Raining and Straining

Last time, while enjoying my way across South Dakota, I mentioned that my ultimate destination was Seattle, Washington.  Just as life is (hopefully) a marathon, not a sprint, my goal was to amble around all three of the Pacific Northwest states a bit in order to refresh my impressions of them.  Seattle was the finish line.

Note that I said THREE states, referring to Washington, Oregon, and enough of Northern California to be included.  You could throw in the Canadian province of British Columbia, which is assuredly in the Northwest and, last time we looked, borders the Pacific Ocean.  But hey, this is not Ted Landphair’s Anglo-America, much as British naval captain James Cook would have liked to hold us to his 1778 claim of all the lands north of the Columbia River in the name of the king.

Idaho, which is up that way, too, sometimes horns into definitions of the region, even though you’d have to drive or tramp at least 725 kilometers (about 450 miles) from any place in that often-overlooked state to watch the sun go down over the Pacific.  We did drive through Idaho’s northern panhandle, which, perhaps longingly, keeps Pacific time.  And Idahoans, like Oregonians and Washingtonians to their west, are nuts (or beans) about coffee.  That’s where the “straining” comes from in today’s title.  Rain band after band off the Pacific, and frequent fog and mist in the mountains of Idaho as well as the coastal states, put people in a mood for a long conversation over a tall mocha java.

But sorry, Idaho.  Love your potatoes.  God bless your daredevil kayakers and whitewater rafters on the Snake and Salmon rivers.  And let us know some time why Aryan cults seem to dig your woods.  But you’re a Rocky Mountain State, and we were just passing through.

Our journey to Oregon and Washington, and warm memories of California’s Sequoia country, confirmed the region’s association with trees.  Enormous green ones, by the millions or maybe billions.  Washington is the Evergreen State, and on the Oregon flag there is a stand of Douglas firs next to a prairie schooner — a wagon with a billowing cloth roof in which many an early traveler arrived on the Oregon Trail.

Everywhere you go, the scent of evergreen needles, fresh-cut timber, and the tangy smell of Pacific pine cones amazes, braces, and lingers.

Deep in the woods, especially amidst the lowland fog in the Cascade and Coastal mountain ranges and the rainforest in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, the smell of new-fallen rain refreshes, too.  (Magically, soaring glaciers somehow rise out of the warm mists.)  West of the mountains that follow the coast, the days — sometimes day after day after day — can be drizzly and dreary; the Olympic Peninsula, in particular, is lapped by moist ocean air that rides above the Pacific’s Japanese current; the Peninsula endures an average 371 centimeters (150 inches) of rain per year.

But despite what the locals tell you, the average annual rainfall in Seattle and Portland — both well inland — is one-third that, and 13 times less than the rain totals on Mount Waialeale on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai, the rainiest spot on earth.  Except in the wintertime, Pacific Northwest cities don’t stay damp and gloomy for long.

Smells of the sea remain in one’s memory, too, for the people of the Pacific Northwest take to sailboats, cruise ships, fishing boats, and a veritable armada of ferries as readily as they travel by car.  Beaches are plentiful but often far too rocky, and the water too nippy, for swimming.  The faint odors there are of kelp and fresh driftwood, including whole sodden trees washed downstream and into the sea from logging camps.  There is the smell, too, of halibut, tuna, and Dungeness crabs hauled ashore in giant trawlers and tiny fishing boats, as well as that of salmon smoking on grills along the piers and in commercial smokehouses in every good-sized coastal town.

There’s often a bouquet in the air, too, around the thousands of hectares of apples, cherry, and loganberry orchards and strawberry fields.  Oregon and Washington are leading producers of zesty peppermint and of flowers grown for bulbs and seeds.  The forests, canyons, and mountain meadows abound with wildflowers — lupines, fragrant lavender, Indian paintbrush, phlox, and aromatic wild roses.  And the Pacific Northwest boasts cultivated perennial gardens on the scale of southern England’s.  Portland isn’t called the “Rose City” for nothing.

And what of the ever-present scent of coffee from thousands of coffeehouses, espresso bars, carts on the street, booths inside grocery stores, and ethnic restaurants?  My VOA colleague Art Chimes tells me that he once pulled into a Seattle gas station and found, right in the island containing the gasoline pumps and window-washing fluid and Squeegee, a narrow espresso kiosk from which a barista was busy handing lattes out the window.

America’s addiction to upscale coffee began in Seattle in the 1980s and spread like a pandemic south and east.  Now there are, what, maybe 25,000 specialty coffee shops across the country?  Residents tell you this is a byproduct of the area’s high-tech sophistication and laid-back lifestyle.  (Washington’s official motto, taken from the Chinook dialect, is Alki, meaning “by and by.”)

And then there’s that rain.

Tea houses have sprung up like spring rhododendrons, too.  Perhaps it is not the product alone, but also the process (more straining) that fascinates the region, for it is the epicenter of a microbrewery tsunami as well.  Portland, which pours coffee and tea with the best of them, also boasts 50 or so microbrewereies and twice that many brewpubs.  “Craft” brewers can be found throughout the rest of the region as well.  The eruption in the number of small, neighborhood breweries coincided with the buyouts and consolidations of nationwide brewing companies marketing pasteurized, pale (Northwest aficionados say “watered down”) lagers and “light” beers.  Regional breweries like Pyramid in Seattle, BridgePort in Portland, and Humboldt in Arcata, California, grabbed a niche with stronger ales, porters, stouts, and pilsners — also often bottled but not usually pasteurized.  Taste, not a long shelf life, is their forte.  I love eccentric Northwest brands such as “Hair of the Dog” out of Portland and “Mia and Pia’s” from Klamath Falls, Oregon.

Somehow, despite the idle chatter at the brewpubs, coffeehouses, tea parlors, and Internet chat rooms, work gets done.  A surprising amount of it, considering the region’s woodsy and marine traditions, is on farms and ranches east of the Cascades.  There, the smells include those of new-mown wheat and alfalfa hay, mounds of freshly harvested potatoes, cattle clustered at feed lots, and sheep bunched together for shearing.  The rain shadow cast by the coastal mountains leaves these flatlands relatively dry and warm, producing a long and frost-free crop season of 250 days or more each year.

The Pacific Northwest’s imposing snow-clad peaks — Ranier, Hood, Baker, Shasta — have no special scent save for the bracing air of the great outdoors.  It is in the high country — and in the region’s deep ravines, along its wild seashore, across the wooded San Juan Islands above Puget Sound, on thousands of freshwater lakes, and throughout the length of the wide Columbia and wild Snake and other rivers — that hunting, fishing, rafting, birding, and jouncy off-road driving are passions.  The Snake cuts a gorge along the Oregon-Idaho border that is deeper than the Grand Canyon.

Of course, the Spaniards who first poked around the coast of the Pacific Northwest in the mid-1500s were not interested in sights or smells.  They were looking for glory and gold.  They claimed the lands but did not bother to establish settlements along the rocky shore.  British explorers like the aforementioned Cook, searching for a Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, followed two centuries later.  Russian trappers sailed there, too, eventually establishing a colony at Fort Ross in Northern California.  When the sea otter supply played out a few years later, most Russians departed for home, leaving behind a few churches and other structures.  Fur traders of many nationalities soon followed into the Pacific Northwest’s interior.  They included Robert Gray, a Yankee trader from Rhode Island, who crossed the bar of the Columbia River — which Gray named after his ship, the Columbia Rediviva — in 1792.

