168 animal, vegetable, miracle
coming through the tall windows, sunlight washing white walls, a horse
clop-clopping by on the road outside. I had the sensation of waking in
another country, far from loud things.
Lily went out to the chicken coop to gather eggs, making herself right
at home. We ate some for breakfast, along with the farm’s astonishingly
good oatmeal sweetened with strawberries and cream. This would be a
twenty-dollar all- natural breakfast on the room service menu of some ho-
tels. I pointed this out to David and Elsie—that many people think of
such food as an upper- class privilege. David laughed. “We eat fancy food
all right. Organic oatmeal, out of the same bin we feed our horses from!”
We packed up to leave, reminding one another of articles we meant to
exchange. We vowed to come again, and hoped they’d come our way too,
though that is less likely, because they don’t travel as much as we do.
Nearly all their trips are limited by the stamina of the standardbred horses
that draw their buggy. David and Elsie are Amish.
Before I had Amish friends, I imagined unbending constraints or cat-
egorical aversions to such things as cars (hybrid or otherwise). Like many
people, I needed firsthand acquaintance to educate me out of religious
bigotry. The Amish don’t oppose technology on principle, only particular
technologies they feel would change their lives for the worse. I have sym-
pathy for this position; a good many of us, in fact, might wish we’d come
around to it before so much noise got into our homes. As it was explained
to me, the relationship of the Amish with their technology is to strive for
what is “appropriate,” making that designation case by case. When milk-
ing machines came up for discussion in David and Elsie’s community, the
dairy farmers pointed out that milking by hand involves repeatedly lifting
eighty-pound milk cans, limiting the participation of smaller- framed
women and children. Milking machines were voted in because they allow
families to do this work together. For related reasons, most farmers in the
community use tractors for occasional needs like pulling a large wagon or
thresher (one tractor can thus handle the work on many farms). But for
daily plowing and cultivating, most prefer the quiet and pace of a team of
Percherons or Belgians.
David summarizes his position on technology in one word: boundar-
ies. “The workhorse places a limit on the size of our farms, and the stan-