Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [78]
The days and weeks rolled by, and August came. Day after day we rolled through the fields, from midmorning until midnight or later, when the call would come over our two-way radios to stop for the night. Then we would park our machines, get out, and wait for the pickup to fetch us and haul us back to camp, where we would fall into our beds for a few hours of exhausted, dreamless slumber before getting up the next morning to do it all over again.
Sometime in August, Dean left for his home in Daviess. He did not travel the wheat harvest because he had to, but simply because he enjoyed it. He didn’t need the money. It was unfathomable to me that he could afford to travel for almost two months without any concern about his future. Wherever he went and whatever he did, he was never really alone. He had his family back in Daviess. A secure support structure, always there for him in case of emergency.
And I knew they would have been there for me, too, in an extreme emergency. But in the normal course of things, I had no one. Unlike Dean, I was alone in the world. Whatever happened, he would be okay. He would somehow make it back to his family. I would not—because there was no family to whom I could return. Not in my current state.
With Dean’s departure, the fact that I was alone, at least symbolically, was even more obvious. I had people around me, of course—Ben and Donna and the crew. But except for Donna, they didn’t know that much about my past. I was on a clean slate, alone, among those I had never known before. No connection whatsoever to Daviess or Bloomfield. What little Dean knew of my past stayed with him and went home with him. And in the vast Montana landscape, I felt a strange new sense of freedom in the here and now. The past was behind me. Who knew what the future held? In the moment, I simply lived.
In the spirit of this vagabond life, I decided to grow a beard and a mustache. It actually looked pretty tough, especially after I took to wrapping a bandanna around my head as a standard part of my daily attire. I could have been a mean biker, the way I looked. Definitely not someone you’d want to meet in a dark alley late at night. But it was just image, with no real substance. I wondered if all the tough guys I had ever seen felt the same way. Or even some of them. Maybe it was nothing more than a sham, dressing like that.
Late August came, and with it, my birthday. I was twenty-five years old, and I celebrated alone, quietly and reflectively. I don’t remember if I even mentioned it to those around me. To me, twenty-five had always been some distant, mystical age by which I figured I would be settled into the Amish faith and lifestyle. A young Amish husband in my own newly established household, perhaps with a son or daughter, moving forward into the future, content in the quiet life. That’s where I had always thought I’d be at twenty-five.
But that’s not where I was. I was in the remote country of Montana, vagabonding my way through life, thousands of miles from the land of my father’s people, because I could not abide there. It was a bit of a jolt to realize, at twenty-five, that life was not turning out as I’d always imagined.
After the wheat harvest was done, Ben planned to travel from Great Falls over the border into Canada. He asked if I would come along and work for him. By then, I was considered an experienced, battle-hardened hand—just the kind of guy Ben needed in Canada to harvest his own crop.