Running with Sherman

by Christopher McDougall

  1 You genius, bringing those CDs.

  2 Never, ever mention you thought all Hawaiians looked like NFL linemen.*1

  She told me her name was Mika,*2 and that’s where our conversation ended. I handed over the music and then got as far away from her as I could, spending the rest of the evening in the corner looking at prints with my photography buddy, M’poze. I’d ruined enough first impressions in my time to grasp that when I surprised Mika with that gift, I’d hit my peak. This woman was so far out of my league, anything I said after that would just begin the process of scaring her off. When Mika brought me a plate of food a little later, I gave her a quick thanks over my shoulder and pivoted right back to M’poze’s photo book. I stayed riveted to that thing for so long, even M’poze was getting bored. But if he was cornered, so was I. I was betting the house on the Tao of Steve.

  I’d recently seen an indie film that offered the theory that the best way to attract someone is to follow the leads of both Zen Buddhism and those twin pillars of sexy self-command, Steve McQueen and the Six Million Dollar Man, Steve Austin. The Tao of Steve wasn’t pickup-artist stuff; it was more like a guide to better living through impulse control, based on the premise that you get what you want only when you stop wanting it. Whenever you meet someone who makes your pulse race, you’re supposed to follow three steps:

  · Be desire-less

  · Be excellent

  · And be gone

  Purely by dumb luck, I’d nailed the first two. I’d arrived looking like a hero, and if I didn’t want to blow it, I had to keep my mouth shut and get out the door while Mika still thought I was kind and chill. So chill, in fact, that when the party was winding down and we saw that an awful winter storm had blown in, I turned Mika down when she offered a bunch of us a ride home in her pickup. (Yes, the exotic journalist was also wheeling around Philly in her Hawaiian surfboard-mobile. Any argument that she was out of my league?) Two other guys happily squeezed into the truck’s cab while Mika asked if I was sure.

  “Yup, I’m good,” I said. I trudged off into the freezing rain, hoping I didn’t look as much like a dumb-ass as I felt. Sometime during that miserable hike through North Philly, it dawned on me that like all Taos, the Steve version didn’t come with an endgame. Exactly how you’re supposed to boomerang back from “be gone,” I had no idea.

  I got my answer a few days later. Mika got my number from Jen and called to thank me for the CDs. I mentioned some African food shops in West Philly she might like to check out, and soon we began spending time together. Mika was actually African American and Chinese, I learned, or maybe it was Thai? She didn’t know for sure, because she’d been conceived when her mother had a brief romance in junior college with a foreign exchange student who suddenly vanished before Mika was born. Soon after, Mika’s mother married her true love, an Army nurse named Dave, who took his new family with him wherever he was deployed across the country. Mika grew up in one city after another, always feeling like an outsider, never looking like anyone else, until the day they arrived in Hawaii. For the first time, people weren’t constantly eyeing her long curls and cappuccino complexion and asking, “Where are you from? What are you?” Hawaii became her home because it treated her like family.

  Mika never intended to leave Honolulu, but she decided to spend one year on the mainland while her boyfriend was learning hotel management in Hong Kong. Maybe I was still Tao-ing, but neither the boyfriend nor the ticking departure clock threw me off. Mika and I had a blast together, roaming used bookstores and attempting with tragic results to re-create stewed goat dishes that I remembered from Uganda. I told Mika about my plans to return to Africa to ride the entire continent on a motorcycle, following the fabled Capetown-to-Cairo route, and for the first time I got an inkling that we might have a future when she became genuinely intrigued about the possibility of saddling up behind me for the adventure.

  Instead, we ended up in a farmhouse in West Virginia, discussing marriage. For both of us, it was a left turn we hadn’t seen coming, but we could sense we were edging toward a life together and we had to figure out how it could work for real. Did it mean good-bye to Kailua beaches and adios to that Triumph Bonneville roaring into a Serengeti sunset? Mika had already handled the toughest jobs; she’d broken up with her boyfriend, who bolted straight for the airport and flew in from Hong Kong to try to talk her out of it, and she’d resigned herself to a longer tour of duty in Philly, where most of my freelance work was based. But before we dove in, Mika proposed a final stress test: she suggested we get out of the city and spend a week completely on our own, desert-island style, to see how happy we were without friends or a city to distract us.

