Growing Up Amish

by Ira Wagler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I rarely, if ever, wrote back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  15

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

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

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

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

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

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

  We wore jeans and Western shirts and cowboy hats, and we felt cool. That summer I began smoking cigarettes for real, a habit that would stay with me, off and on, for almost ten years. From what I’d seen and read, the ideal cowboy smoked, so I did too—filterless Camels, the real deal. In my mind, I can still taste them—not an altogether unpleasant memory.

  On Saturday nights, we all hit the town. Allen and I usually met the others there, and we would all hang out at the drive-in movie theater, still a staple of small towns back then. That’s where all the action was. Teenagers converged every Saturday night and hung out, drinking beer and socializing.

  We got to know the fairer sex too. I’d never had much to do with girls in my seventeen years. Not that Bloomfield lacked girls—even beautiful ones—but they were mostly prim and proper. And unapproachable, we felt. Plus, we were actually pretty shy when it came to such things.

  The painted, pretty town girls of Valentine seemed like goddesses to us, visions of splendor and worldliness. They were bold, aggressive, and available.

  Late one muggy Saturday night, in the summer of 1979, I kissed a girl for the first time. She’d been around. I had not. I still remember her name.

  We saw and lived all the things we’d never seen or done—parties, drinking, and dancing on the large hardwood floor to the fiddle and guitars of some two-bit country band at the Norton Dance Hall, an old converted barn out in the country. We heard the arguments and saw the fistfights triggered by the cowboys’ sensitive code of honor, which is quick to take offense at the slightest insult, real or perceived.

  One night, outside the dance hall, one of our townie buddies tangled with a cowboy from the range. One had said something offensive to the other, and without delay, they faced off and began whacking merrily at each other. The townie’s friends and the cowboy’s friends hovered close but did not interfere. Had anyone stepped in to help one or the other, a general melee would have ensued. But no one did.

  The townie got the worst of it by far. He was beaten and pitched around like a rag until his face was a pulpy and bloody mess. And then, after a few minutes, it was over. The townie’s friends helped him up and took him away. Everyone else headed back inside to dance and socialize.

  It’s a wonder that none of us, the six from Bloomfield, got beaten up. Maybe it was the fact that anyone could glance at us and instantly know we were innocent rubes from another place. Or maybe it was that the real cowboys viewed us with bemused condescension. Whatever the reason, all of us passed through our Valentine days unscathed.

  Come Sunday, we always returned to our jobs, broke and hungover, then got up early the next day and slaved in the hot summer sun. We told ourselves we were in the real world and making it. And we were. But we weren’t getting ahead. Work, party, drink, blow your money, then go back and do it all over again.

  By late summer, the thrill was gone in more ways than one. Gary, the jovial ranch manager with the great booming laugh, turned out to be a hard-driving, volatile man with a fiery temper. He was tough, worked like a maniac, and demanded the same from us. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But on the slightest provocation, his mean streak would surface like a shark from the waters. We never came to blows, he and I, but we got close a few times during sporadic in-your-face shouting and swearing matches. We always patched things up, but I never forgot.

  By late August, I was ready to get out of Valentine. I was sick of ranch life, and to be honest, memories of home tugged at me. I missed the security and stability of it—the quiet life, the old Bloomfield haunts, and my family.

  And therein lies the paradox that would haunt me for almost ten years: the tug-of-war between two worlds. A world of freedom versus a world of stability and family. A world of dreams versus a world of tradition. And wherever I resided at any given moment, trudging through the tough slog of daily life, the world I had left called me back from the one I inhabited. It was a brutal thing in so many ways, and I seemed helpless to combat it. Torn emotionally, moving back and forth, always following the siren’s call to lush and distant fields of peace that seemed so real but, like shimmering mirages in the desert, always faded away when I approached them.

  Before heading back home, Mervin Gingerich and I decided to take a two-week trip on Greyhound. After fourteen days of traveling—through Wyoming, the empty beautiful stretches of Utah, into California, to New Orleans, and back north—we ended up in Ottumwa one Sunday evening, flat broke. We didn’t have a dime between us—just a couple of candy bars and half a pack of cigarettes.

  We called an English friend from Bloomfield to pick us up and take us home. Around dusk that evening, we pulled into the long drive that led to my family’s farm. I stepped out, lugging my faithful black duffel bag—the same one I’d carried down the lane the previous April. Slowly I walked up the concrete walkway to the house.