The pathfinding expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, sent west to map the wilderness by U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, followed that river to the sea 13 years later.  John Jacob Astor made a fortune from his Pacific Fur Company, established in 1811 by his minions in Astoria, the Oregon country’s first permanent settlement at the mouth of the Columbia, and the first American town west of the Rocky Mountains. 

A concerted incursion of other Americans, led by Methodist and Catholic missionaries and “mountain men” from the Rockies, began in Oregon soon thereafter.

That’s “ORR-ih-gunn,” by the way, not “ORR-ih-GONE,” if you want to keep peace with the locals.

The trickle became a human tidal wave beginning in the 1840s with the arrival at the land office at Oregon City — now a suburb of Portland — of farm families from the Midwest.  They had trudged from Missouri along the Oregon Trail to what were advertised as the “gates of Eden” in the fertile Willamette Valley.  Imbued with “Oregon fever,” they came mostly on foot, leading their teams of mules, horses, or oxen that pulled all their worldly possessions.   To their surprise, it was not the rugged Rocky Mountains that proved to be their greatest impediment, for a broad and gentle pass through them had been found in Wyoming.  The most arduous climb was indeed at Eden’s gate, over Oregon’s Blue Mountains, which offered no passes at all.

All the while, the Americans sought to push the British northward, preferably to latitude 54° 40’ in the Yukon, and James J. Polk sounded a rallying cry in his successful race for the U.S. presidency in 1844: “Fifty-four-forty or fight!”  Knowing that its claim to the Pacific Northwest rested largely in the hands of a few Hudson Bay fur company traders and the valiant Northwest Mounted Police, the British took what they could get in a treaty struck two years later.  It conceded all lands south of the 49th parallel (save for the protruding southern tip of Vancouver Island) to the United States but, in return, put an end to Americans’ designs on Canadian territory.

In 1848, the Oregon Territory, including what is now all of Washington and much of Idaho, was organized.  Settlement proceeded in two distinct clumps: one to the south of the Columbia around Portland, and the other along the eastern shore of Puget Sound.  In 1853, the northern reaches broke off as their own territory, named “Washington” after the first U.S. president.  Truncated Oregon became a state in 1859; Washington lost some of its lands to Idaho Territory and waited 30 more years before becoming the nation’s 42nd state.  For much of this period the bulk of Northern California was a wilderness, but the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in Sacramento spurred rampant development.

In the years since, the Pacific Northwest’s economy has grown largely because of its timber and agricultural riches, its extensive mining, hydroelectric and nuclear energy production, aluminum smelting and refining, and, later, aerospace and computer industries.  The economy has also benefited from tourists like Carol and me, drawn to the region’s boundless natural wonders that include volcanic peaks like mounts Ranier and Hood, and the remnants of Mount St. Helens — a volcano that erupted in 1980 and around which, despite some forest regrowth, barren hillsides and charred timber can still be seen.  Today St. Helens is the official “national volcanic monument,” though the closest that visitors can get is an observatory eight kilometers (five miles) away, where the still-steaming lava dome, crater, and landslide deposit can be seen.  Crystal-blue Crater Lake in southern Oregon is set in the depression left by the explosions of another, now-extinct volcano.

A comprehensive tour of the Pacific Northwest might begin, though, in extreme Northern California.  This is a land far different from the rest of the Golden State.  It is a trove of national forests, wild rivers, precipitous mountain roads, and craggy coastline akin to green Oregon.  The far-northern California counties are a dense, woodsy place where not just ice and deer pose road hazards; so do gray-pine cones, which fall like rocks and damage vehicles and noggins.  From there, reservoirs, dams, and aqueducts divert water to the state’s arid Central Valley and on to glittering Southern California.

Close to the Northern California coast looms the majestic Redwood Forest, home to the world’s tallest — and some of its oldest — trees.  One, called the “Immortal Tree,” is thought to be 950 or more years old.  The Redwood Highway, or “Avenue of the Giants” through Humboldt Redwoods State Park leads visitors past and even through living trees.  They grow there and only there, in the humid coastal climate of Northern California and southern Oregon.

With all that grandeur, no wonder Humboldt County is California’s “art capital,” with more artists per capita than any other county.

Up in Oregon, pretty Portland is a remarkably self-contained city by design.  Under Governor Tom McCall in the late 1970s, and with the cooperation of county and suburban officials, it drew a simple line around the metropolitan area.  This boundary has expanded outward, but its rigid purpose is still largely in place.  Inside the line, carefully controlled urban growth is permitted.  Outside — sometimes even on the other side of a street — forests, farms, and open space must be maintained.  Developers howled at this idea.  They warned of a loss of jobs, but the opposite has occurred.  Factories and high-tech campuses arose, and both the population and home prices soared without unchecked sprawl.

Still, downtown Portland is home to the nation’s largest urban wilderness in Forest Park.  The city even tore up a downtown freeway and replaced it with a delightful riverfront park whose many festivals have helped keep residents in town and downtown alive at night.  There’s also a long, dedicated transit mall, much of which is closed to automobile traffic.

Oregon even has its own Mardi Gras, of sorts.  It is the annual Graffiti Weekend each July in Roseburg, gateway to Crater Lake and the Oregon Caves National Monument.  The name springs not from scribbling on building walls but from the 1973 movie “American Graffiti,” director George Lucas’ popular paean to the 1950s.

In Eastern Oregon — wheat and high-desert country — ranchers raise everything from antelopes to llamas to reindeer.  And the land across the Columbia in eastern Washington is just as remote and dusty until one reaches the irrigated orchards around towns like Pasco and Walla Walla.  The latter’s name derives from an Indian word for “many waters.”  So important is agriculture in the area that an official of the local chamber of commerce once sent me a list of tourist attractions that included the sweet onion.

Spokane, farther north along the Idaho border, rightly brags about its picturesque falls and an imposing clock tower erected by the Great Northern Railway. A lot of railroad and mining barons built beautiful homes near it during the “Age of Elegance” at the turn of the 20th century, just as “country leisure” brings lots of newcomers to little Washington towns from Spokane to Seattle to this day.  (I recently wrote about one of them, a new city called Sammamish, in a VOA feature story, at http://www.voanews.com/english/AmericanLife/2009-09-11-voa28.cfm

Seattle, an increasingly prominent and globally competitive city in the midst of a metropolitan area of 3 million people, is the region’s most notable crossroads of peoples, cultures, technologies, and transportation.  It is a place where Yakima apples go out and New Zealand kiwi fruit comes in; where tourists from across America come to buy salmon at Pike Place Market or get on a cruise ship to Alaska; where more than 500 international firms have a presence; and where the value of goods shipped to far-off Japan is nearly double that sent to nearby Canada. 

