Amish Country

From Virginia we headed north to Pennsylvania because we wanted to go to a community in New York (with a little side trip to Niagara Falls!). We stayed one night on the lovely Shenandoah river.

We ended up in an RV park near Lancaster Pennsylvania, "Amish Country". It was a strange experience when an Amish horse and buggy pulled out in front of us on the highway, prompting me to slow way down. Even though I was driving I pulled my video cam out and filmed the buggy through the windshield. It was only when I got closer that I realized there were two children in the back, facing to the rear, watching my rude behavior. Oops, sorry little Amish children. I was just surprised, that's all.

In Lancaster we visited an Amish farmhouse to learn how they live. In that area are mostly "Old Order Amish" who tend to be more traditional and not as "progressive". They have rules such as they can't connect to the electric grid, so they tend to use propane lamps for light. But you'll see good Amish folk shopping at WalMart or thrift stores like anybody else. I even have a video of an Amish girl in her dress and bonnet roller-blading expertly down the street.

At the farmhouse, the children enjoyed seeing all the farm animals. This cow never seemed to move even when Lexie tickled its udder. Imagine that!






The Amish are highly admirable in a lot of ways. They are hard workers and they keep their farms and homes in good shape. They came to the area to escape religious persecution in Europe, as the story goes. I suspect William Penn recruited them because he wanted to increase the economic value of his vast holdings and what better way to do it than turn loose a bunch of farming bots onto the landscape.

The Amish are farmers galore, master cultivators. If you believe that in dim history there was a conflict between the traditional hunter-gatherers and the cultivators and that the cultivators won, the Amish give you a clue as to why. They are tireless farmers and they apparently make a good living at it.

My fault with them is they are using pesticides and chemical fertilizers and their methods are traditonal monoculture grain farming. (There was nothing but corn as far as the eye could see.) Many might look at this landscape and call it "pastoral" or some other artsy fartsy word, but I saw a devastated lunar landscape where every wild thing had been destroyed, and all of this destruction deriving from the bizarre christian philosophy that the earth is put here for man to have "dominion" over.