Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [42]
Ten
A Barn Raising
As Mary moved deeper into women’s circles, I remained somewhat isolated from the sphere of Minimite masculinity. The church meeting had helped greatly, but in some ways it also brought anguish by reminding me of our separateness. In addition, it introduced many unfamiliar faces, many identities yet to be revealed. I still knew next to nothing about most of my neighbors. They shared certain attributes with the Amish, but Amish they were not. I had little inkling even now of where they came from, what they were after, or who they really were.
The news reached me of a barn raising about to take place on a farm somewhere in the community. Lightning (in the figurative sense) had struck. A “calamity simulation” such as this might be the perfect chance to make better acquaintance. I decided to put in an appearance. To blend in better, I wore an Amish-style straw hat.
My first barn raising, I later realized, was a bit atypical. Most raisings take place in the fall, when the crops are in and the weather is cool. The barn-builder here was too impatient to wait four months and bumped his raising up to the midsummer lull. The temperature and humidity that day, I hate to say, hardly evoked feelings of festivity. As I came within earshot of the white frame house across from the building site, I chanced to overhear heated words—and I mean heated—floating in my direction.
“You’d better never have a work bee in this weather again,” cried a female voice. “So much cooking in this heat.”
“I’d gladly trade you,” said a male voice deferentially.
“I would too,” returned the indignant female, her voice rising, “but I don’t know a thing about your work.”
“I’d come in and make the whole meal,” vowed the male, secure in the knowledge he wouldn’t have to.
It was in some ways comforting to know that Mary and I were not the only couple to fight in the kitchen. Minimites evidently did not step right off a postcard; the argument made me feel closer to them than all the nice talk in the world. Come to think of it, the fact that they aired their grievances so openly in English indicated they were transplants. I later found out that Minimite converts were not exempt from the need of marriage counseling.
But there was another aspect of this event that departed from a standard barn-raising format: the barn had already been raised several years earlier. Today we were only adding a fifteen-foot extension to the handsome, steeply peaked gray structure that dominated the homestead. The customary numberless horde would not descend, but only a handful of neighbors. I counted about twenty men and two women by day’s end.
The scene that now greeted my eyes was nonetheless spirited. Minimite men buzzed about the existing barn, pulling boards from piles of lumber, carrying them here and there. Clad in solid colors and straw hats like mine, their shirts dark and gleaming with sweat, they chatted and heaved and toted. Small children scampered around the periphery, unable to contain their glee, pausing to watch the activity to which the men bent.
Some worked on the ground, trimming wooden posts with bucksaws; others cut sheet metal and toted lumber; still others laid block.
My gaze moved first to the sawyers. From several large piles of boards, they were selecting two-by-fours, two-by-sixes, and six-by-sixes. After laying the boards across sawhorses and marking the length to be cut, they would brandish their sharpened hand tools and trim the narrower pieces down to size in fifteen to twenty seconds. The thicker six-by-sixes took two workers several minutes on a flopping bucksaw.
Not every pair was equally efficient. Bucksawing, I soon came to understand, was a low-tech matchmaker of temperaments. Every man had a different idea of how fast the blade should