(We interrupt for a cute Seattle/kid story.  My editor, Rob Sivak, tells me that he and his family love the Northwest — Seattle in particular.  One day, as they were leaving on a trip there, wee daughter Monica asked where they were going. “We’re going to Seattle,” Rob replied.  “Oh,” said Monica, looking puzzled.  “Who’s Attle?”)

Named for “the Emerald City,” See-Attle ranks third in the nation in percentage of professional and technical employees, and third in percentage of adults who have competed college.  The Boeing aircraft company and Microsoft computers, the region’s largest employers, are among America’s largest exporters.

Taken as a whole, the Pacific Northwest tests the limits of hyperbole: spectacular, sublime, panoramic, a racial melting pot with a pronounced Asian accent.  And — remembering especially a steaming cappuccino in Seattle, a pint of fresh-brewed pilsner in Portland, a bite into a freshly cut peach near Bend, Oregon, and a blast of cool air in the pines along Lake Sammamish on my recent visit —  the adjective I like best in describing it all is . . .

Fragrant.

***

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Akin.  (Usually used with the preposition “to.”)  Similar to.  Having the same quality as.

Barista.  From the Italian, it refers to one who grinds beans into coffee, specifically behind a shop counter rather than at home.

Jouncy.  Bumpy and jolting, bouncy.

Noggin.  An informal word for one’s head, especially used when describing a knock on, or blow to, the head.

Paean.  Pronouncded “pee-AWN,” this is a shout or song of praise.  The word was used in hymns of thanksgiving to the Roman gods.

South Dakodak

If you’re like me, you sometimes look back at an earlier period in your nation’s history and think, “Those were the days!”  We romanticize the slower pace and what today seems like their relative innocence — even if reality was something else again.  I’ve already told you that I sometimes linger over old photographs — I’m thinking of a grainy one of a family posed in front of an 1870s Nebraska sod house — and wonder what those people were thinking and what their days were like. 

And even though I’ve never been much into automobiles, I love to read about the late 1920s and early 1930s, when Henry Ford’s Model T, as Smithsonian Institution historian Roger White once said, “put America on wheels.”  Ordinary America, not just big shots who could afford the fancy touring cars produced before Ford’s assembly line came along.

By the way, South Dakota is the subject of this posting, but bear with me.  It took a long time to get places in those early days, and we’re puttering our way west and will get there by and by.

With the Automotive Age came a national wanderlust that continues to this day.  People formed “touring clubs” and headed out.  Ford, inventor Thomas Edison, tire baron Harvey Firestone, and even President Warren Harding were among thousands who joined caravans of “camping cars” that stoked the nation’s appetite for outdoor recreation.  They called themselves “the Vagabonds.”  Auto enthusiasts prodded their state politicians into paving, widening, and connecting meandering roads, and auto clubs gave them enticing names like “Lincoln Highway” and “Yellowstone Trail.”

Then the federal government assigned numbers to many of them, and gasoline companies gave away maps so drivers could find their way clear across the land.

The mechanized rush hither and yon was on, and people — families, especially — needed places to eat, sleep, and amuse themselves along the way.  Thus was born a disjointed network of one-story “motor courts,” greasy-spoon diners, nightclubs and taverns, and repair shops of varying caliber whose neon signs beckoned weary wayfarers.

Hang in there.  We’ll be in South Dakota soon.

My own nostalgia — if that’s the right word, for I wasn’t yet born — peaks at the thought of offbeat and oddball “roadside attractions” of those times that endeavored to separate travelers from their money.  I’m talking snake farms, spooky caverns, mangy zoos, exotic rock and fossil collections, Christian theme parks, muddy fields where dinosaurs were said to have roamed, real and phony Indian trading posts, aquatic gardens (some with “mermaids”), “funhouse” amusement parks, and museums of every description.

Let us not forget architectural “curiosities” as varied as the entrepreneurial minds that created them: “mystery houses,” a swimming pier inside a blue Plexiglass whale, a restaurant shaped like the familiar figure on a syrup bottle, the “world’s largest” spinach can or rabbit; and what tourists were assured were the world’s smallest church or horse or man.

What does any of this have to do with South Dakota?

Well, the No. 1 motoring destination in those early days was the nation’s first national park, Yellowstone — that geologically tremulous place with the spraying geysers such as “Old Faithful,” which is still reliably erupting with a 60-meter-high column of boiling water and steam every hour to hour-and-a-half. 

Yellowstone sputters in Wyoming, the state just to the west of South Dakota.  But by 1941, the Coyote State itself had a monumental tourist magnet, literally, way out near the Wyoming border.  It was the epic sculpture of four U.S. presidents, carved and blasted over 14 years into the face of Mount Rushmore.

But to get there, or on to Yellowstone and the Pacific Northwest from the populous East, Midwest, and South, families had to cross the wide, largely empty South Dakota prairie.  Did I say “wide”?  Picture yourself in a noisy, smelly, hand-cranked Model T with the wife and kids, jostling along South Dakota’s early cracked and dusty roads for 550 kilometers — 340 miles — in search of Mount Rushmore.  

They became eager customers of some of the most abundant and creative roadside attractions in the country.  And the same can be said today, although the quality of South Dakota attractions has taken a quantum leap from the days of dairy stands and pony rides. 

Carol and I recently crossed the entire state en route to Seattle, Washington — not on a teeth-rattling, two-lane road but on a modern, high-speed Interstate highway.  And while you can’t pull over on I-90 any time you feel like it for a cuppa joe at a roadside diner, or check out an Indian cultural center or Scandinavian church without driving far ahead to the next exit, there are interesting, family-oriented, and quirky places to explore all across South Dakota’s single east-west expressway.

So many that we took to calling the state “South Dakodak” — a play on the name of the American camera-maker — because of its wealth of photogenic and fun attractions.

We started, as most visitors do, in eastern South Dakota and worked our way west.  Barely out of Minnesota is the state’s largest city, if you want to call a population of 125,000 “large.”  It’s Sioux Falls, an old slaughterhouse town where at least one stockyard and meatpacking operation survives.  The city gets its name from falls of the Big Sioux River.  Don’t expect roaring Niagara Falls.  These are pleasant cascades, but the surrounding bluffs give one a clue that the terrain is about to change.  Rocks, if not the Rockies, are no longer just our imagination away.

Sioux Falls is a sort of outdoor art gallery.  Downtown streets are dotted with 50 sculptures, loaned to the city by artists from around the world and replaced in toto every year.  Their creators are paid $500 apiece to deliver them and another $500 to come pick them up if they haven’t been sold.  About 20 percent of the “SculptureWalk” pieces DO find buyers, and you can even lease one for awhile if you like.  Talk about making an impression at a cocktail party! 

The artists can also earn up to $15,000 if their works win awards in an end-of-season judging.  End of season, meaning before South Dakota’s savage winter snowstorms come a-howlin’ down from Manitoba.

In Fawick Park stands a bronze replica of Michelangelo’s Statue of David in all his, um, glory.  He is NOT for sale or rent.  Thomas Fawick, an art collector, early automobile maker, and inventor of everything from landing-craft clutches to golf-club grips, donated David to the city and a replica of Michelangelo’s Moses, wearing a few clothes, to Augustana College across town.

