The Wedding
I have become accustomed again, now, since our return to the electric world, to all the ambient noises of modernity. Unless I listen close, I don’t hear the ice machine humming or the cubes falling into the tray. The exhaust fan over the stove doesn’t strike me now as odd, and I’ve acclimated to all the beeps and buzzes and whirs banging along into my ears from every corner of my day to day. For a while though, after our return, it felt tremendously odd to reach for a light switch, and Edison’s light burned my eyes in a dreadful way. It was the lights really, that drove me a bit mad, not their harshness, which was brutal, but the sound. After we returned I heard them everywhere—a white hot fuzzy static burning tiny holes in my mind. I hear them still. At night, after toiling through another day, after making minimal efforts towards coitus, when I’ve finally settled onto my lumpy pillow under our threadbare sheets and all is apparently dark, still, even there, perhaps especially there, the electric world haunts me. Street lights down the way flicker, casting shadows that somehow worm their way through my eyelids. The printer’s little blue power light colors the hue of my dreams. And all these minutiae sound like arguments being had, between the living and the dead.
*
In the mountains of western Montana, far west, past the shiny remodeled logging towns of yesteryear where Californians in droves of overpriced SUVS have turned big-sky ruggedness into valley living, out there, on the other side of the mountains, rests a small community of rebels where, on the off chance you end up passing through, you may feel lost a bit in time. There, kids by the dozen line up on the roadside to skip rope in the summer heat. The girl’s bonnets flop over their young brows, they peer out at the strange world, they snicker and run away. The sweaty young boys already wear suspenders, already seem ready for the difficulties of adulthood; they carry milk pails down the road, one in each hand, the wind blowing sideways, up hill both ways, like your grandpa did. Whether real or not, there is at least an illusion of innocence on display in this little corner of the world. And of course, if you linger a while, you’ll doubtless see too what most people think of whenever the word Amish is used—a mile-weary horse dutifully pulling a black buggy, guided down the road by a man, an Amish man, a man with a beard and a big black hat, wearing clothes his wife probably stitched together by the light of their hearth for him. You might see that too if you linger a while over the mountains there.
Josephine and I landed in a two-story Amish-built house on twenty acres. I specify this because an Amish-built house is quite different from an English built house. (To the Amish, all english speakers who are not Amish are simply English.) In this house the unfinished pine floors creaked ever so gently, as if the place were speaking. Each room boasted a different color of poorly applied pastel on its walls. Throughout the home, in all the appropriate places where electric lights would typically hang from a ceiling or off a wall, instead copper tubing protruded out and propane lamps provided a delicious and romantic soft glow. A barrel stove occupied one corner of the first floor, and provided all the heat for the many long winter months we spent there. Crisscrossing the ceiling in front of the stove hung several laundry lines, and when they were full and the barrel stove was glowing the whole house became a Tide scented sauna. Upstairs, adjacent to our bedroom, the kitchen and dining room looked out onto a sizable deck perhaps fifteen feet off the ground. So many hours we spent out on the second story deck. In our rocking chairs there we could see perhaps fifty miles, clear across the Tobacco Valley and into Canada. We spent mornings and afternoons there, listening to the silence and the subtle sounds of the community around us. Down the road, when a buggy rolled by our driveway, we could hear the hooves beat. When the children played at their schoolhouse, we heard them singing the dutch red rover.
And it seems inevitable to me now, that I might end up for a while somewhere like that place. I needed it somehow. When I first arrived I wasn’t so sure, and it wasn’t my idea after all. I wanted to be somewhere busier, somewhere things were happening, but Josephine wanted something else. We’d only been married months when I suggested and she agreed on Montana. I thought of Missoula, or maybe Bozeman, somewhere I could stay plugged in. She kept pointing to the mountains. “I want to go that way,” she’d say. And so.
Amish country sits, it contemplates. It lingers along creeks, and sways in tree tops to the clip-clop of hooves, nothing in particular is happening there. Sure, even in Amish country the gears of industry still turn. Men build log home kits in their fields; at the furniture factory women too whittle and glue and nail parts together for market, or run the saw mill. At the small wood floored general store you can find most of the necessities, eggs and lettuce, popcorn, gasoline from a farm tank. There, skirted ladies shuffle in and out all day with woven baskets in hand buying pectin for jelly and bacon for breakfast, needles and thread for common repairs. Just a skip down the road you might see a solemn looking schoolmarm, with an actual switch in hand, hurrying gaggles of laughing children back into class after recess. There, in the one-room log schoolhouse, she guides them all, six to fourteen, in one great effort towards their terminal eighth grade year.
All these things and more are happening daily over the mountains there, but there are no bars, no bookstores or bodegas, and certainly no internet connection. None of the many things I thought I needed. There are no street corners or street lights, no musicians playing saxophone in no alleys, but there is something. Something real and valuable I found, eventually. That thing I miss dearly, even now.
**
When I first arrived, I must admit, I felt in some way superior to these simple folk. There they were, obviously keen and capable people, just opting out of society, snubbing their noses at the whole of human achievement beyond the halter and buggy. I found myself resenting their position, angry that they found peace outside everything science and reason had led society to achieve. And I, with all my accumulated anxieties, having traveled hither and yon, having seen firsthand the wider world of suffering, having peered through the telescope of the internet into other worlds beyond, and down into the smallest things, found no peace atop the mountain of knowledge and experience I had acquired. I observed them happily unaware of the war in Iraq, oil forever altering the Gulf, the Kardashians, profit margins, acceptable loss, and programmed obsolescence. Meanwhile, with a surprisingly capable battery operated radio, desperate to remain attached, tethered by at least a thread to the my complex world of meanings, I stayed abreast of who was playing in the Super Bowl, and who won the election. And I watched them whistle as they worked, and I heard families on Sundays piled high on their buggies, dressed in the finest from their simple wardrobes, cruising up and down our country road, cart after cart, this way and that, content with just being, it seemed. In the course of time it came to pass that I saw what effort it took to resent them, their simplicity of living appeared too great a foe for my hubris. I began to wonder what compelled me to despise simplicity so, to admire and even worship complexity. And some wall came down.
