Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [16]
He usually showed up at our farm in the evening, after supper. Dad always walked out and greeted him. “How are you tonight?”
“Fine and dandy. Fine and dandy,” he would reply, smiling his toothless grin and lighting another cigarette.
Dad would then walk out to a tree in the yard and break off a slim, Y-shaped branch. Then with one or two of us boys, he would pile into Fine and Dandy’s dilapidated old pickup and we would roar down the gravel road to the place where Fine and Dandy was fixing to drill another well.
Dad would get out of the truck holding his little forked tree branch straight out in front of him, with his palms up and his thumbs out. He would then begin to walk slowly back and forth across the lot in the general area where Fine and Dandy wanted to dig a well.
It must have been quite the sight—an Amish man in a battered, wide-brimmed, black felt hat, holding a forked stick and slowly crisscrossing the yard, while a dirty, chain-smoking roughneck and a ragged little boy in galluses lounged off to the side watching.
Sooner or later, the branch in Dad’s hands would lunge downward, quivering, as if alive and pulled by some invisible force.
“This is where you want to drill,” Dad would announce, standing over the spot.
Fine and Dandy would smile his toothless smile, hand Dad a crumpled ten- or twenty-dollar bill, and take us home again in his dilapidated pickup.
Fine and Dandy always drilled exactly on the spot Dad had marked. Sometimes hundreds of feet down. And he always—always—found good wells with abundant supplies of fresh, clear water. Thanks to my dad, Fine and Dandy developed quite a reputation as a top-notch driller of wells that never ran dry.
I don’t know where Dad’s “gift” came from, and I don’t know why he had it. Or how it worked. It may have been a latent ability, a remnant of ancient practices, buried deep within the psyche of his Swiss-German heritage. I don’t think even he knew quite what it was or why he possessed it.
All he knew was that he had the gift and he could use it.
But when it came to passion and purpose, my father was committed to the one true calling of his heart. He wrote.
For decades he was a scribe for The Budget, a weekly newsletter for the Amish and Mennonites, and he developed quite a fan base. By the time I was born, he was already widely known throughout the vast majority of Amish and Mennonite communities in North America—and even overseas. But after he cofounded Pathway Publishers in the late sixties and launched the monthly magazine Family Life, his name became legend. Aylmer had been well known before, but after the launch of Family Life, it became something akin to a pilgrimage destination for Amish families from other communities.
Family Life was Dad’s baby. His dream. His impossible vision. A magazine published by the Amish, for the Amish. To fund it, he mortgaged the farm (despite my mother’s protests).
He must have seemed insane. Such a thing had never been attempted before. But he plodded determinedly forward. He placed ads for subscriptions in The Budget, formatted and published the inaugural issue, and then sent it out free to thousands of Amish households across the United States and Canada. Amazingly enough, it worked. Subscriptions poured in, eventually reaching thirty thousand.
Family Life was (and is) a very nice little magazine—if you like didactic stories in which the protagonist always repents after harboring heretical notions of leaving the Amish faith, or some such similar crisis. And the wayward son always returns in true humble repentance to court the plain but upstanding girl who is actually very beautiful inside, which, as we all know, is what really counts anyway. A glad light springs from her eyes as she modestly welcomes his return. Or maybe the glad light springs from his father’s eyes. I can’t remember. Whatever. The fiction was all pretty formulaic and predictable.
To be fair, Family Life also published a lot of useful, practical stuff—farm tips and such. Yet