I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (25 page)

We pulled neck and neck with the cart. Some sound buzzed around the horses’ fibrillated clop. The middle brother stood with the reins.

Our bus went amurmur with something like relief, the adults glad that the Amish were out there, reaping, and they and the children both gladder still that it was not them out there, reaping. I myself found them stirring. Strapping, blue-eyed brothers, harvesting corn in 2012! No incessant Instagramming, no real-time Twitter updates:
Jacob’s got the reins, FML.

A dozen camera phones captured the boys with fake mandibular clicks, and Gail sighed, “Goddamnit.” As my window came level with them and I framed a picture, I realized that the sound underneath the clopping was Kris Kross’s “Jump” issuing from a hidden stereo.

I made eye contact with the oldest, inches away. He looked back with this mirthless inner grin. Then he faked a lunge, to see if I’d balk, and totally flinch-flexed me, prison or high school style. He laughed as he passed from my window to the one behind.

I’d come back to Lancaster County, in the southeast of Pennsylvania, because years ago, when I was driving back from the Gathering of the Juggalos, I took a detour through Amish country and happened upon something that I’ve thought a lot about since.

That day, I stopped at a one-room schoolhouse. It was barely visible from the macadam lane, brick and vinyl-sided behind a woodworking shop and a house selling brown eggs. I would’ve never found it had I not typed “New Hope School” into my GPS.

Simple wood fencing ran along the lot’s perimeter and kept me far from the Amish kids enjoying recess. Some preteens huddled around back. Others hung linens on a line to dry. A chain of downy-headed toddlers pedaled Big Wheels across a field where, in 2006, a milk truck driver walked into the old schoolhouse, barricaded the door, and shot five Amish girls to death.

A hard breeze soughed the surrounding cornfields, a shush I spun around to appreciate. Then I noticed the backstop. Not just saw it, but realized that all the other Amish schoolhouses I’d driven by—they didn’t have hoops or goals or uprights in their playfields—they had backstops and baseball diamonds. One boy ran barefoot across the grass and positioned his shoes as bases. Then several more joined him, and they sidearmed a ball around the horn with terrible mechanics but unflinching competence. A lefty took up a bat, and I took a few steps back, understanding now that the fence I stood behind doubled as the right-field wall.

He was a new teen whose taut physique and knobby joints had him looking like a system of ropes and pulleys. He stroked a ball over my head, laces hissing. I made like I had somewhere else to be. When I sneaked back a few minutes later, he was fielding impassively, scooping and throwing with kinesthetic tics I remember having once, when I was little and in love with the game, before coaches smoothed all that out. The tics made him seem more authentic, more faithful to the form, like warps and bubbles in handblown glass.

The Amish play baseball!
I thought.
Of course they do.

What’s become of baseball? We don’t seem to want to play it or even watch it anymore. Participation in Little League has been dropping steadily for the past two decades. The nationwide
player pool for slow-pitch softball has shrunk by a third since 2000, mostly in the twenty-five-to-thirty-four-year-old age bracket, the biggest decline of any team sport other than wrestling. Meanwhile, this past year, as
Sunday Night Football
repeated as our number-one-rated primetime program, fewer people watched
Fox Saturday Baseball
than ever before. And the World Series—a quarter century ago, more than half of our nation’s televisions were locked into the deciding game of the 1986 Fall Classic. In 2012, barely 12 percent tuned in.

I used to play in leagues year-round, and watch the parade of home-run highlights on
Baseball Tonight
after prayers but before bed. My dad was my assistant coach then. In my youth leagues, he acted like he didn’t at home. At home, he was someone else’s dad, a dad at a sleepover who cares only that nobody gets hurt too bad under his supervision. At home, my dad would sometimes poke his head into the living room and just watch me play video games. When I’d pause the game and look back, he disappeared like a TV nature guide who didn’t want to upset the specimen. But in the dugout, my dad paced up and down and got angry, or excited, or happy. He kicked the cooler and yelled, “Be a hitter!” or “Let me blow the sand out of it for you, Chesco.” He spoke a foreign language, one you only learned through immersion. He slapped asses. He held me by my shoulders and whispered instructions. He hit extra flies for me after practice, because he knew that nothing back then made me feel as good as that immaculate moment when the ball went from white reticule hovering on blue sky—
pock
—to unseen kernel seeding a glove.

