I know an Amish man who uses a cellphone.
Fact is, I strongly suspect that Enos may even make calls while driving — driving his horse-drawn buggy, that is, uphill and down along the dusty gravel roads of Fillmore County in southeastern Minnesota. I asked Enos once whether employing the signature totem of digital age connectivity didn't constitute "jumping the fence" in his devoutly traditional, simplicity-loving sect. But by then I knew that Amish attitudes toward modern technology are subtler and more interesting than we "English" (i.e., modern Americans) often assume. In fact, we could learn something from them about flexibility and freedom of choice.
For 20 years I've divided my time between the Twin Cities and the rustic bluff country along the Iowa border. There is one stoplight in all of Fillmore County, last I checked, and the place has an informal motto: "If you're stressed out in Fillmore County, it's your own damn fault."
But nothing better symbolizes the humane pace of life down in the country than the image of the Amish, who migrated to the bucolic area from back East some 40 years ago. Ever since, they've made regional emblems of clip-clopping buggies and hay wagons, of bonnets and flat-brimmed hats, and of neat, whitewashed farmsteads where a whole family's worth of dark-hued laundry often flutters in the breeze like an array of rebel flags from clotheslines stretching from front porch to barn.
That the Amish are in a kind of gentle rebellion from the frenetic modern world around them has been reflected in the appearance of several prominent Star Tribune stories about the community in recent weeks. Naturally, it's a controversy that has brought them to our attention.
It seems that some officials in the picturesque town of Lanesboro — the heart of a prosperous bluff country tourism industry — are trying to patch up a conflict with the Amish that has removed them, with their baskets and baked goods, from the town's popular farmers market for several years. The town poobahs had decreed that all market vendors must carry liability insurance, but the Amish don't believe in insurance; they believe in taking care of one another. And now it seems their absence from the market is hurting everyone's business — and nobody believes in that.
One trusts they'll work something out. But tension between English and Amish is not entirely unknown. The Amish community's separateness and their underlying belief that the modern world is sinful, even while they benefit from it in many ways, rubs some the wrong way, as do other situations where the Amish claim religious exemptions from general obligations — Social Security, slow-moving-vehicle insignia on buggies, some business licensing, etc.
But mainly the Amish are a huge success in Minnesota and elsewhere in America (they number about 3,000 in the state and a quarter million in the U.S., with both numbers growing). And that confirms something pleasing and easy to take for granted about America.