Truth be told, while I admire and enjoy imaginative sculptures, I rarely let out a “wow” when beholding them.  I’m especially unmoved by most “folk art,” which to me looks like something I could have slapped together from metal squares and Popsicle sticks in eighth-grade shop class.

But I let out wow after wow on a grassy plateau about 40 kilometers (25 miles) west of Sioux Falls, near the minuscule town of Montrose.  My eye, like that of just about everybody tooling down the Interstate, had been caught by an 18-meter (60-foot)-high sculpture of a bull’s head.  A funky one, with horns of exaggerated height.  A modernist interpretation of the extinct Egyptian longhorn, perhaps.

So we took the Montrose exit and wound our way up to “Porter Sculpture Park,” which displays a field full of unpredictable, bizarre, and quite lovable works of a fellow named Ron Porter.  There’s a small admission charge, but we found the place unattended, with a sign inviting any and all to come on in.  Porter, who swears he can’t draw or paint a lick but is pretty handy with a welding iron, even touts the park as “a great place to walk your dog.”  I can’t begin to describe all the wacky sculptures — you can see a couple of Carol’s shots of them — but they include much-much-larger-than-life depictions of tools, schools of fish, skeletons and bugs, buzzards, and freaky looking sort-of-humans. 

A lot of people who are whizzing past Porter’s big bull are heading for Mitchell, a bit larger eastern South Dakota town, there to behold the vaunted “Corn Palace.”  Mitchell was an almost-new town in 1892 when the residents got together and built an extraordinary auditorium entirely — save for its wooden frame — of corncobs.  It was the showpiece of the fall harvest season and that year’s “Corn Belt Exposition,” and a challenger to a “grain palace” established in Plankinton, a rival down the road. 

Plankinton’s grain-clad structure lasted just two years.  Mitchell’s Corn Palace, though twice rebuilt, pulls in tourists every day of the year to this day. 

You can walk right in and stroll the corridors, looking at historic photos like the one of “March King” John Philip Sousa and his world-famous band, who performed at the corn-y opening.   The auditorium floor below holds souvenir booths until the men’s and women’s basketball teams of Mitchell’s Dakota Wesleyan University take it over for their seasons. Then the trinket-selling moves to a separate building across the street.

Several varieties of corn in eight colors — including Indian corn ears in multicolor “calico” — adorn the palace’s facade.  Each April about 275,000 ears of dry corn, for which the city pays a farmer $150,000, are cut, hauled into town, and affixed to the building in thematic designs that differ each year.  Mitchell makes its money back, and then some, on postcards and corn-related souvenirs; the Corn Palace brings in about $30 million a year in all, counting motel stays, gasoline purchased, and corn dogs consumed.  That’s a whole lot more revenue than other prairie farm towns of 3,000 people can boast.

The “palace” didn’t look so grand in years when severe drought or hailstorms damaged the corn crop.  The town stopped trying to cover the spires and minarets altogether after high winds knocked a couple down.  Hungry rats with wings (pigeons) have been known to strip a section or two of kernels, and a summer of intense prairie sunshine can dull the building’s sheen.

If you’ve never heard of Mitchell, I guarantee you’ve not heard of Murdo, South Dakota.  That’s a town, named after an early settler and cattleman, Scotsman Murdo MacKenzie, that would almost certainly have dried up and blown away had local Chevy car and John Deere tractor dealer A. J. Geisler not opened a place called the Pioneer Auto Show in 1954.  He then sweet-talked the state into putting an exit ramp at this nondescript town of 600 when the Interstate reached central South Dakota.

To call the Pioneer Auto Show an antique-auto museum would be like calling the Taj Mahal a pretty building.  True, but inadequate.  As you’d expect, there are almost 300 vintage cars of all descriptions, but also 60 tractors, 60 motorcycles, assorted jukeboxes, a Wurlitzer circus organ, slot machines, toys, an old and intact gas station, and, incongruously, shelf after shelf of rocks.  One of the astonishing 42 buildings cobbled together to make the place, you see, holds the National Rockhound and Lapidary Hall of Fame.  (As you would, I had to look up “lapidary” to discover that it relates to the cutting and polishing of precious gems.  Not diamonds or rubies, but prairie rocks and fossilized cross-sections of plants, polished to a fare-thee-well.)

Seventy-two-year-old David Geisler, A. J.’s son, presides, charming women and kids and even the men who escort them.  He walks people past the old fire engines, pausing to clang their bells; points out classics among the cars — ah-oo-guhing their horns; and spins yarns about everything he passes, including the Elvis Presley motorcycle and the “prairie town” out back.  Don’t get him started about the leather license plate or the eight-wheel “Octo Rod” car. 

Altogether, the Pioneer Auto Show — plus rocks and such — is more than anyone could comprehend in a short visit.  Which, of course, is the point.

More manageable, three exits down the road, is a place where the buildings themselves are the draw: more than 50 of them at “1880 Town.”  In 1972, ranchers Clarence and Richard Hullinger began assembling authentic structures from the Dakotas’ “Wild West” era, starting with those that a production company had moved to the nearby plains for a movie shoot.  Filled with period furnishings, the buildings include an old-timey bank, Wells Fargo express office, saloon, blacksmith’s shop, and 14-sided barn.  Costumed marshals, outlaws and a “loose woman” or two mingle with visitors, who can rent western duds for themselves and their kids as well for hammy photographs.

1880 Town is billed as “the ultimate destination for fans of ‘Dances with Wolves,’” and for good reason.  The producers of that Kevin Costner epic vehicle about a disillusioned, white Civil War veteran in the land of the Indian gave the Hullingers props and photos from their film as well.

About half an hour onward, you can detour into a different sort of Wild West: the loop road through the South Dakota Badlands.  The Lakota called these 99,000 hectares (244,000 acres) of barren buttes, pinnacles and spires that encircle the nation’s largest mixed-grass prairie maco sica — literally, “land bad.”  Now protected, or at least patrolled, as a national park, this forbidding place also holds the world’s greatest fossil beds of early mammals from — you guessed it! — the Oligocene Epoch.  (And what an epoch it was!) 

After a drive or hike through desolation, you’re ready for an ice-cream sundae or a cheeseburger and fries.  Even a glass of ice-cold water.  In the 1930s, in fact, free, chilled water was enough to pull people in to a little drugstore in the town of Wall, which wasn’t much bigger than the store.  Today, Wall Drug is so enormous and kitschy that it bills itself — with not a lot of argument from others — as “America’s favorite roadside attraction.”

It’s really no more than a big-box store for shopaholics, snack-food addicts, and people who are curious what those hundreds of Wall Drug signs along the freeway were about.  Want some cowboy boots and spurs?  Christmas ornaments any time of the year?  Gold bracelets?  “Indian” bows and rubber-tipped arrows?  A stuffed jackalope?  Wall Drug T-shirts that confirm you were there?  You’ve come to the right place.

And yes, Wall Drug has drugs — the over-the-counter kind. 

If you need a contemplative break from shopping excess, Wall Drug has even set aside a little room as a chapel.

