our swimming trunks. It was hot or something. We got started running in circles on the concrete floor. That turned into a real racing game, which turned into something else and, yeah we were just in no hurry to get back into our clothes.

 

Somehow or the other we got separated from our clothes by the presence of a staid old Amish gentleman. Someone who would have been mortified to see us in our skins.  While the elderly gentleman was hollering, “Hello! Anyone around?” we retreated around the corner and up the stairs into the room where the boxes were stored. After some muttering under his breath about the lack of staff he decided to get what he came for himself. Well it so turned out he had come to get boxes. Wooops!!!! Fortunately there were a lot of nooks and crannies and we knew them all. We managed to escape detection but it was way too close.

 

There was an old outhouse out behind the barn that got used for all calls of nature. Trips to the out house were of a rather secretive nature. Somehow we started a tradition of throwing rocks onto the metal roof whenever we saw one of our buddies slip into the outhouse. One day my friend got smart. He made a run for the outhouse but instead of stopping he kept on going, circled the barn and came back up behind us and watched us belabor the roof with stones for a while before making his presence known. We were not impressed!

 

Then one the day we broke that tradition, permanently. My friend was sure he saw me enter the outhouse and made the most of the opportunity. But then the door opened and an elderly spinster rather cautiously emerged. Needless to say he beat a very hast retreat.

 

We worked a crazy schedule. It was nothing unusual for me to start work at 10 am and quit at 3 am the next morning. All that made for long days and having enough food to last the day was sometimes a problem. Incidentally, that was where I learned to cook. One day, because we wanted to make a point, we caught a sparrow in the barn, cooked it inside a squash and ate it. Then peddled the story to make it look like we were starving.

 

Every night after everything was done we had to take inventory for the book keeper. A most dreaded job. It was 2 am and we were weaving through the isles tired to a state of drunkenness, trying to get an accurate count of 30 different kinds of produce. There were several boxes of product simply missing. Gone. My uncle (at that point in time he was younger and could still be very funny) declared up and down and sideways that a Green Dragon had eaten them, all the while looking furtively at the dark dragon ridden corners. We reported the missing boxes as eaten by the Green Dragon. Unfortunately we failed to convince the book keeper, probably because it was no longer dark when she got there.

 

Several days later my cousin and I were at CAM sorting clothes when behold! A stuffed Green Dragon, spitting image of the one Uncle had seen in the dark corners, came down the clothes tube. Well that Dragon went home with us, lured by promises of all kinds of vegetables to eat. We perched him in a corner where Uncle was sure to see him and waited.

 

A little while later Uncle came by with a stern, I told you so look on his face. “See!”, he said, “I caught him!! He was in a box of half eaten squash. We are going to have to hang him.” And so we did. With a piece of fishing line fastened to the kerosene line for the lights.

 

Not long after we had simply too many squash. As if they had appeared out of nowhere. We concluded that the Green Dragon had repented and returned the squash he stole. How he managed that while dangling from a fish line we never did figure out.

Full Throttle

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.