The game is so freaking interminable, though! Tune in to the afternoon half of a Tuesday doubleheader held in Colorado, say, and you will start to taste your own mouth, displeasedly, as though you’ve just bitten into a mealy leathered apple. One of Colorado’s guys takes
thirty seconds
to throw a
single pitch.

What baseball is is anachronistic. (Important, yes. Hugely, fundamentally so. But so are the
Federalist Papers,
and no normal person reads the
Federalist Papers
more than once.) This is what’s most celebrated about it, the single narrative sweep of a game that’s changed little if at all over the course of a dozen generations. How me and a farmer sent forward in time from 1860 could sit down and enjoy nine innings with few or no expository leanings-over necessary.

But this is also what makes baseball so oppressive, so dense with numbers and precepts and bones. If you want to get into it, you have to be okay with yoking yourself to the game’s considerable weight. It’s like an inheritance, a gift old people want you to accept, maintain, and someday pass on. Which, really, is the last thing any one of us wants when he’s young.

Before heading back to Lancaster, I looked up Amish baseball online and got a lot of hearsay. There were never-updated web pages listing Amish teams as the eighteen-and-under Ohio state champions, as the winners of a Texas “world” softball tournament. Depending on your blogger, they belted dingers and rounded the bases full bore, in silence, without moving their arms; or else they were dirty as all hell, flapping elbows on the base paths, coming in spikes-high on slides, their dogged consciences not extending to sport.

I did find one trustworthy story reporting that in the late ’40s and early ’50s, Amish ballplayers in Lancaster were recruited onto semipro teams. They played under assumed names so no neighbors would spot them in newspaper box scores. One of the last of them, a late pitcher whose deception was never found out, had a nephew living in the area, a prominent business owner.

“LANK-uster County,” Jim Smucker corrected me when we shook hands in the gift shop of his Bird-in-Hand Family
Restaurant & Smorgasbord. Smucker has long acted as a sort of docent to Lancaster’s tourists, holding weekly Q&As for the guests of his restaurant and his inn next door. His parents were apostate Amish. They raised him a practicing Mennonite, which makes him like a Reformed Jew compared with the Amish ultraorthodoxy. Most of his friends and neighbors and employees, though, are Old Order.

He seated us in one of the roped-off wings of his recently expanded restaurant, laying his cell phone on the tabletop, where it would chitter between us throughout our conversation. “Amish contractors built the original,” Smucker said, and gestured to the huge, rectangular, irregularly windowed place. “And they’ve built each addition.”

Smucker then launched into a brief history of the Amish, explaining that what began three centuries ago as a handful of families escaping persecution in Europe by sailing for the nascent Pennsylvania colony is today 273,700 adults and children spread across thirty states and the Canadian province of Ontario. (Though two-thirds of them have remained in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana.)

Amish belief then as now is completely grounded in the New Testament, which they hold to be the sole and final authority on all things. From it, they take their impetus to remain separate (“and be not conformed to this world”—Romans 12:2), as well as their orders to renounce violence in all spheres of human life, to refuse to swear oaths, and to obey literally the teachings of Jesus Christ. Still, they shun their undisciplined and wayward, to make it a little easier to keep the community of faith intact.

And the Amish
are
a true community, in every sense of the word. They believe that what we call “individualism” is actually pride. Or, more bluntly, selfishness, which opposes God’s will, which should be yielded to with a dedicated heart. This communal spirit is regulated by an unwritten code of conduct,
the Ordnung, which prescribes clothing and grooming and language, and prohibits things like divorce, military service, owning or operating automobiles, taking electricity from public power lines, and installing wall-to-wall carpet.

Basically, the Amish way of living argues implicitly that tradition is sacred, that preservation is as important as or perhaps more important than progress, that obeying and yielding are virtuous, that the personal reality might not be the supreme. And in this way, above all else, they take the integrity of individual choice really, really seriously.

Or, as Smucker summed it up: “The Amish are very intentional. Whereas we just take on everything we’re offered without even thinking about it.”