You’ll recall that I mentioned Mount Rushmore as one of the powerful magnets that lured early tourists across the farmland and Rocky Mountain foothills of remote South Dakota.  In 1923, the state historian came up with the idea for a REALLY BIG sculpture to promote tourism.  He convinced sculptor Gutzon Borglum to take on the project, which was funded from private sources and the federal government.

Borglum envisioned granite likenesses of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt carved into the face of Mount Rushmore.  His plans called for the presidents to be depicted from the waist up, but only their faces — 18 meters each from chin to the tops of their heads — were completed when money ran low.  But the work, for which Gutzon Borglum hired more than 400 unemployed miners as laborers, continued for 14 years. 

In order to achieve correct scale, Borglum created a studio model in which three centimeters equaled four meters on the mountain.  And translating that model to giant visages required more than mathematics or hammer-and-chisel sculpting.  Using dynamite, whole boulders had to be blasted most carefully, both to protect workers and to be sure a presidential nose was not blown away.

Today Mount Rushmore, way out in the rugged Black Hills, draws more than 2.5 million visitors a year from around the world.

Those hills have long been sacred to the Lakota tribe, which bitterly opposed building the monument, arguing that the United States Government had given the hills to the tribe forever in a 19th century treaty.  But whites had won the Indian Wars, and the government brushed aside these objections.

So, on behalf of native peoples throughout the Americas, the Lakota commissioned one of Borglum’s assistants, Korczak Ziolkowski, who had completed a giant carving of his own on Stone Mountain in Georgia, to create their own mountainside memorial just down the road — sacred hills or not.  "My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes, too," Chief Henry Standing Bear wrote in the letter of invitation to Ziolkowski in 1939. 

Together, they chose Chief Crazy Horse as the subject.  A Lakota warrior, he was infamous among whites for leading the war party of Sioux and Cheyennes that trapped and massacred flamboyant U.S. Gen. George Armstrong Custer and his 215 cavalrymen at “Custer’s Last Stand” along the Little Bighorn River in neighboring Montana in 1876. 

When the Crazy Horse Monument is completed a generation or more from now, it will likely be the largest sculpture in the world.  Some time this fall, I’ll be writing about it in a VOA “Only in America” feature story to which I will link in this blog.

Not far from Crazy Horse and Mount Rushmore is Rapid City, the hub of the Black Hills, where you can’t help but come face to face with more U.S. presidents.  Not real ones, as you must have guessed, and not big granite guys.  These are bronze chief executives — 40 of them so far — the creations of five South Dakota artists.  They’re arrayed in memorable poses at downtown streetcorners. Ronald Reagan, for instance, appears in jeans, work shirt, and a cowboy hat, as if he’d just cleared some brush at his Rancho del Cielo in California.  Teddy Roosevelt sports his Rough Rider hat, kerchief, and sidearm.  A smiling John F. Kennedy holds the hand of his young son, “John-John.”  Three other, more obscure presidents — Chester A. Arthur, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Benjamin Harrison — will join them and the others this fall, along with Abraham Lincoln. 

Just about everybody has heard of him. 

Our last stop before leaving “South Dakodak” was a fascinating little park that at last had the feel of good-old-days roadside wonders.  “Dinosaur Park,” featuring “towering dinosaurs of the size and appearance of dinosaurs that roamed Western South Dakota during the late Cretaceous Period!” sits high above Rapid City.   Kids (and spry adults) are actually encouraged to climb on the five really big, painted-concrete, prehistoric reptiles, which appeared way back in 1936. (That’s the Cretaceous Period, isn’t it?)

A paleontologist at the South Dakota School of Mines convinced the government to send Works Progress Administration crews to build these creatures during the depths of the Great Depression.  Even the curator of the National Museum of Natural History, far away in Washington, D.C., consulted to be sure the beasts looked plausibly like Stegosaurus, Tricerotops and their ilk from eons ago.  Now, of course, they look like cartoon characters or Thanksgiving-day parade parodies. 

All the better to create a delightful diversion after a long drive across a wide state.

I’d like to, but can’t, close by telling you that you’ll find lots of even-quirkier roadside attractions elsewhere, along the narrow state highways that survived the sprawl of Interstate expressways.  The truth is that except in a few short or remote stretches, including some remnants of historic U.S. Route 66 between Chicago and Los Angeles, most little “tourist traps” that thrived in the early days of motorized travel died of visitor starvation when the Interstates passed them by.  Pockets of development beside exits off the superhighways are now the place to grab hunks of travelers’ cash, and there’s no room there for Indian arrowhead shops or snake farms. Unfortunately.

****

One Dakota, Two Dakota

If you’re curious, South and North Dakota lie in what was once land traversed by nomadic Plains Indians.  The Dakota branch of the Sioux tribes gives it its name.  The United States claimed that land in 1803 as the northernmost part of the “Louisiana Purchase” of vast inland territory from France, even though few French or Americans had dared to live there.

The discovery of gold in the Black Hills, plus the coming of the railroad, prompted a settlement boom that led to the creation of a defined “Dakota Territory in 1861.  And one gigantic state it might have been had the territorial capital not been moved from Yankton in the southeastern corner, near Nebraska, to Bismarck, far to the west and north.  Sectional squabbling ensued, making two distinct states almost inevitable.  They entered the Union together in 1889, separated by a long, straight boundary just below the 46th Parallel.

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

By and by. At some time or occasion in the future.

Jackalope. The fanciful combination of a jackrabbit and an antelope, with horns as well as long ears Newcomers (or “tinhorns”) to the U.S. prairie were often sent out to hunt the nonexistent jackalope, whose doctored photos they had been shown.

Kitschy. Lowbow or quirky, but deliberately so.

Tremulous. Quivering or trembling.

Vaunted. Famous, renowned.

The Plain People

Carol and I recently visited the land of the Plain People in Holmes County, Ohio, just down the road from the ordinary, middle-sized cities of Akron and Canton.

These neatly tied shocks of barley epitomize the look of the countryside in Ohio’s Amish country

This is “Amish country,” the largest, if not richest, concentration of Old Order Amish in the world. It is a serene place, full of rolling meadows, vibrant fields of corn and grain, and the Amish people’s tidy farmsteads. Serene, that is, until you’re stuck behind lines of tourists’ cars, funneling into quaint villages with even quainter names: Charm, Birds Run, Nellie, Seventeen, and Blissfield, to name five. There’s a Berlin, a Schoenbrunn, and a Gnadenhutten, too, giving a clue as to the German heritage of many folks thereabout.

Gnadenhutten. Gesundheit!

You can ride in Amish buggies, gorge yourself at smorgasbord restaurants and Amish bakeries — just try eating a couple of whoopee pies and then tell me the Amish aren’t sinful! — and watch Amishmen make cheese and furniture. You can walk through an authentic Amish home, too, run by non-Amish but with the Plain People’s blessing. It’s a way that the Amish can satisfy the curious while keeping outsiders from prying too deeply into their lives and affairs.

This town-limits sign says it all about one little Holmes County community.