  Mom met me at the door. She smiled in welcome. My younger siblings, Rhoda and Nathan, clamored about excitedly. The older children were all at the Sunday evening singing. Dad was in his little office, typing away. Eventually, he heard the bustle of excitement and walked out to the living room. By then I was downstairs in the bedroom, unpacking.

  As I walked back upstairs to the kitchen, I met him on the landing, halfway up. We paused in the semidarkness and faced each other.

  “Ira.” It was a half question, tinged with disbelief.

  “Hello, Dad,” I said.

  “You came home.” His voice quivered slightly.

  “Yep,” I grunted.

  I walked on up. And he walked out. There just wasn’t a whole lot to say.

  * * *

  I didn’t particularly have my pulse on Bloomfield’s gossip lines at the time, but I’m sure the news swept through the community very quickly. Two of the six outlaws had returned. Ira and Mervin.

  We were back inside the box and the perceived safety of that world. Back to what we had left, not that long ago, in search of adventure and freedom. Back to the world of horse and buggy, barn-door pants, and galluses—and a whole lot more. The world of home. We settled in uneasily.

  Those first few weeks were strange, almost surreal. We were forced back into the slow pace of Amish life. No more trucks. No more running to town on Saturday nights. No more hanging out with the English girls of Valentine. We worked on the farm. Attended church on Sundays. The singings on Sunday nights. The other youth welcomed us. Whatever they thought inside, they were friendly enough.

  But home, I soon discovered, wasn’t quite the same. It would never be again. And I could never truly return, even as I participated in the community, its life and customs. On one hand, I loved the camaraderie, the feeling of belonging. But, wherever I was at any given moment, the grass always seemed greener on the other side. When I was home, I heard the siren’s song of the outside world. I had followed that song into that outside world until the memories of home had tugged at my heart and pulled me back.

  Always I grasped, with tenacious grip, at the anticipation of something rare, something great and grand and fine. Something beyond.

  I grasped for tomorrow, with its visions of splendor and a shining city. I dreamed of adventures in strange and distant lands, and of a brighter future of happiness and contentment that always seemed to be just beyond the tip of my outstretched hand.

  I would find it tomorrow. Always tomorrow.

  16

  Mervin Gingerich and I
slowly settled into the rhythm of what passed for normal life in Bloomfield. But I had a sinking feeling in my stomach, a sense of quiet desperation. I didn’t think about it much, but it was there. Desperation and tinges of despair. Deep down. Way deep down.

  I went through the motions. I worked hard that fall on the farm. Harvesting corn. Plowing the fields behind jangling teams of horses. The world I had inhabited a few short months before in Valentine now seemed far away, in both miles and time.

  On the surface, I’m sure I seemed like a normal eighteen-year-old kid, with normal teenage issues. And I fooled most of the people, most of the time. I smiled and laughed, at least in public.

  Mervin seemed to genuinely settle in and settle down, and we still hung out on Sundays. Meanwhile, our four buddies remained in Valentine, doing who knows what. I thought of them a lot.

  And then, sometime in September, word trickled in and quickly spread through the youth grapevine—the four remaining rebels were coming back home.

  They returned a few weeks later—a group of four swashbuckling kids, mildly subdued but still defiant, sporting long hair and worldly haircuts. By then I had reverted to the upended-bowl haircut.

  One night during the first week after their return, I hitched up my horse and buggy after supper and rattled over the five miles of gravel roads to my friend Marvin Yutzy’s place. He emerged from the house, grinning. We shook hands and then sat on the buggy and talked.

  “We’ve been pretty calm since we got back, me and Mervin,” I said. “I’m not sure what’s going on, but I think Mervin will probably join the church next spring. He seems to be heading in that direction.”

  Neither Marvin nor I were particularly inclined to join church quite yet. I had just turned eighteen. And he was about to, in December. In the end, we both thought it would be best to wait another year and see what developed.

  Nevertheless, we were back—the six of us. Back safely in the fold. But somehow, after the Valentine experience, we never quite connected like before. Sure, we still hung out. Rehashed our experiences. Told war stories. Got together with the other youth on Sunday nights, and one night a week we played hockey out on the iced-over ponds. But it just wasn’t the same.