Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [42]
The morning after the wedding, Eli and I announced that we were hitchhiking up to Ottumwa, twenty-five miles northeast. The adults frowned. My dad strongly discouraged us from going, but we ignored him, and shortly after breakfast, we headed up to Highway 2, stood beside the road, and thumbed a ride into Bloomfield. I knew some English people there, and one of them readily agreed to take us up to Ottumwa, fifteen miles north.
Once there, we decided to pool our meager funds and look for a used car to buy. After all these years, I’m not sure whose idea it was, or when it first came up. I don’t remember who suggested it. Might have been a mutual thing we both conceived at the same instant. I know that in the ensuing months, my family blamed Eli, and his family blamed me. But I’ll take the full blame right now, just to clear up that ancient tiff. It was probably my idea anyway, being more experienced in leaving and all.
We had probably five hundred dollars between us. So we headed to a car lot along Highway 34, just east of the city. It was a dreary, rainy day, and we arrived on the used-car lot dressed in Amish barn-door pants with galluses and plain denim jackets—all homemade, of course. The smarmy salesman greeted us with a shifty smile. Could he help us? Plainly, he doubted that he could.
We were just looking for a used car, we told him. Might be in the market for a purchase. His eyes immediately perked up. We told him we had about three or four hundred dollars to spend, and he led us to the back of the lot to an old two-door Dodge painted an ugly avocado green. I don’t remember the model name, but it was built in 1972. The salesman claimed it was a good old car.
“Heck, it only has seventy-five thousand miles on it,” he said. “This car will run and run, way over a hundred thousand miles.”
“How much?” we asked, trying to act uninterested.
“Four hundred dollars.”
What a coincidence—almost exactly what we had to spend.
“Could we take it for a test drive?”
“Of course.”
And, of course, the car wouldn’t start. Dead battery. So the salesman dragged an old black charger from the jumbled mess in his garage and hooked it up. Then he took us inside to draw up the paperwork.
Looking back, if either Eli or I had expressed even the slightest reservation—if either of us had had the sense to say, “Wait a minute. Let’s think this through. Should we really be doing this?”—we would have backed out. But we didn’t. That’s what always happened when we got together. We’d step out on some bold adventure, and neither of us wanted to be the first to break. And so we hurtled on, straight over the cliff’s edge.
By the time the salesman got the car started and drew up the paperwork, it was getting late. We handed him a fistful of crumpled twenties, and after carefully counting it, he slapped a license plate on our new car, and that was that. So, without a shred of insurance, we edged the car out of the parking lot and onto the highway.
So far, so good. But now what? We hadn’t planned ahead at all. What to do? Head back home? That wouldn’t work. We had a car; we couldn’t go back home. Park it somewhere, maybe, at my English friends’ place in Bloomfield? That would have actually made some sense. But on that day, we were devoid of sense. After the excitement of buying a car, we couldn’t imagine heading back to my house. We wouldn’t be able to keep our secret. Besides, we wanted to hit the road in our new car. Head out into the big, wide world.
We decided to head south on Highway 63, into Missouri, toward Eli’s home in Marshfield, three hundred miles away. So off we went, through the darkness, with only the clothes on our backs, a few bucks, and an old green Dodge with no insurance.
We headed south through the darkness, and the old Dodge hummed along. It seemed like a decent