Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [72]
The traffic on the narrow, two-lane road that led to Blue Ball was particularly dense. It was bumper-to-bumper from one Wendy’s to the next.
“Oh my God,” I said, pointing to a remarkable sight out the window.
“See,” Dennis said. “I told you.”
In the opposite lane, right behind a white BMW 5 Series sedan, was a small black buggy drawn by a single old horse. The driver appeared to be a man with a peculiar beard and a black hat with a wide brim. But perhaps it was only Kelly McGillis, who is rumored to have moved to this area? Then as we passed the buggy, I could see that it was not Kelly but in fact a real-life Amish man. He was smiling and waving and, to my utter shock, did not appear drunk. Behind him, a line of cars inched forward, the drivers rolling their eyes and slapping at the steering wheels. This peaceful old Amish man was unknowingly being willed cardiac arrest by every driver a mile behind him.
“Is he insane?” I asked. “I mean, how can he live here? This is like the most commercial area of the state. It’s awful.”
Dennis agreed. “Yeah, it does seem that strip malls are contrary to the Amish way of life.”
We watched as the Amish man with the doubtfully clean beard aimed his buggy into the driveway of a small house, instantly freeing the cars behind him. The house was what a real estate agent would optimistically call a “starter home, a fixer-upper.” With its peeling beige paint, its lack of shutters, and its bare dirt lawn, the house was in need of far more than a little TLC. The house needed to be leveled and replaced by an AutoZone, in keeping with the spirit of the neighborhood.
As we drove past, three little Amish girls were playing in the dirt alongside the house. They wore drab white smock dresses and scarves that resembled dishrags on their heads, covering their hair. They were playing with some sort of curious round wooden hoop. It appeared to be a cross between a toy and some sort of primitive tool for extracting roots or stones from the earth. The girls tossed the hoop to one another, and then one of the girls would bang the hoop on the ground, sending up a cloud of dust and pebbles. This appeared to be the point of the game: to watch the dust rise. I could not imagine my thirteen-year-old nephew trading in his Game Boy for this hoop.
A small garden was barely visible from the street. This “garden” would be completely unacceptable to Martha Stewart as even a compost area. Any vegetables that came from this plot of land would most certainly be contaminated with carbon monoxide and every other imaginable traffic carcinogen. Any woman eating a salad from this garden would certainly have a child born with flippers.
“It wasn’t always like this,” Dennis said, driving on. “It used to be all farms out here, and then the tourists came and ruined everything.”
But from the look of it, the Amish didn’t seem to mind that the natural beauty of their land had been destroyed. Quite the contrary. The Amish had become filthy rich.
The streets were lined with Amish souvenir shops, Amish furniture stores, even a corrugated metal warehouse that sold “authentic Amish children’s clothing.” Though I can’t imagine a parent within two thousand miles of this area dressing their child in such a way. “Look, Megan! A burlap pinafore! And a matching bonnet!”
“So why the fuck,” I wondered, “didn’t they get the hell out of here? How can they live this monastic, Amish life in the midst of such horrid commercialism?”
It seemed like some mass pathological level of denial, or rabid persistence, a refusal to accept change. Maybe the Amish were not living in a simpler time, holding fast to a more wholesome way of life, but in fact they were mentally ill and in desperate need of power tools.
“Well, a lot of them have moved to the Midwest,” Dennis said.
That’s exactly what I would do if I were Amish. I’ve been through Kansas, Iowa, Wisconsin, and I can tell you, it’s the perfect place to live off the land and avoid zippers.
“But why