  She definitely picked the right spot. After driving four hours from Philly, we were rumbling down a lonely dirt road on the outskirts of Appalachia. We finally arrived at an old farmhouse hidden in the woods, miles from the nearest neighbor. We creaked open the ancient door to find a beautifully preserved gem, with cast-iron woodstoves and a greenhouse converted to a hot tub room. The first few days felt a little strange, with nowhere to go, no one to see, and not even a SEPTA bus rattling the windows to lull us to sleep at night, but by the end of the week, we felt right at home. When I found I could laze in the creek all morning and still file an article back to Philly with the cabin’s creaky Internet dial-up, we were asking each other, “Why is this vacation? Why isn’t this just…life?”

  I’m a pro at tasks that require me to blow off work for no practical reason (ask me sometime how to repair vintage fountain pens), so as soon as we got home, I began hunting for a home that I knew we had no chance of buying. First I checked whether we could get DSL in that part of West Virginia and whether the house we’d rented was even for sale. Nope, and nope. Then I spread the net wider. Mika and I began roaming the fancypants horse country between Philly and New York, pestering realtors with an insane list of requirements on the chance that maybe, somehow, there was a cheap, cozy cottage by a brook that everyone else had accidentally overlooked. We wanted something old but restored, isolated but train-accessible, rural but DSL-equipped, and, of course, compatible with a struggling writer’s income, which meant the same price it sold for in 1870.

  We’d gotten absolutely nowhere by the time our first daughter, Maya, was born, but instead of getting real, we kept treasure hunting. We listened to hours of Wiggles and Elmo Sing-Alongs as we hauled Maya to one death trap after another, including a burned-out shell on a soggy patch near the Delaware River with giant penises spray-painted on the few surviving walls. “For your price range,” our realtor said, “this isn’t bad.”

  For two years, we struck out. Then, late one night, something impossible popped up online. I sat there in the dark, staring at the photo and muttering, “No way.” A hand-hewn log cabin on four acres, with a fieldstone chimney, a creek, its own sweet-water spring, a dirt-road walk to the Susquehanna River, and protected farmland on all sides. Only ninety minutes from downtown Philly, and it cost less per month than our apartment? Perfect!

  Except…

  “You know where this is, riiiight?” the realtor cautioned when I called the next morning, drawing the word out to make it clear he was in no way accountable for this folly. Only two houses were down in that hollow; everything else, for hundreds of acres around, was open farmland. Peach Bottom had no police, no local government, not even a grocery store; the only place within fifteen miles to buy food was a one-room shop in the back of an Amish farm. If we moved out there, he warned, we’d be completely on our own. That’s why, tasty as it looked in photos, no one had made an offer on the place for over a year.

  Whatever. It had to be better than the condemned House of Dongs, right? But during the drive out from Philly, the realtor’s warning began to sink in. It felt like we were clicking off centuries rather than miles; in little more than one hour, two hundred years vanished from the landscape. McMansions and mini-malls
gave way to red barns and windmills; Escalades were replaced by horse and buggies and hay wagons. We knew Lancaster County was famous for its Amish community, but we hadn’t realized we were heading into an even deeper, more rustic heartland: the river hills of the “Southern End.” Even by Lancaster standards, the Southern End is another world, a place where the post office has a hitching post, the kids have Drive Your Tractor to School Day and no classes on the first day of hunting season, and you’re about as likely to find a gun range behind the house as a swing set.

  When we located the log cabin for sale, we were stunned. Winslow Homer couldn’t have done this place justice. We pulled into the dirt-and-gravel driveway to find horses grazing along the fence line, watercress blooming in the creek, and an Amish farmer rumbling past in a steel-wheeled wagon. Unbelievable. If a milkmaid had appeared with buckets of frothy cream across her shoulders, I’d have been only a little bit surprised. We threw open the car doors, raving about the gorgeous view, until I spotted something bizarre out of the corner of my eye. Or did I? When I jerked my head around to look, all I saw was the blinding afternoon sun. Weird, I thought. It looked just like—

  Then it reappeared. There, stepping out of the glare, was a lone horseman watching us from the hillside across the road. He was wearing a Stetson and a serape, Josey Wales style, and had a machete and a rifle hanging from his saddle. I lifted a hand to wave, but he wheeled his horse, dug in his heels, and galloped off.

