Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [7]
If it was one thing to theorize about doing with less technology in a classroom, it was another to ponder doing with less in real life. As we drove, the discomfort of uncertainty grew in my gut. The very lack of information seemed to confirm darker intimations. A picture began to form in my head; I tried to suppress it, but it kept swimming in the back of my mind. It was almost too ghastly to articulate: bent-over figures laboring in the muck, adhering to the customs of their ancestors, warding off modernity with hexes and chanting.
Shaking the picture from my head, I reminded myself, “They allowed you to come, allowed an outsider to enter their inner circle. They cannot be so backward.” Then I thought of the real reason they had taken me in and my throat went dry: the rowing team. In my letter, as an ingratiating gesture, I had described the endless weight circuits and painful back bending of my chosen sport. No wonder they had agreed. They thought I was one of them.
I braced myself for the inspection. It had been two years since I had last rowed. My center of gravity had shifted from my chest to my waist. Would I be repulsed as a fraud? Or would they simply allow my corpulence to serve as its own punishment, bringing me my just deserts? How would I be brought back to civilization? In an ambulance? In a wagon filled with dung?
Beside me sat my new wife, innocent of what was to come. Where was I leading her? What would become of us?
“Isn’t it pretty,” she said.
I rustled from my daydreams. The terrain around us was green, misty, and rolling. Farmhouses peeked through the trees, permitting glimpses of steeply angled roofs, fat porches, and muted colors. Homesteads were arranged in a pleasing contrapuntal series alongside the creek that rippled and twisted its way among them, flanked by small rich strips of bottomland. I could see faint green lines in the dirt, shoots of corn or sorghum starting to grow. From what I had read, the land indeed seemed suitable to Amish settlement: hills could not easily be farmed using large-scale mechanization, and the ample woods, besides providing privacy, were a source of heating fuel and wild game.
Something bothered me about the scene, but I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. Then I realized what it was: There were no automobiles or pickup trucks in the driveways. There were no power lines connected to the houses. There weren’t even any people…It had rained earlier; the road was still damp in places. The inhabitants must have been indoors, out of the weather.
The quiet, the mist, the emptiness, the absence of signs of modern life, began to fill me with a sense of desolation. It was as if I were viewing the Earth after some great holocaust had pruned back the population and left the survivors bereft of any modern technology whatsoever. Was I actually getting what I asked for?
Mary and I topped a crest. The curling road bobbed down into a wooded hollow, rising again to a small tumbledown shack on the left. Around the next bend, we came to a large gray home with a steep pitched roof and shutterless windows, set back behind an enormous vegetable garden. For all the vegetation, the lack of a human presence was disconcerting. After curving and bobbing past many similar unpeopled dwellings, we finally found the mailbox number we were looking for. Our hearts quickened.
The house sat about fifty feet from the road; it was a white, sharply gabled bungalow. Though modest of size and design, it