Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [38]
The painted, pretty town girls of Valentine seemed like goddesses to us, visions of splendor and worldliness. They were bold, aggressive, and available.
Late one muggy Saturday night, in the summer of 1979, I kissed a girl for the first time. She’d been around. I had not. I still remember her name.
We saw and lived all the things we’d never seen or done—parties, drinking, and dancing on the large hardwood floor to the fiddle and guitars of some two-bit country band at the Norton Dance Hall, an old converted barn out in the country. We heard the arguments and saw the fistfights triggered by the cowboys’ sensitive code of honor, which is quick to take offense at the slightest insult, real or perceived.
One night, outside the dance hall, one of our townie buddies tangled with a cowboy from the range. One had said something offensive to the other, and without delay, they faced off and began whacking merrily at each other. The townie’s friends and the cowboy’s friends hovered close but did not interfere. Had anyone stepped in to help one or the other, a general melee would have ensued. But no one did.
The townie got the worst of it by far. He was beaten and pitched around like a rag until his face was a pulpy and bloody mess. And then, after a few minutes, it was over. The townie’s friends helped him up and took him away. Everyone else headed back inside to dance and socialize.
It’s a wonder that none of us, the six from Bloomfield, got beaten up. Maybe it was the fact that anyone could glance at us and instantly know we were innocent rubes from another place. Or maybe it was that the real cowboys viewed us with bemused condescension. Whatever the reason, all of us passed through our Valentine days unscathed.
Come Sunday, we always returned to our jobs, broke and hungover, then got up early the next day and slaved in the hot summer sun. We told ourselves we were in the real world and making it. And we were. But we weren’t getting ahead. Work, party, drink, blow your money, then go back and do it all over again.
By late summer, the thrill was gone in more ways than one. Gary, the jovial ranch manager with the great booming laugh, turned out to be a hard-driving, volatile man with a fiery temper. He was tough, worked like a maniac, and demanded the same from us. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But on the slightest provocation, his mean streak would surface like a shark from the waters. We never came to blows, he and I, but we got close a few times during sporadic in-your-face shouting and swearing matches. We always patched things up, but I never forgot.
By late August, I was ready to get out of Valentine. I was sick of ranch life, and to be honest, memories of home tugged at me. I missed the security and stability of it—the quiet life, the old Bloomfield haunts, and my family.
And therein lies the paradox that would haunt me for almost ten years: the tug-of-war between two worlds. A world of freedom versus a world of stability and family. A world of dreams versus a world of tradition. And wherever I resided at any given moment, trudging through the tough slog of daily life, the world I had left called me back from the one I inhabited. It was a brutal thing in so many ways, and I seemed helpless to combat it. Torn emotionally, moving back and forth, always following the siren’s call to lush and distant fields of peace that seemed so real but, like shimmering mirages in the desert, always faded away when I approached them.
Before heading back home, Mervin Gingerich and I decided to take a two-week trip on Greyhound. After fourteen days of traveling—through Wyoming, the empty beautiful stretches of Utah, into California, to New Orleans, and back north—we ended up in Ottumwa one Sunday evening, flat broke. We didn’t have a dime between us—just a couple of candy bars and half a pack