  “Zach’s out hunting pigs again,” explained the homeowner, who’d walked down to greet us. Explanation: The thirteen-year-old who lived over the hill was riding through the cornfields, shooting groundhogs. “Don’t worry, he won’t shoot over here. Not unless you want him to.” For the rest of the day, those brief glimpses of the Lone Pighunter and one Amish farmer were the only signs we saw of human inhabitation. If we moved here, it really would feel like volunteering for a manned mission to Mars. How would we survive when the house was snowed in and the power died? Where was the nearest hospital, and what were the schools like?

  Those were all sensible questions, none of which Mika and I had ever thought to ask before pulling the realtor aside to make an offer. A few weeks later, we were leaving Philly for the Southern End.

  * * *

  —

  Solitude was going to be our biggest problem—or so I thought until I heard Mika scream. I dropped the box I was unpacking in the basement and came running. I found her on the back porch, holding two-year-old Maya in her arms, edging away from a six-foot blacksnake writhing at her feet. She had been watering a row of plants, and when she stepped from one to the next, the snake dropped from the porch roof and thudded down right where Mika had been standing a second earlier.

  I grabbed a shovel, thinking I could flip that monster away, but it began slithering up the porch post toward the roof. I banged the shovel blade in front of its face to drive it back; instead, the snake glided right over the shovel and disappeared into the eaves. Now what? The only thing worse than finding a giant carnivorous reptile outside your house is driving it inside, especially when inside contains a toddler you’ll soon be putting to bed. I had to figure this out before dark, so I walked through the cornfield behind our house to pester, once again, our nearest neighbor, an older Amish farmer who goes by the initials “AK” (a touch of genius if he intends it as a gag, and knowing him, I can’t rule it out and he’ll never tell: AKA AK).

  We’d been in the house only a few days, but already I’d gone to AK for advice about repairing our collapsing well, finding a desk, and buying a used chain saw, which he both sold me and taught me how to operate. When I tromped to his door with my latest problem, he didn’t understand the fuss. “You’re lucky,” he said. “That’s a rat snake. It will eat your mice and stay out of your way.”

  We have mice? That was a revelation. So was the fact that soon I’d be telling Mika the good news that we were now roommates with a resident serpent. “I think we’d rather have the mice,” I told AK.

  “Well, that’s okay,” he said, pushing ahead glass-half-fullishly. “It won’t get all of them.”

  Before leaving, I thanked AK the way I always did, by offering my help if there was ever anything I could do for him in return. For the first time, he took me up on it. He asked me for a favor that, over the next few months, would change my life: “Can you give me a ride to the hardware store?”

  That request opened my eyes to a terrific little loophole in local Amish code of conduct. Every Amish community sets its own laws: some allow foot scooters but not bicycles; others allow cars but only if they’re gray or black. Down in the Southern End, the Amish are mostly Old Order, which means they can’t drive cars but they can be driven. Way before Uber was a gleam in Garrett Camp’s eye, our non-Amish neighbors had created a nice little cash economy by hiring themselves out as taxi drivers for Old Order families who needed a lift to places they couldn’t reach by horse and buggy.

  “Sure,” I told AK, although I wasn’t sure how Mika would feel about me joyriding around while she was stuck at home with a predator on the premises. AK and I hiked back across the cornfield to fetch my old Bronco. He congratulated Mika with so much charm and winking good humor on her solution to a rodent problem she didn’t know she had that it convinced her—and me—that maybe the snake wasn’t such a big deal after all. AK and I got into the Bronco and set off, winding along twisting farm roads until, within a few miles, we arrived at a place I never would have found on my own: behind a barn and invisible from the road was a long, white bunker. I squeezed the Bronco into a parking spot between two horse-drawn buggies, then stepped through a door into the 1800s.

