Amish Confidential (5 page)

For a while, explanations like those satisfied me. Kids know what they know, and I only knew being Amish. But as time went on, the questions got louder inside my head, and the answers got even harder to find.

CHAPTER 4

FREE AT LAST

I
was dying to turn sixteen. I wouldn’t have to wear a hat anymore.

It’s funny, the things you focus on when you are young. For me, it was the hat—my big, black, full-brimmed, Amish hat. That hat sat so large on my head, sometimes I almost felt like I would disappear beneath it. I’d worn a hat since I was two years old. My mother attached a small tie that went under my chin to keep the hat from falling off when I ran around the yard. As a teenager, I didn’t need the chin strap anymore, but the hat still felt like it was lashed onto my head. To me, that hat represented everything that frustrated me about being young and Amish, living under my parents’ roof, being subject to all the Amish rules, whether those rules made any sense to me or not. God, I hated wearing that hat! Up until sixteen, I knew, the rule was: Wear your hat. I also knew that once I got to be an adult and I got baptized in the church as everyone just assumed I would—me included—then I’d have to wear a hat every day again. But there was this window, this little period of time, this very special moment. From sixteen, when I would start going to youth group, until whenever it was I finally got baptized—in my twenties, proba
bly—I could run around anywhere I wanted without having to wear a hat. This represented freedom to me.

I had only the vaguest idea of what else freedom might mean. But I was pretty sure I knew how to spell it: R-U-M-S-P-R-I-N-G-A.

A quick word about the word:
Rumspringa
comes from German, as so much in Amish life does. That’s why we pronounce the word
ROOM-shpring-ah.
But its history and meaning have been bent, chopped and twisted by the continents and the years. It all goes back to the German verb
herumspringen
—literally “to jump or hop around.” Yes, it sounds like some of the parties I’ve been to, but there’s more to it than that. Like a lot of long German words,
herumspringen
gets its meaning from its individual parts. In German,
her
means “here,” and
um
means “about.” So the first part of the word,
herum
, adds up to
“hereabout.”

Now the second part:
Springen
is a German word meaning “to jump” or “to skip.” Simple enough, except that the Swiss came along and put their own spin on it. To them,
springen
also meant “to run.” So to our Amish ancestors along the Swiss-German border,
rumspringen
was a verb meaning, more or less, “to run around.”

To complicate matters just a little more, the word got changed again when the Amish brought it to America. This happened to a lot of words. In the case of
herumspringen,
the
he
was chopped off the front, leaving just the
rum,
and the
en
at the back of the word
was shortened to an
a. Rumspringa
was used as a noun as well.

And there it stands, ready to signify an important time of Amish life:
Rumspringa
—a time for running around.

For the young Amish like me, it all begins at age sixteen. At sixteen, you get to join a youth group and go away on Sundays. “Gangs,” these groups are sometimes called. Like, “What gang are
you in?” They aren’t criminals or anything like that. It’s just a name, and you’re expected to pick one. You’re allowed to find a gang anywhere in the Amish community. It’s your choice. It doesn’t have to be in your church or your part of the county, and the groups have different personalities, from the plainest to the wildest.

In the plainer groups, the boys still choose to wear their hats and the girls always keep their bonnets on, even though they don’t have to, and everyone rides in open buggies. Then there are groups that have some open buggies and some covered buggies. And there are groups that get a little wilder, riding in covered buggies and maybe even a car or two. Yes, that’s what passes for semi-wild in Amish youth groups. There are also some youth groups with all cars where everybody’s riding around like
The Fast and the Furious
or some undiscovered NASCAR team.

It’s the same spread with haircuts—going from all bowl cuts to a mixture to all barbershop haircuts. The girls’ hairstyles are also different from gang to gang. In some gangs, the girls still wear their hair hidden under bonnets. In others, the girls undo their braids and let their waist-length hair go flying in the breeze. There are groups who don’t drink alcohol and groups who drink a little and groups where it seems like no one’s ever sober. They’re toasting everything except their next confession. It’s up to the individual to choose.

