Amish Recruiter

Black Book 107, May 29, 2021

One afternoon when I was down in Southeast Minnesota, I drove out to an Amish farm in a big valley. I wanted to buy some eggs. While I was standing around in the yard waiting for the woman and one of her boys to fetch my eggs, the man of the house came out and gave me the Amish hard sell.

Surely, he said, I wanted a quieter, simpler life, and wouldn’t it be nice to ditch the razor? What 21st-century city slicker didn’t occasionally fantasize about beekeeping and animal husbandry?

“We have all sorts of wonderful opportunities for a man who isn’t allergic to hard work,” he told me. At present, in fact, the community happened to have a surplus of eligible young women, he said, and several first-rate properties that could be mine, along with a team of good horses and mules. There was also a sawmill just up the road that was in need of a new steward, and couldn’t keep up with the pandemic demand. “We don’t have any of that monkey business out here, by the way, just in case you were curious,” he said. “Nothing but good, clean living. And no more pesky zippers!”

“I just came for some eggs,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Some of our wonderful, farm-fresh eggs. I’ll tell you what, come on out, give us six months, and I feel confident you’re going to love what we have to offer.” He asked if I’d ever been for a buggy ride, and I allowed that I had not.

“It’s a beautiful day,” he said. “Would you like to go for a ride and meet some of the neighbors?”

It was a beautiful day, I agreed, but I still had a long drive back home.

“Just an hour of your time,” he said, in an almost conspiratorial whisper. “Surely it wouldn’t hurt to take a little look around and see what we’re up to out here. At the very least, I trust that you’ll enjoy the ride and the scenery.”

I told him I had a wife and a dog waiting for me back in the city, but this information didn’t seem to discourage him in the least.

“If necessary,” he said, “we can cross that bridge when we get to it. Are you thirsty? Would you like a glass of our cool, fresh well water? I’ll fetch you a glass, and then, once we’ve slaked that thirst of yours, let’s just take a little spin in the buggy. I think you’ll find it rather pleasant, and in an attempt to persuade you, I’m prepared to make a special offer—are you familiar with our beautiful quilts? The quilts we make here in our community routinely sell for $800-1000 all over the country, through lucrative arrangements with mall outlets and specialty boutiques. I’ll give you one of those lovely quilts in exchange for no more than an hour of your time. And if we go up the road just a short distance I can also send you home with some jam, honey, and fresh-baked bread.”

The man was so insistent, and it really was a gorgeous day, so I eventually consented to accompany him on a buggy ride. At each of the neighboring farms we visited, he introduced me as “a prospective new member of our community.”

“Well…,” I’d say, but before I could say anything else he’d cut me off and say something like, “What we have here is just another confused young man from the big city craving a healthier, more meaningful life.”

Once I was in the buggy, of course, I couldn’t just get out and walk. My car was still in the man’s yard. What was supposed to be a brief tour turned into four hours, and I increasingly felt as if I were trapped in an especially nightmarish timeshare presentation. By the time we got back to the farm I’d become increasingly assertive—and perhaps rude—in rejecting the man’s many generous offers (including, at one point, a Bible that he said had belonged to his dead brother). He, in turn, eventually turned hostile, and when his wife came out and attempted to give me a pie, the man snatched it from her hands and said to me, “Just take your eggs and go.”

“What about my quilt?” I asked.

“There’ll be no quilt for you,” he said.

I was so rattled by the experience that I checked into a motel in Spring Valley, ordered a pizza, and watched “Barbarella.”

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A few years later, after more than a million Americans had died of COVID and I’d essentially become mute, sleep-treading veal, I was back down in that part of the state with my dog. It was mid-summer, and as darkness fell I drove out to a gravel road that was just off the two-lane state highway. There, from an overlook at the top of a hill, I could look out across the long valley that was home to dozens of Amish farms. I parked, and my dog and I stood out there at the edge of the fields and gazed down upon all the farmhouses and barns stretched out in complete darkness.

Here and there in all that darkness, we saw occasional flickers of lamplight in windows, or moving around in the farmyards. And then, for maybe 45 magical minutes, we found ourselves surrounded by tens of thousands of fireflies swarming from the fields and trees all around us and rising up out of the valley. It was as if we were suspended in a snow globe where the seasons proceeded just as they do in the real, dying world, and we were frozen in one eternal summer moment.

I sensed some pair of giant, unseen hands was gently shaking that globe, with us inside it, but instead of specks of silver glitter swirling all around us, we were in the middle of a dazzling shower of fireflies, and I crouched down next to my dog in the road and held him in my arms. The huge silence all around us felt holy or sacred to me in a way that I know is rare in this world, and for at least a brief moment I thought maybe I should drive down there into the darkness and give the Amish thing a try after all.