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“Stop here,” David said suddenly. “Pull ahead just a little, so the headlights are pointing up into the field. Now turn off the headlights.”

The field sparkled with what must have been millions of fireflies—the most I’ve ever seen in one place. They’d probably brought their families from adjacent states into this atrazine-free zone. They blinked densely, randomly, an eyeful of frenzied stars.

“Just try something,” David said. “Flash the headlights one time, on and off.”

What happened next was surreal. After our bright flash the field went black, and then, like a wave, a million lights flashed back at us in unison.

Whoa. To convince ourselves this was not a social hallucination, we did it again. And again. Hooting every time, so pleased were we with our antics. It’s a grand state of affairs, to fool a million brainless creatures all at the same time. After five or six rounds the fireflies seemed to figure out that we were not their god, or they lost their faith, or at any rate went back to their own blinky business.

David chuckled. “Country-kid fireworks.”

We sat in the dark until after midnight, out in the yard under the cherries, talking about the Farm Bill, our kids, religion, the future, books, writing. In his spare time (a concept I can hardly imagine for this man) David is a writer and editor of Farming Magazine, a small periodical on sustainable agriculture. We could have talked longer, but thought better of it. People might sometimes wish to sleep in, but cows never do.

In the morning I woke up in the upstairs bedroom aware of a breeze coming through the tall windows, sunlight washing white walls, a horse clop-clopping by on the road outside. I had the sensation of waking in another country, far from loud things.

Lily went out to the chicken coop to gather eggs, making herself right at home. We ate some for breakfast, along with the farm’s astonishingly good oatmeal sweetened with strawberries and cream. This would be a twenty-dollar all-natural breakfast on the room service menu of some hotels. I pointed this out to David and Elsie—that many people think of such food as an upper-class privilege. David laughed. “We eat fancy food all right. Organic oatmeal, out of the same bin we feed our horses from!”

We packed up to leave, reminding one another of articles we meant to exchange. We vowed to come again, and hoped they’d come our way too, though that is less likely, because they don’t travel as much as we do. Nearly all their trips are limited by the stamina of the standardbred horses that draw their buggy. David and Elsie are Amish.

Before I had Amish friends, I imagined unbending constraints or categorical aversions to such things as cars (hybrid or otherwise). Like many people, I needed firsthand acquaintance to educate me out of religious bigotry. The Amish don’t oppose technology on principle, only particular technologies they feel would change their lives for the worse. I have sympathy for this position; a good many of us, in fact, might wish we’d come around to it before so much noise got into our homes. As it was explained to me, the relationship of the Amish with their technology is to strive for what is “appropriate,” making that designation case by case. When milking machines came up for discussion in David and Elsie’s community, the dairy farmers pointed out that milking by hand involves repeatedly lifting eighty-pound milk cans, limiting the participation of smaller-framed women and children. Milking machines were voted in because they allow families to do this work together. For related reasons, most farmers in the community use tractors for occasional needs like pulling a large wagon or thresher (one tractor can thus handle the work on many farms). But for daily plowing and cultivating, most prefer the quiet and pace of a team of Percherons or Belgians.

David summarizes his position on technology in one word: boundaries. “The workhorse places a limit on the size of our farms,