Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [64]
Did I possess other skills that I could use here? A thought came to me. Impulsively I approached an attendant at the visitor’s center with it, a woman with brunette hair and a large open face.
Yes, she replied, I could try a horse-drawn cab service. Someone else had already done this. “But one time his horses bolted. They got scared or something when a big semi went by. I never found out if there was a lawsuit, but he stopped doing it. It really scared him.”
The attendant put the kibosh on the horse-and-carriage idea. But Mary and I left this remarkable historic island deep in reflection.
Fourteen
Heatstroke
When we got back from our trip, the midsummer lull was over. The season had advanced a notch. It was time for threshing, and the Millers asked me if I wanted to take part. I remembered a comment my grandfather had made that in his day threshing had been a test of manhood. Having undergone a three-and-a-half-hour church service in a stuffy room, I shrugged. If that wasn’t a rite of passage, what was? I did know that field work was probably even more typical of the kind of shared labor the Minimites engaged in than barn raising. And in many cases it involved the use of technology they themselves had cleverly tailored in order to preserve the cooperative character of the work. I didn’t hesitate to say yes.
In our absence a heat wave had moved in, and as I approached the threshing site on foot, the very air seemed to weigh down on me. Once-distinct hills and trees melded together into a gray-green smudge. Dust hung everywhere.
By the time I rounded the last bend in the road, I was beginning to feel lightheaded. The sight in front of me seemed almost surreal. The farmstead of Gideon Stoltzfus, like others I had passed on the way, consisted of an unadorned clapboard house and a tall metal barn with attached silo. West of the barn lay a pond shaded by a few trees, where some geese and pigs lounged in the mud. Behind the buildings were more trees, and off to the east there was a large bare field, recently cut down to stubble.
Everywhere bearded men milled about, intent on various aspects of this multifaceted task. When the man on the Greyhound bus had first alluded to his life without motors, I had assumed he and his neighbors collected the wheat with scythes and threshed it in the air like characters from Biblical times. How else could they obey the rules? Before me in the doorway of Gideon’s barn sat the answer: a huge old contraption, an amalgam of galvanized metal and weathered wooden boards, quaking like an elephant with palsy as it swallowed the sheaves being fed into its snout from a trunklike conveyor belt. This was the threshing machine.
Stretching from a hub on its side was a black rubber belt that reached about fifty feet to another piece of machinery in the middle of the barnyard, around which circled four pairs of horses. At some point I found out that Gideon, who co-owned the water mill, had put together this device with the help of his other brother, Elbert, using the discarded transmission of an old dump truck. It was a horsepower rotor.
Despite the use of these non-motorized devices, there was still plenty of work for humans to do: two men pitched sheaves onto the conveyor belt from a high-mounded wagon; two others tended to horses held in reserve in a shaded enclosure near the barn; many unseen were gathering sheaves in the field; and a small boy stood rotating in the center of the turnstile, prodding the horses with a long stick.
To me, the scene was as strange and exotic as a three-ring circus. And to think I myself would soon be playing a role in it.
An older, portly man with a long white beard nodded his head in my direction. I recognized him from the church meeting: Bishop Henry. “Eric?” he called.
We shook hands and made small talk for a few minutes. I was taken by his solicitude, which appeared genuine; but our conversation was cut short by the departure of the harvest crew. He put a pitchfork in my hand and