My changing outlook had much to do with the pace of life there, I’m sure. I had no job per-se, only the occasional cabin kit I’d buy off the neighbors, build in our shop, and sell in town. Besides that I ran a kind of taxi service for them. Situated where we were, a buggy ride into town presented more danger than they were willing to bargain with, and so, for fifty cents a mile they’d pile into my Subaru, and tell me where to go. Most often I’d drop them at the grocery store in town, where they’d take an inordinate amount of time, strolling the fluorescent aisles as if they were on a boardwalk along a beach, slowly picking one item after another off the tightly stocked shelves, looking each over intently before either placing it back or deciding on purchase. Once, I took a few young adults to an all Amish ping-pong tournament for which I was completely unprepared. Though I was an Englishman to them, and would always be an outsider, and though I didn’t even pretend to care much at all for their beliefs, they did somehow accept me as a member of their community. So it happened that I, having snuck off to smoke a joint, returned to my rig where a teenage boy asked if I wanted to join the tournament. Let’s just say I was no competition for one seven year-old with a very lazy eye, and a white bearded gentleman who needed help getting up to the table. At any rate, this was one of the few times I’d engaged with the Amish in one of their community activities, and something about the scene struck me as beautiful, and odd, or rare at least: six or twelve people over fifty, thirty or more in middle age, and at least fifty teen on down, all laughing and chatting, crowded in circles around three paddleball tables. Humbled as I was by my clear lack of skill, I smiled as I wondered where else I might find three generations all happily sharing an evening together. The most humbling of my adventures as an Amish taxi-man occurred during hunting season. A few times in the fall of those years young men in their twenties would hire me to drop them off alone, hours from home, high in the mountains, for weeks at a time. This was elk season, and they were on the hunt. I would leave them there in the hip deep snow with only an overstuffed hiking pack and a rifle. We’d agree on when I should return, and when I did they were always there waiting, sitting by a fire, their prize neatly rearranged and wrapped in its own skin, the great horns of the beast protruding from a snow bank. It amazed me: the confidence they carried, the hardness they displayed, a hardness I didn’t have. And so it was that I began to feel a true respect for this community of rebels. I might even say their way of living, flawed as I’m sure it can be, took on a sort of sanctity in my mind.
Our first son arrived late in the third year we spent over the mountains there. By that time much of the worry I had carried before arriving there had faded to silence, but the relative ease of our version of simple living was coming to an end it seemed. The boy would need clothes and diapers and food, and care, much care, much more care than I could afford were we to stay. Toward the end, on those crystal clear evenings, and on the fog banked mornings, though I had made great strides towards finding comfort in the simplicity of things, I could feel it creeping back, the pull of complexity, the screaming nagging magnetism of the electric world, where there were jobs and commerce and systems within systems all designed ostensibly to make it possible to stay alive and comfortable at least the average number of years. And I did not want it, I did not want to leave. I had arrived by chance in this place where all of the great wide world fell away like old skin from me, and leaving felt not so different from turning my back on the only holy thing I’d ever really known. There, I found I no longer cared what year it was, so much the less who was liberal or conservative, or what of the melting ice caps, or exploration of Mars. There I found a timelessness of which I had become so small a part, and my part in it all mattered less to me too than I might have expected, and yet there he was, bouncing on my knee, and I couldn’t help but be drawn on down into worry over a future for him there, where simple living just might not be enough. And so I remained stuck, frozen at the precipice of decision. My wife, sad too at the state of things, having peered into our future there, had decided it was best to return, back to the way things were before. I knew she was right, but I could not yet bring myself to admit it.
***
It was a Sunday when the dam finally broke, when the decision to leave became an inevitability. Josephine had run to town with the boy for the day, and I was left to my devices, which for most men, regardless of their admission, hangs between their legs. I had other plans for the day too of course, a bit of firewood stacking and greenhouse work, but first, not as if it were planned at all, but with the kind of precision that only comes from countless hours of practice, I prepared for what would eventually be a life defining session of self-love. After I was quite sure there would not be an immediate return of my dear wife, I stood in our second floor kitchen: eyes closed, pants around my ankles, taking my time with the age old ritual. I relished the breathtaking silence wherein I found myself that day. I travelled in my mind across some astral plane, into pools of lavender oil, where I careened off the breasts of myriad women, and where I heard at some length the sounds of angels, a beautiful sound, a choir of a hundred voices in exponential harmony, rapture. My flesh became one with the sound and I swayed over my weakened knees as the moment of truth came nigh. All the truth presented itself at once. Tears welled in my eyes as I heard the choir continue, the truth it seemed was being sung in Pennsylvania Dutch, and all of its beauty was in procession down the lane. And it was too late for my truth, there was no stopping it. There it fell on the kitchen floor, to the sound of Amish angels singing what I later discovered was a wedding song. And in those moments I understood the place was too holy for me. Where I belong is buried in the chaos of the electric world, far from the simplicity beyond the mountains, deep between the folds of anxiety, struggling against the arching tides of static reverberating along the corridors of my mind.