They’re Anabaptists, which means they do not baptize babies but only those who can understand and accept responsibility for what they’re getting themselves into. They don’t cotton to the evangelicals and the born-agains. Declaring oneself “saved” is presumptuous, prideful; the Amish simply live faithful lives and hope for salvation.

And, contrary to popular belief, they’re not Luddites. They’ll use technology so long as it isn’t “worldly,” doesn’t connect to the outside or pull one’s mind away from the task at hand. Solid-state gas engines are okay, as are battery-operated calculators. If a machine can be retrofitted to run off oil or hydraulics, it’s allowed. Appliances may run off battery power. Cars may be ridden in if driven by an Englisher. (Anyone who isn’t Amish is “English,” because they don’t speak Pennsylvania Dutch.) Rollerblades are fine, and wood scooters, but not bicycles, because they, like cars, take you too far too fast too easily. Newspapers, trampolines, and gas grills: all kosher. Central heating systems are not.

Therein lies the problem they have with a lot of modernity: it’s fragmentary. And insidious. You allow central heat, and
next thing you know, everyone in the family leaves the fireside after dinner to go off to their own warm rooms. This is why the Amish live apart from us. So that they might remain whole.

Smucker himself has lived in Lancaster his whole life, save four years at college. When he came back, he played ball against the Amish in local park leagues and at the field he built into his brother’s corn.

“Are they good defensively?” I wanted to know. “It seems like they’d be good defensively.”

“
MMM
mmm …” he said, pushing all of his mouth to one side of his face. “It can be sandlot stuff. Cow-handed batting stances, Bob Tolan swings. Just terrible mechanics. But they’re so good despite that.”

Baseball, he went on, was forbidden by church elders around 1995. Baptized men had been wearing uniforms, and traveling to play league matches, and neglecting their duties at home. So, now, the game is strictly for the unbaptized. What I saw in the schoolyard was the noncompetitive stuff all kids play until the eighth grade, when their formal education ends. (“Knowledge puffeth up”—1 Corinthians.) The only ones who can ball for real are the boys who have entered Rumspringa, the few free years of “running around” in the secular world that the Amish allow their youth (and about which we make feature-length documentaries and National Geographic Channel reality shows).

Rumspringa—ostensibly a time for finding a mate—is a kind of inoculation. A manageable dosage of culture is introduced to unbaptized Amish, the hope being that this exposure will keep them from succumbing to the whole pathology later on. From their sixteenth birthday till their mid-twenties, they sample what they’ve been missing—cars, hip-hop, food courts, double plays. Then they make the biggest decision of their lives: get baptized and get married, or forsake their world for ours.

“The unbaptized, if they play competitively in uniforms,
that means they’re from a faster, more liberal district,” Smucker told me. “But you can still tell they’re Amish by how they carry themselves.”

“What should I scout for?” I asked.

“You’ll just know. But it’s getting less and less apparent. How are you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve got the MLB app on their iPhone?”

“The ballplayers are losing their religion,” I said, pleased with the joke.

“Not quite,” Smucker replied, suggesting that I look up Amish retention rates at the Mennonite Information Center a few miles around the way. About 85 percent of today’s Amish choose the church, I’d learn—far more than when there were semipro ballplayers about. More, in fact, than at any point in their history.

Officially, the Amish spurn private telephones, but an Anabaptist academic I contacted snuck me a number. He told me I’d need to first leave a voice mail—the Amish have voice mail on their communal outdoor telephones, and they check it once a day—and then I’d get a call back.

And so, at the close of regular business hours one Friday, an Amish butcher rang my cell from the phone he hides in his basement. “All Amish kids are baseball fans,” he confessed. “My sons follow the Phillies very much. Avidly.”

He spoke a bottlenecked English, this brogue through which “do” became “dew” and “ill” squeezed into “eel.” “They watch
SportsCenter
on their cell phones,” he admitted. “What can I say? They’re in Rumspringa. I did the same. Or similar.” He used to love baseball, he said, used to play all the time before it was banned. “It’s fine for kids to play. But as Paul says, ‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I
thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’ ”