Still, most kids do what I did. They start out with a youth group close to home, a group that their friends are part of. That’s who they know so that’s where they go. This is one of the first big decisions an Amish teenager gets to make. Officially, it’s your choice, but choice is not something Amish kids have a lot of experience with. You didn’t get to pick your church or its many, many rules. In school, there weren’t any electives to choose from. You certainly didn’t pick how
to dress or which chores to do. Your parents made all those choices, under the strong influence of the church and the local bishop. So even if it’s only “I’m going where Ruben and Isaac are going,” for the first time ever, well, at least those words came out of your mouth.

I started out with a horse-and-buggy group in Lebanon County. They were so plain, they didn’t even really have a name. Some of the other groups had names, like the Crickets, the Lightning and the Renegades. Also the Hurricanes, the Seahawks and—these weren’t quite as wild sounding—the Swans and the Antiques. I also heard about some car-driving groups that called themselves the Avalanches, the Dominoes, the Checkers and—these sounded almost like real gangs—the Cougars and the Sharks.

The youth group I chose was just known as the Lebanon youth group. They had a couple of cars that they didn’t use too often, and that was about it. They didn’t go many places, and when they did, someone had a set of reins in his hands. Most of the kids in my Lebanon group didn’t have haircuts, either. They do now, but they didn’t back then. They didn’t drink much. That might have made us popular with the parents, but it didn’t make these kids very much fun to hang out with. After years of imagining the blowout I’d have when I finally turned sixteen, I probably came off as a little bit of a rebel, or at least impatient. I was one of the only kids who had a haircut and left his hat at home.

No one in the community had any reason to whisper about what went on with the Lebanon youth group. We got together on Sundays around four or five in the afternoon. We played volleyball and some other games, then we had a meal together, then everyone sang some Christian hymns, then we all went home.

Really, that was it.

As far as I was concerned, Rumspringa was starting out as a huge disappointment. I could have stayed at home and done most of that. The only difference I could see was that of all the boring things we were doing, some boring girls were doing them with us. During the week, I did my usual farm work. Every other Sunday, I went to church in the morning. This was my big excitement? After all the tales I’d heard from older kids, this wasn’t my idea of Rumspringa at all. As far as I was concerned, I hadn’t been waiting sixteen years for
this
.
And
the girls barely even talked to me. They just talked to one another.

I knew I had to find another group to Rumspringa with.

I still had a few friends from Lancaster County, kids who’d been there when I was a baby and some I knew through my brothers Christian and Henry, who’d never liked Lebanon County and went back to live with my Lancaster uncles as soon as they possibly could. If you live in a big city, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, may not sound like a major metropolis. But compared to Lebanon County, believe me, it was Rome, Paris and New York rolled into one. Lancaster is the biggest area anywhere for the Amish community, especially Amish youth. All the other counties are smaller. When I was seventeen, I told the Lebanon group good-bye and switched to a youth group in Lancaster County.

That
was more like it. Finally, the only times I was expected to wear a hat were when I went to church and to funerals.

M
y new gang was called the Souvenirs. I liked the way that sounded immediately. It was from those guys that I got the nickname I still carry around, Lebanon Levi. I was the guy from Lebanon County. They had so many Levis and Johns and Rubens, they
needed some way to tell everyone apart. If you’re John from Perry County, you’re Perry John. As soon as I got there, I was Lebanon Levi. Everything was faster in Lancaster, including the nicknames.

The new crowd was way more fun than the plain kids in Lebanon County. Now Saturday night, which I used to think of as just the night before Sunday, was key to the Rumspringa equation for me and the other Souvenirs. Saturdays were for partying. Wintertime, we’d all get together in a shop or in a barn where there was heat. Summertime, we had our parties in pastures, meadows and open fields. It was always great having parties outside. A lot of kids, boys and girls, were trying cigarettes. So outside was a lot less smoky. We had alcohol too, lots of alcohol. Someone would make a punch and pour different kinds of booze in there. Sometimes, we had bands playing late into the night. That might not seem like a big deal, but except for maybe a harmonica that can be stashed away in a pocket, most Amish people don’t play instruments at home or at church. A lot of bishops see playing music as a form of self-expression, and they don’t mean that as a compliment. You won’t ever hear an organ at Amish Sunday service. Amish sing a lot of hymns, but usually without so much as a pump organ playing along.

