Unknown America: New York Ascetics

June 2010

One of USA's largest Amish communities lives in New York State within only an eight-hour drive from Manhattan. These voluntary ascetics of European origin with German roots recognize neither electricity, nor water pipelines, nor automobiles. So it goes, this is a tradition...

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Time Stopped

My friend Sergey from the town of Utica opened me the door to the amazing world of the Amish. We needed to buy milk and eggs. However, for some reason, we drove not to a supermarket but in the opposite direction along countryside roads. Unusual yellow horse and buggy road signs could be seen on the shoulder of the road increasingly frequently. My friend continued smiling without any explanation. We almost ran into a "slowcoach" emerging from behind a corner – a horse-drawn vehicle akin to those we had been warned about by the road signs several miles ago. It was driven by a bearded man who, judging by his clothes was a farmer...

"They are the Amish... sort of Protestant Old Believers," Sergey enlightened me.  Sometimes we go to their community to buy food products. Look! They are from the last century". The whole road was filled with same horse-driven carriages, whereas people moved on the sides. A bare-footed boy wearing a straw hat, the living image of Tom Sawyer, was driving cows to pasture. Women in prayer caps and long dresses covered with aprons were hanging laundry to dry. A man was taking a bag of wheat or corn to a windmill.

Amish clothing was constructed of plain, durable fabric in solid three colours at most: grey, blue and green. There were very simple wooden houses with peeling paint: nothing reminiscent of siding that is extremely wide-spread in the States, no gnome figurines on lawns. And there are no proud Stars and Stripes on roofs. Anywhere but here.

We turned to one of farms having parked snugly between a sleeping dog and an old-fashioned buggy. As compared to the latter, the second-hand Honda ranked up to a spaceship or, what was closer to the truth, to a time machine. I reached out a hand to a door bell out of habit. Of course, there was not any. So, we knocked. A plump girl of about 18 years old opened the door. While I eyed her dress at a close distance, which was no less simple than everything around, Sergey was negotiating about foodstuffs and then he slightly poked me on my side for some reason or other. "She isn't married," he said. It turned out married women wore black aprons, while single women wore white ones. Later on, after having looked it up in an encyclopaedia, we understood that our matchmaking chances were equal to zero. The Amish do not accept people from outside in their families therefore their population of more than two hundred thousand people have been the descendants of only 200 founders who had immigrated to the USA in the XVII-XVIII centuries.

The Country of Mark Twain

We visited the place not once and sometimes hung out in homes of the rural people, when they were prone to welcome guests, of course. These people are conservative to a fault, especially the older generation. But we managed to have had an "insider" among the Amish. It was Andy, a smart 12-year-old boy, who unexpectedly discovered a blazing passion for Russian candied nut bars also known as kozinak. I was lucky to have had a couple of bars in my bag. He would lead out horses from the stable, he would put them to a wagon or a carriage and would drive us around the neighbourhood, telling us about himself and the lifestyles of his peoples. He told that the New Order Amish lived in some other communities and that though they also wore plain clothing and spoke the Pennsylvania German dialect, they did not refrain from using electric lamps along with kerosene ones, and that they did not refuse from modern medicine. However, our new friend and his family keep to austerity in everything.

The Internet, television and radio are prohibited here. They have no water supply pipelines and heating systems. The hair of Amish women must be covered in public as it must be done, in their opinion, by all Christian women. The married men wear beards. The Amish are very religious people, they interpret the Bible in a strict manner and wait for second coming of Jesus Christ. That said, they do not have churches or other houses of worship – they take turns hosting meetings for divine services at each other's houses. On Sundays, when they do not have divine services, they rest and make visits to friends. Alcohol and tobacco are allowed in restricted amounts.

Andy's school consists of only two classrooms. Young Amish learn writing, reading and arithmetic. It is believed that they do not need to know more. In two years, Andy will graduate from the 8th grade and will join his parents: he will work on land, weave blankets and make furniture. At the age of 16, he will have Rumspringa, a very important period of self-determination for the Amish, when an adolescent departs to big cities to see the life of the other society and to decide to return for adult baptism into the Amish church and follow the rules of the Ordnung or to leave the community. Now our conservative boy was adamant: "My grandfather used a driving horse, my father used a driving horse and I will use a driving horse."

Andy agreed to take a picture of him only once and even then he was slightly afraid in case his father would find out because it was prohibited among them. I keep these pictures as memorabilia, as an evidence that I was temporarily carried to the times of Mark Twain.