Like the more famous, and much more touristy, Amish country of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania – replete with its own odd place names (Bird-in-Hand, Intercourse, Blue Ball) – Holmes County is an unusual juxtaposition of cultures. The Old Order Amish’s distinctive 19th-century lifestyle endures alongside, and within, the 21st-century world. These people cheerfully acknowledge that they are living in a time warp as they drive horse-drawn buggies, open carts, and mule- or horse-pulled farm machinery. Their farms, located in the rural parts of 22 mostly eastern and midwestern U.S. states and eastern Canada, are often the largest, best-kept, and most prosperous in their counties. Their homesteads are characterized by well-manicured gardens, windmills, and long rows of hanging wash on clotheslines, as well as one, two, or more additions to their farmhouses to accommodate large, extended families.

And what makes these places especially easy to spot are the plain window shades – that “plain” word again – and the absence of electric wires, frilly curtains, or any other kind of adornments.

Three especially memorable stops marked our visit, not counting dozens of screeches to a halt so that Carol could photograph the alluring countryside:

These are just a few of the lamps on display at Lehman’s General Store. Kerosene lamps are the principal form of illumination in Amish homes.

Lehman’s General Store in Kidron, Ohio. It was founded by a former Mennonite missionary in 1955 to serve the Amish but has evolved into room after room of old-timey and non-electric products that my mother knew well growing up “back in the country” of rural Pennsylvania. This is the place, in a series of refurbished old barns that Jay Lehman moved to one location and joined, to find butter churns, sauerkraut crocks and pickle kegs, oil lamps and cookie cutters by the hundreds, farm bells, noodle makers, potato mashers and other “hand-powered kitchen appliances,” jump-ropes and jack-in-the-boxes, washboards, straight-edge razors, cider presses, hand-cranked radios and ice-cream makers, and something called “granny-ware.” That’s a “water-bath canner” – a metal tub with handles to heat jars of fruits and vegetables like those that my mother “put up” for the winter, even in our suburban basement. Lehman’s carries books like Living With Chickens and Basic Butchering of Livestock and Game. Walking through the place, I felt like I was inside a living Sears & Roebuck mail-order catalog from 1905.

This is the Homestead Furniture “floor lamp” of which I speak. It’s more like a ceiling lamp, though.

Homestead Furniture in Mount Hope, where I was perplexed by floor lamps that rose – and rose and rose – all the way to a very high ceiling. That’s because the owner, Ernie Hershberger, is Old Order Amish, and these lamps, powered by batteries secluded in drawers at their base, take the place of overhead fluorescent electric lights.

And the Gutisberg Cheese Factory in the town of Charm. Now in its 60th year of making cheeses, it invented the “baby Swiss” variety, milder and creamier than typical Swiss cheese, and with far smaller “air” holes. Amishman Abe Mast walked me through the cheese-making routine

The baby Swiss rounds will soon rise to fill the molds at the Gutisberg Cheese plant.

– at least the part that begins once horse-drawn Amish wagons have dropped off tanks of fresh milk. The process is full of vats and enzymes, brine racks and cultures, curds and (of course) whey. Something called “renet,” too. Are you sure you want to know what that is? If not, skip to the next paragraph. Renet, as the Gutisbergs spell it, or rennet, is the extract of the fourth stomach of young ruminants like cows and goats. It helps them digest their mother’s milk, and it causes milk in the vats to coagulate into the beginnings of cheese.

Naturally we also saw what we came for: Amishmen and women and their children, the men and boys in straw hats and the women in bonnets. Their homes and buggies and horses, too.

An Amish farmer heads home with his team after a hard day in the fields. Every day is hard there.

Amish, you see, unlike odd societies that keep their distance from the rest of us, are not separatists. They do not live in communes. Their handsome farms are spread alongside those of their non-Amish neighbors. The most noticeable difference is that their neighbors will plow their fields with motorized tractors, while the Amishman – or just as often, the Amish boy – will plow his with a team of draft horses or mules. (Some of the strictest, Old Order Amish will not allow the use of mules, though, because they were created by human cross-breeding of a donkey and a horse, and not by God.)

Tobacco and cattle were once the Amish’s chief cash crop. The manure from cattle fertilized the tobacco fields, and stockyards and gigantic tobacco warehouses stood on the outskirts of towns near Amish farms. Today dairy cattle, corn, and soybeans are the most prevalent cash crops.

This day’s crop is certainly bountiful, as are most in Amish country.

The demand for land, certainly in Pennsylvania and to a growing degree in Holmes County and surrounding east-central Ohio, is so great that Amish farmers as well as non-Amish developers routinely bid against each other for available parcels. Since the Amish live simply and frugally, the wealthy among them do not spend their money on baubles, cruises, or fancy homes; they buy more land! And they put their money in the bank to save for future generations. The Amishmen are also always in search of more land to meet their obligation to provide farms for their male offspring.

The current U.S. recession has not entirely bypassed the Amish, however. Many of their young people, working in stores and factories in town, have been laid off. And sales of Amish people’s goods have dropped commensurately with a decline in consumer spending. But there’s no such thing as a homeless Amishman. There’s always a large and welcoming place to go home to.

Communities of Amish can be found as far west as Montana and as far south as Texas, and many Amish keep track of other clans’ doings through a chatty newspaper called The Budget, published in nearby Sugarcreek, Ohio. For more than a century, it has printed letters that are the antithesis of racy tabloid fodder. An example from Hillsboro, Wisconsin:

The spring peppers are really enjoying this fine weather, their first outing, and during the day the chirping sparrows’ song fills the air.

There’s plenty of work for man and beast at this Amish sawmill, whose blades and belts are driven by steam engines.

The U.S. Amish population is estimated to be near or above 165,000. This number includes groups of “New Order,” or “Beachy,” Amish – named for Amishman Moses Beachy from Somerset County, Pennsylvania, who led a walkout from an Amish community over the issue of shunning. (More about that in a bit.) Beachy Amish have incorporated some vestiges of modern technology, sometimes even driving cars – albeit black ones with plain black bumpers.

To further confuse visitors to Amish country, members of strict Mennonite orders also drive buggies and eschew electric appliances in their homes. And many Mennonite men wear beards and plain clothing. And there’s a fourth group of Plain People in the mix, too. They are “Dunkards”: German Baptists or “Brethren,” whose baptismal ceremonies include immersion – dunking – in water.

This “Amishman” didn’t mind having his photo taken. In fact, that’s the whole idea.

The Amish call their neighbors who live with 21st-century conveniences the “English,” or Englischers in German. They, and many Mennonites, refer to themselves as “Dutch.” Together, the Plain People (even in Ohio) are often called “Pennsylvania Dutch,” which English Quaker settlers corrupted from the word Deutsch – the German language spoken by many immigrants. Old Order Amish are in fact trilingual: They speak High German at worship; English at school and in dealing with the Englischers; and, at home, a German dialect peppered with words borrowed from English and softened by French influences from their people’s time in Alsace.

