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Last week, I was a tourist among my own people.
I first visited Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, when I was in my 40s and my niece Annette married a local. Subsequent trips were always rushed, but this time we scheduled a bit more flex into our weeklong visit. I spoke at two Mennonite women’s events, my husband attended meetings, and we saw relatives. But in between we had time to sit on the porch of our Airbnb and watch the Amish world go by.
“Oh my goodness! A buggy!” Hearing the approaching hoofbeats, I would whip out my phone to surreptitiously record a gray buggy pulled by a gorgeous dark-brown horse. One morning I took a photo of a young Amish man on an electric scooter leading a horse beside him.
I also shopped at an Old Order Mennonite fabric store and tried to eavesdrop on the young cashiers’ animated conversation in the Pennsylvania German dialect, browsed handkerchiefs and hairpins at crowded little variety stores, and tried not to stare too obviously at the variety of Amish and Mennonite customers at Hayloft Ice Cream, especially the adorable children in their traditional clothes and the nervous young couple in Weaverland Mennonite clothing.
One would think that having been Anabaptist all my life — first Old Order Amish, then Beachy Amish, then Conservative Mennonite — would make me feel right at home in Lancaster County and a little less of a gushing tourist when buggies go by.
Not only have more than 50 years passed since I was a little Amish girl in a large navy blue bonnet, going to church in a buggy, but our Midwestern variety of Amish was very different from the Pennsylvania norms. So different, in fact, that I think the Lancaster area would have felt foreign to me even in our Amish days.
Lancaster County, with more than 45,000 Amish and thousands of other Plain peoples, is in many ways an island, self-contained and self-sufficient for hundreds of years. With many generations undisturbed in one place, the Amish of Lancaster County have found and perfected what works: industry, ingenuity, and community as well as a focus on excellence and incredibly hard physical work. The entire community exudes a sense that there is a right way to do things, and everyone not only knows what that is but is happy to do it that way.
The Midwest, in my memory, is much more varied in its Amish subgroups and their expectations. While Amish everywhere place a high importance on appearance and how one is perceived, the culture of my past varied from Pennsylvania in subtle rules and expectations and was more relaxed.
“The Amish are aggressive here,” three different locals told me, a strange adjective considering the popular perception of the Amish as gentle people who live in harmony and humility.
But the term fit the young Amish woman coming around the corner of a house with what looked like a military-grade jet-fueled leaf blower strapped to her back, chasing three unfortunate autumn leaves in the front yard. So did every fast-moving but friendly server and cashier as well as construction crews building barns and men harvesting fields, piling cornstalks on a wagon behind a team of horses.
The result is a community of astonishing wealth and success in a setting of beauty and extreme tidiness, all with an overtone of religious devotion.
Looking on from our porch, I had far more questions than answers. What happens when a culture built on simplicity and humility becomes incredibly prosperous and an attraction for thousands of tourists? If there’s a financial incentive to dressing in plain clothes, is their spiritual purpose completely defeated?
Perhaps it was when I saw the Amish woman at a crosswalk checking her smartphone while she waited for the light to change that I faced the fact that this was not the trip into my past that I had hoped it would be. Despite the dark dresses and the buggies everywhere, this place was as foreign to me as Thailand and Kenya, where I saw little that was familiar and could only take in the many differences.
So I embraced that fact and enjoyed being as much a tourist as the woman with a raspy New York accent inspecting the tote bags near me at Good’s Store. I drove slowly down country roads, admiring the brown fields against green hills and a blue sky. I indulged in the incredible food, admired baskets of mums at roadside stands, and asked too many questions of anyone willing to talk to me.
When the week ended, I was happy to come home to Oregon, where cobwebs exist undisturbed on my porch and I never see the blinking lights of a buggy on the road at night.
While it wasn’t the nostalgic experience I hoped for, I didn’t really belong, and I was only another tourist, maybe I absorbed a bit of the county’s energy, ambition and creativity. Certainly, it’s easier to make peace with disappointments and paradoxes if you eat delicious local food among friendly people who have figured out what works.