Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [80]
In the next few days I packed up to leave and said good-bye to Ben, who offered me work the following spring.
“Come on up and help me seed my fields,” he said. I felt good about the offer and promised to consider it. Then I stopped at the house to say good-bye to Donna. She wished me safe travels and invited me to return again, as a friend if not a worker. And then I left them.
30
It was late October, and the nights were chilling. From Canada I headed down to Montana and stopped for the night at the Rossmiller farm, where I had learned to drive a combine mere months before. They greeted me cheerfully and put me up for the night. The next day I headed east.
I took my time, meandering back. A week or so later, I arrived in Daviess, where I discovered my friends in a tizzy. They had not heard from me in more than a month. This was, of course, before cell phones. You couldn’t just call someone whenever you wanted. I had not communicated much with Eli or the Wagler family since the summer, and not at all recently. As the days and weeks passed and no word came from me, they imagined something terrible must have happened. They were ready, they claimed, to send someone on the road to find me.
I settled into the trailer house with Eli and his brother, but not for long. I could not rest in Daviess. I itched to move and to travel. And within a week or two, I was making plans to head south to Florida for the winter.
I took what money I had, loaded the Drifter, and headed down to Pinecraft, the Sarasota Amish suburb where my brother Nathan lived. There, I rented a room and found a job as a mason’s helper. I had not been back to Florida since Marvin and I lived there in 1981. Nathan and his friend Eli Yutzy lived in an apartment in the very center of Pinecraft, and we hung out almost every night, playing cards and partying.
I’m sure I appeared relaxed to those around me during those winter months. I enjoyed life and, to some degree, enjoyed living. But always, deep down, a thread of desperation pulsed inside me. I was a drifter, a rolling stone with no goals and chronically short of money. I was living day to day. I had zero long-term plans, or short-term plans for that matter. It was not a good place to be—financially, emotionally, or spiritually.
And always the old thoughts crept in and tormented me. I could not squash them, could not escape. I brooded quietly, intensely. What would happen to me if I were killed? I knew, deep down, there was no hope, none at all, that I would ever make it to heaven. I’d done so many bad things, hurt so many people. I had left the Amish church for the world after promising—on my knees when I was baptized—to be faithful. Breaking those vows was a very serious thing. There could be no hope of ever righting those wrongs. Not unless I returned and repented and rejoined the church, which was not an option.
But I could not shake the thoughts of my sins and of the afterlife. I knew I was lost and frankly admitted as much. There was no salvation for me. Not in my current state. I had escaped the box of the Amish lifestyle. That was a simple matter of making a decision and walking away. But the box that bound my mind wasn’t that easy to escape. Entrenched inside my head, powerful and persistent, my fear of eternal damnation would not be denied. And I could not shake it off.
Once again—in spite of myself and in spite of the fact that it had never worked out before—thoughts of returning sprouted and grew. Frightful thoughts of returning to the fold of the Amish church. It was the strangest thing. I had returned three times before over the years, and not once had it worked. In time, I always despaired, always chafed at the confines of the culture. And yet I felt that this time might be different.