Both the Mennonites and the Amish are part of the Anabaptist movement, which began in Switzerland in the early 1500s at the time of the Protestant Reformation. The name means “twice baptized,” as their members – already baptized into the Roman Catholic Church as infants – were baptized a second time as adults. Later, Anabaptists rejected infant baptism, believing that the individual should make a free choice to accept a life with God. At that time, adult baptism was considered a criminal offense that was punishable by death, and many Anabaptists were imprisoned and tortured for their beliefs. Amish songs and books keep stories of their persecution alive and contribute to ongoing Amish distrust of society at large. A favorite Amish story tells the fate of Dutch Anabaptist Dirk Willems, who pulled to safety a pursuing sheriff who had fallen through the ice on a pond. For his kindness, Willems was arrested and burned at the stake.

One of the reasons Amishmen wear no moustaches dates to this period, for the soldiers who tormented them often wore long, florid ones.

Simplicity — and piety — are the watchwords of Amish life. There are a few Amish trades that you won’t find much in the “English” world.

To avoid detection, Anabaptists fled to the mountains or distant rural regions, where many became farmers. In 1693, Anabaptists in the Alsace region, now part of France, broke away from the larger church. Jakob Ammann, their leader, believed the Anabaptists had become too liberal in their lifestyles, straying from strict biblical teachings. Thereafter, Ammann’s followers became known as the Amish, and Swiss Anabaptists as the Mennonites, a name derived from their leader, Menno Simons.

In the early 1700s, the Amish accepted the invitation of William Penn, Pennsylvania’s founder, to Europeans of all religions to come to “Penn’s Woods” and enjoy a life of freedom and religious tolerance. The Amish from Germany and Switzerland arrived in Philadelphia, and true to their history, promptly headed far into what was then the wilderness, where the “world” could not follow. Such a notion seems preposterous today, as the “world” has built a jumble of outlet centers, strip shopping malls, and quasi-“Amish” attractions, right next to Amish farms. There are some, but nowhere near as many, such startling contrasts in Ohio Amish country as well.

No Amish congregations remain in Europe.

There are no Amish church buildings and no religious icons other than the Bible – an edition originally translated into German by Protestant reform leader Martin Luther. There’s no special Amish creed aside from following Christ’s example by living simply and humbly and helping others. Even personal Bible study is discouraged because it might lead to individual interpretations outside the accepted understanding of God’s word.

There’s nothing religious, or even Amish, about the “hex” signs that one finds in Amish country. They appear on some barns to inspire hearty crops and ward off evil, but they’re more of a tourist trinket than an everyday part of Amish life.

The Amish believe that working the soil brings them close to God. Their worship is organized into districts of about 25 households, led by a bishop. Services are held every other Sunday in each other’s homes. Thus Old Order Amish are sometimes called “House Amish.” In rooms cleared of household furniture, men and boys sit on one side, and women and girls on the other, both facing a central area where leaders are seated. Home worship harks back to the days in Europe when persecuted Anabaptists were forced to worship secretly. It reinforces the Amish belief that worship and daily life are inseparable.

The 3½-hour service begins with about 35 minutes of singing from the Ausbund, an 812-page German-language hymnal written by Anabaptists while they were imprisoned in the 1530s. There are no musical notes for the 140 songs within it, and no instruments accompany the singing, which is delivered slowly in a chant with no harmony. (Thus I, a shower tenor and choir lover, could never be an Amishman. Not that I’m big on plowing, either.) Some hymns have as many as – are you ready for this? – 60 verses!

These buggies are lined up outside an Amish house in which a church service, or at least hymn-singing, are probably going on.

Then comes a series of New Testament scriptures read from a booklet that lists 26 texts appropriate to the time of year. A second speaker, chosen by the congregation’s leaders only moments before he begins speaking, then preaches the main sermon that lasts an hour or more without notes of any kind. Talk about pressure! More scriptures and comments from the assembled, called “witnessing,” follow, then a prayer from a German prayer book and a benediction. And they’re not done yet! Announcements from the deacon and a final hymn bring the service to a close.

Then the women, who take no leadership role in any religious service, prepare a light, cold meal. Offerings are collected only twice a year – at Eastertime and at a fall communion service that can last seven hours or more. (The Amish are certainly a patient, unhurried lot.) That service is followed by ritual foot-washing and the sharing of bread and wine, the latter made from grapes by the bishop’s wife.

Religious holidays are solemn occasions. The Amish exchange small, practical gifts at Christmas, but there are no Christmas trees, lights, or Santa Claus figures, stories or songs. Nor does Peter Cottontail hop down the bunny trail around Easter in Amish country. Bunnies are sometimes served at mealtime, however.

This could be a “courting buggy,” although it looks like it’s had a lot of other uses. Note the rear reflector, required by law but a slim slice of protection for driver, passengers, and horse.

Sunday afternoons are a time for play and socializing. Baseball and softball are passions among Amish youth, even though they do not listen to games on radio or watch them on television. Young singles, who, together, are called “gangs” by the Amish, travel to other homes on Sunday evenings for more hymn-singing. A “date” will often consist of singing hymns (you may be detecting a trend here) or perhaps a spirited game of volleyball. It is to and from these events that a young Amishman will often drive a single Amishwoman in an open “courting buggy.”

An enclosed family buggy, sometimes laughingly called a “cheese box” by the Amish themselves, costs about $7,000, its single horse about $2,000, and harnesses $1,000 or more. In communities with large Amish populations, buggies, which must have lights and triangular rear reflectors, are sold at dealerships, just like cars. I can’t say whether they take test drives and haggle over the price there.

A common Amish country scene. Heavy traffic on both sides of the road, but one side crawling behind a slow-moving buggy that has nowhere else to go on the narrow roads.

Those reflectors are meager protection against onrushing automobiles, although the Amish keep to the side of the road whenever possible. Nevertheless, there are many gruesome accidents in which the Amish and their horses almost always get the worst of it.

Amish elders often “look the other way” as many of their young people “sow their wild oats” and taste worldly pleasures for a period. In this time of modest rebellion, it is not uncommon for Amish teenagers and young adults to obtain driver’s licenses and drive cars, change from their simple clothes into Englischer garb, and go dancing and bar-hopping in big cities like Philadelphia or Cleveland. Young Amish have occasionally been arrested for drunken driving of buggies as well as automobiles. Such rascally behavior is tolerated because the young people have not yet joined the church. But once a person accepts baptism – often at the time of marriage – all such worldly dalliances are banned forever. At baptism, the young Amishman or woman accepts the Christian faith and the authority of the group, and the penalty for deviation is lifetime shunning by the community, parents and siblings included.

Young Amish people are adept at making whoopee . . . pies out of oatmeal, chocolate, butter, and the creamiest filling in the land. They also are free, briefly, to make the other kind of whoopee: exuberant fun.

The excommunicated person may remain with his or her Amish spouse, but sexual relations are forbidden until and unless he or she renounces wicked behavior and returns to the fold.

Elizabethtown College professor Donald Kraybill, who has written several long backgrounders on the Amish, estimates that four of five young Amish people accept baptism and remain in the fold. After all, temptations to stay are surprisingly strong. Within the community there is love, support, security, and what I would call a degree of certainty that the harsh “real world,” with its unexpected twists, cannot guarantee.