  Inside, the Amish hardware store was dimly lit by hissing gas lanterns. Men in black suits and straw hats searched the aisles for sheep testicle removers, hand-cranked ice-cream makers, spare wheelbarrow handles. Can’t find what you need? No problem; the old gent behind the counter has an intercom consisting of a funnel attached to a long piece of plastic sink pipe stretching to another funnel at the back of the store. He’ll honk a bike horn to get his storage assistant’s attention, then the two of them will holler back and forth into their funnels like kids on a paper-cup phone. The whole scene was like wandering onto the set of a Henry Ford biopic, except with excellent prices on name-brand power tools.

  I found a sweet deal on a splitting maul, but when I went to pay, the old gent looked at the credit card in my hand and shook his head. No one had ever bothered to post a CASH ONLY sign on the door, because anyone who could find the place already knew that (a) hello, no electricity means no card swipe, and (b) Old Order Amish don’t do debt; they buy only what they can pay for, so they have no use for cards. I started to put the maul back, but once again, AK was there to help me out, fronting me the money without even rolling his eyes.

  * * *

  —

  A few days later, I got a call from AK’s son, Amos (AKA AK, JR.). When I heard what Amos wanted, I was psyched. I’d been stuck at my desk in the basement all morning, working on an overdue magazine assignment and dreading a call from my editor, so I was dying for any excuse to escape. Soon Amos and I were in the Bronco, heading for another behind-the-barn hot spot. This time he directed me to a farm less than two miles from the house. No sign was posted out front, but those in the know were aware that the back shed was actually a semipro butcher shop. Legally, they couldn’t sell meat, but you could rent their skill, so if you brought in your own animal, they’d kill it and send you home with bins full of steaks, chops, sausage, jerky, and bologna to fill your basement freezer chest.

  Amos lucked out; he’d wanted some free bones for his dogs, and the butcher boys hooked him up with two trash cans full of bloody carcasses. During the drive home, the weirdness of the moment sank in: how, out of all life’s paths, did I end up cruising around with a trunk full of discarded cow and a guy who speaks ancient German and doesn’t believe in zippers? Amos and I began trading
stories, and it turned out we had a lot more in common than I’d realized. He had just turned thirty, and like me, he was still adjusting to life as a first-time dad and homeowner. He told great stories, especially about his younger brother, who canoed all the way across the Susquehanna River in the middle of a winter squall to visit his girlfriend. Amos and I had such a good time that we made plans to get together again the next morning to cut firewood.

  From then on, Amos was my jungle guide to the Southern End. Every few days, he’d call with another adventure in mind, and I’d immediately slap the laptop shut and head out the door. Amos took me to my first “mud sale,” a local firehouse fund-raiser held each spring thaw, and introduced me to the Tuesday night poultry auction, where I accidentally bought seventeen massive roosters instead of hens. Amos was a wizard at sensing when the power company was taking down trees on remote back roads, and since we both depended on wood to heat our homes, we’d speed off together to chain-saw the logs and heave them into my truck before anyone else got to them.

  One freezing February afternoon, Amos called with an urgent tip: his older brother had three big boars he wanted to get off the property, so if we butchered them that night, we’d get a ton of cheap, fresh pork. Mika’s family was visiting, and to this day, I can’t figure out why I thought her dad would enjoy this. Long past midnight, the poor guy was shivering and up to his elbows in gore, trying to avoid hacking off his own frozen fingers as we helped Amos dismember the massive animals with handsaws in an icy barn lit only by headlamps. It was nearly dawn when we got home, bloodstained and filthy, looking like Lord of the Flies kids who never made it off the island.

  Mika became friends with Amos’s wife, Katie, who taught her that sheep’s milk was a great alternative for the dairy-intolerant. Mika began making cheese with Katie, and would drive her to her midwife appointments as Amos and Katie’s family grew to five children. When we had our own second daughter, our kids would color and play board games when we got together for family meals. One evening, I was out for a run past AK’s house when he waved me over. Did I want some raw cream left over from the milk pickup? I could carry the cream in two half-empty jars, he suggested, so while I was running, it would slosh into butter. While we were talking, a jubilant Amos showed up. He’d shot three deer while bowhunting and had plenty to share. My hands were full, so the only option was to shove the haunch he offered me into the back of my running shorts. When I got home, the girls were sitting down to dinner as I came through the door with blood oozing down my legs and two jars of clumpy gook, but by then, they were too Southern End to be surprised anymore.