So to us, having a band play seemed exciting and slightly taboo. Of course, that made me want to start a band immediately. Lancaster Souvenir parties were filled with people dancing and carrying on. The girls were way friendlier and way more fun than any I’d met in Lebanon. Some of them would actually talk to boys, even someone like seventeen-year-old me, who could be loud and rowdy around his guy friends and suddenly tongue-tied in the presence of a girl.

Lebanon was a long buggy ride from Lancaster on a late Saturday night. I spent a lot of time with my friends’ families or staying at
one of my sisters’ houses. But parents have special radar, and the distance gave me only so much insulation. My parents had heard about these wilder youth groups, and now they were keeping a particular eye on me. My father kept asking me, “How was youth group? What did you do with your friends?” I always gave the vaguest answers possible.

“Not much. Just talked. Hung around.”

“Did you enjoy yourself?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” I said, without offering any further details.

Somehow, my mother knew I was drinking. I couldn’t figure out how she knew. Maybe the other mothers were gossiping at church on Sunday. Or maybe it was something sneakier than that.

“Were you drinking over the weekend?” she asked more than once.

“No,” I insisted.

“I know you were.”

“Okay, whatever.”

We’d been through this ritual several times already.

One Sunday morning when I was still half-asleep, I heard my mother walk upstairs and into my bedroom. I know it wasn’t Monday because my head hurt from drinking so much. There aren’t a lot of rules that kids follow about getting drunk, but one I always tried to follow was, “Do your big drinking on Saturday night.” Plenty of Amish kids wake up Sunday mornings and say, “Damn, I’ll never drink again—or at least not today!” That morning, before my mother told me it was time to wake up, she bent down and put her nose an inch from my mouth. I didn’t know what she was doing. I held my eyes closed tight and tried not to breathe. She stayed like that another moment until I had to exhale. Then she
stood up, and I heard her satisfied sigh. She’d been smelling my breath all along.

Ah
, I thought.
So that’s how she knew I’d been drinking!

My father had his own, quiet way of addressing the subject of alcohol. One Sunday, I stopped at the house with a friend. While we went inside the house to change clothes, I forgot I’d left four six-packs of Yuengling beer in the buggy. And I didn’t think to shut the buggy’s back end.

My father saw the beer. He didn’t say anything. He just went over to the buggy and took the six-packs. When my friend and I got outside, I noticed the back of the buggy was open and the beer was gone.

I said nothing, and neither did my father.

A few months later, I found the empty cans between two rows of corn in the field, where he’d dumped them out. At least I think he dumped them out. He didn’t drink the beer, I’m sure of that. Another possibility is that he fed the beer to the cows. Beer is good for sick cows.

I always understood that my parents didn’t want me to drink. I also understood that, at this time in my life, they were willing to give me the space to—mostly—figure these things out for myself. I remain grateful to my mom and dad for that. And to this day, I still don’t drink around my parents.

M
y Rumspringa friends and I, we didn’t always stay close to home. We went for long drives to places none of us had ever been before, exploring towns in Pennsylvania and into Ohio. We had a whole fleet of cars, from old beat-up junkers that English teenagers
would never be caught in to faster, flashier, newer models that somehow we ended up with. It didn’t matter to me, as long as it had tires instead of hooves. We hardly bothered with horse-and-buggies at all.

We did all kinds of other stuff, too. Stuff that anyone who wasn’t Amish would have considered mundane. We played sports competitively. For the first time in our young lives, we had leagues for softball and flag football and played against teams from other youth groups. We didn’t have all the protective equipment that it takes to play tackle, but we sure loved flag football.

I always needed money, even though I’d constantly taken on small pickup work since I was a child. I never felt like I had enough money. Some parents gave their kids spending money, but Dad didn’t believe in financing my Rumspringa fun. His idea was: “You don’t need money. You’re not spending it on the weekend. Your family gets the money. That’s how it is.” But I did need money, more than an Amish farmer with animals to feed and a family to raise could ever imagine. Now that I was getting out more, I had lots of things to buy. Fast food at the restaurants we hung out in. Little things at the mall that couldn’t be called essentials but were still nice to have. I started eyeing some jeans and T-shirts and cool pairs of sneakers. I told myself, “I might not want to dress Amish all the time.”