Marriage is encouraged by the Amish but by no means expected. Unmarried Amishmen work farms or get jobs as carpenters, buggy makers, or mill employees. Amishmen are enthusiastic participants in volunteer fire departments, whose efforts obviously benefit Amish homes and barns. But the Amish do not participate in other community or professional organizations, organized sports, or political parties. They do vote in local elections, but usually not in state or national contests. Amishmen will not serve in military services; in wartime, they have traditionally been exempted from service as conscientious objectors and given noncombat roles. Some Amish do, though, keep rifles for hunting and even share hunting cabins in the mountains.

You know this is an Amish farm. You see no electric wires, but a clothesline getting lots of use.

The Amish buy goods that they cannot make or grow – especially raw materials, fertilizer, and farm machinery – from Englischer merchants, they bank at town financial institutions, and they hold public auctions. Unmarried Amish women often leave home to run quilt, bake, or craft shops, or to work in Amish butcher shops or health-food stores. Married Amish women also sometimes work outside the home, and two-income Amish households are becoming almost as common as in the community at large.

The Amish are never ostentatious, but the Plain People do express themselves exuberantly in their exquisite quilts.

Obedience – children to parents and teachers, wives to husbands, and all to God’s word – is central to the Amish way of life. So is the glorification of God and the community, not the individual. Arrogance, pride, publicity, and adornments that call attention to oneself are forbidden. You won’t see Amish people with nose rings or tattoos.

It is therefore apt that Amish appearance and dress are plain and utilitarian. Amish girls and women wear their hair parted in the middle and pulled back in a bin; the hair is never cut! They wear prayer coverings at all times in public due to a biblical dictate from 1st Corinthians. When they travel, Amish women and girls also wear bulky black bonnets that are almost as big as hoods.

Unmarried men are clean-shaven, and boys often are given bobbed “Dutch cut” haircuts. Married men grow beards, which, for the rest of their lives, they never trim. They wear straw hats to keep the sun off their necks in warm weather but switch to black felt hats for worship and on cold days. From the moment they are potty-trained, boys wear the same clothes as men, including suspenders.

If you’d ever shake hands with an Amishman, you’d remember it, for work on an Amish farm is hard, and an Amishman’s hands are tough, callused, and extremely strong.

There’s a place for everything, and everything in its place, in an Amish home.

Amish homes are generally devoid of decoration, although the Plain People will hang calendars, dried flowers, colorful quilts, and photographs . . . of scenery – never themselves or others. They believe that only the vain pose for photographs, and they do not take kindly to close-up photos snapped by others. Distant shots don’t seem to disturb them, though, and anyway, the most you’ll get for popping one is a shaken fist, since the Amish don’t believe in lawsuits!

This is an Amish “washing machine.” Actually, some homes have mechanical ones, powered by oil or gas.

Often the kitchen is the only heated room in an Amish house, and the sick are sometimes tended to there. Most kitchens do have modern-looking appliances such as refrigerators and washing machines – run by kerosene or propane gas. But you won’t find dishwashers (except the women and girls), toasters, microwave ovens, or, indeed, any electric outlets in which such contraptions could be plugged. Few Amish have deep freezers, but they get around the problem by bartering produce in exchange for freezer space at a non-Amish neighbor’s farm.

The aversion to electricity, by the way, has nothing to do with the modernity of it all, and certainly the Bible was silent on the practical use of electrons. Rather, the objection is that wires from the street into the house or barn are a tangible tie to the outside world that the Amish wish to avoid. Modern plumbing is readily accepted, and many bishops allowed telephones in Amish homes for a time until people were found to be gossiping; pay phones can now be found at the end of country lanes on some Amish farms.

A horse and “cheese box” buggy fittingly pass in front of the Gutisberg Cheese Co. factory and Swiss-inspired showroom. The founder was hired from Switzerland by local Amish looking for a cheese-making master.

You won’t find Amish people going door to door looking for converts. They believe that their good works and piety speak for themselves. They welcome converts, but
find it difficult to renounce modern conveniences (“No I-Pod? You’ve got to be kidding me.”). One Amish woman told me that potential converts find it especially wrenching to give up their automobiles. Who would trade tooling along at 100 kpm in a luxurious sedan for clip-clop, clip-clopping behind a moseying horse?

The Amish do not practice birth control, and families of seven, eight, or, for that matter, fifteen children are not unusual. Several siblings of the same sex often share bedrooms. Offspring are needed, of course, to support large Amish farms, though prosperous farmers will also employ non-Amish labor, especially during the harvest season.

To give you an idea of the size of Amish steam engines, that’s good-sized me standing in front of one of them.

You’ll find mechanized equipment on the farm and in mills, but it’s powered by steam, not internal-combustion engines, and is pulled by draft animals just like a farm wagon. And Amish farm equipment may have only steel or wooden wheels for the same reason that Amish allow tricycles, roller skates, and push scooters but not bicycles: rubber wheels on vehicles would make travel away from the community and into the temptations of the world too easy. The Amish do, however, accept rides, and “English” taxi services do a lively business. The Amish will also hire non-Amish drivers to move products and take them to visit far-off relatives. Train and intercity bus travel is allowed, but air travel is rarely permitted.

A young Amishwoman and her even younger siblings sell baskets by the side of the road in Charm, Ohio.

The Amish may be modest in most realms, but they are ambitious in business. Common at the end of an Amish family’s driveway are tiny, hand-printed signs announcing “bunnies for sale” or “quilts – no Sunday sales.” No other signs will be found. No beer or cigarette advertisements on billboards, for sure. Like Englischers, the Amish take advantage of tourism, as we saw in Holmes County. They want strangers to come, see, and buy – but not pry. “Yes, we’re different,” they’ll tell you. “But you’re different, too. We could certainly ask why you dress the way you do.”

Amish children may attend public school, but more common in heavily Amish areas are one-room, English-language parochial schools where, once again, girls sit on one side of a central aisle, boys on the other. It was such a school in Bart Township, Pennsylvania, that brought worldwide attention to the reclusive Amish in 2006, when a deranged non-Amish gunman shot and killed six girls after lining them up against a chalkboard. What staggered the outside world even more than the heinous act was the Amish response to this tragedy. The grandfather of one of the girls told his fellow Amish, “We must not think evil of this man.” An Amish neighbor comforted the killer’s wife and children, and the Amish set up a charitable fund for them, and offered them the community’s forgiveness.

Amish furniture is prized for its quality and craftsmanship.

Amish life is quaint but by no means idyllic. They are plain, not perfect, people, and very much a people apart while still in our midst. They cling stubbornly to old ways, resist new ones, and keep to themselves. There are jealousies and feuds as in any community. Births out of wedlock, mental illness, family violence, and suicide are not unknown among them. But the Amish by all accounts are also loving and supportive, though strict, parents. Their homes are “safe houses” for old and young. The “information age” may be passing the Amish by, but so are many of the stresses and dangers that grip the outside world. The Amish can and do fairly ask of their worldly neighbors, “Where is all your ‘progress’ taking you? Are you happier? More loved? More fulfilled?”

Seen in this light, the wholesome life of North America’s Plain People does not seem backward at all.

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Dalliance. A frivolous use of time. “Goofing around” rather than working.

Mosey along. To dawdle or take one’s sweet old time about getting somewhere.

Perplexing. Confusing, lacking clarity.