Take Highway 60 east out of Springfield, Missouri. Past Rogersville, past Fordland, past Diggins, and you reach Seymour. Take Highway C North and you’re in Amish Country. You would be today, like I was some 50 years ago on a sultry August day.
I didn’t know what to expect. I had directions to get to a particular Amish farm, the name of a man to ask for when I got there and, in the back of my dad’s Ford pickup, a Duroc boar. A few days earlier, a farmer who was a trusted friend of some Amish families in the area had shown up at our farm to pick the fellow out as breeding stock.
Why my dad had me do the delivery alone is still a mystery. Perhaps he wanted to test my new driving skills. Or maybe he just had something else to do. Regardless, in those decades before Google maps I still had no trouble following the turn by turn directions I’d been given. A woman on the front porch of a white farmhouse, careful not to look straight at me as we spoke, said the gentleman I needed was haying in a nearby field. She summoned his son, a tall, muscular, heavily bearded young guy in work clothes.
A Hint of Uncertainty
What to expect now? Would the young guy lead the way for me to follow? Or would he … oh, hey, yeah … he jumped right up in the passenger seat, his face blooming into a broad, friendly smile. He pointed along a rutted path that led to a line of trees.
The pickup was fairly new and as beefy as they came in those early 1970s days. I steered carefully along the path into the trees. Then down a draw that would take us across a shallow stream. But I was a bit frustrated, learning I wasn’t as good a driver as I should be. Struggling to keep the wheels of the truck aligned with the rutted path.
As we splashed across the stream and headed back up the wooded path, I had to smile. I wasn’t as bad a driver after all.
A horse-drawn wagon was coming down the incline. No wonder my pickup truck wheels wouldn’t match the ruts.
The wagon driver easily maneuvered around us. I eased us up to the crest of the incline, back into the blazing Missouri summer sun.
And There It Was
A sight whose memory has stayed with me all these years.
It was the largest, flattest, most beautiful alfalfa field I’d ever seen. In those rolling Ozark hills, such an expanse of flat land was rare. Maybe 12 acres … 15? (Yeah, if you’re from Kansas, you’d say that’s a nice front yard. In the hilly, rocky Missouri Ozarks, it was a treasure.) But then what next caught my eye was even more astounding.
Two horse-drawn haying sickles were working the field. Like the ones in the picture, they were clanging, fearsome looking machines with spare, brutally hard metal seats. And on those seats, steering? Amish women, dressed in long gray dresses whose hems stretched down to their boot-clad feet. Gray sun bonnets shielded their heads. In their gloved hands they held the reigns of a pair of jet black work horses. These were not riding horses. They were huge, magnificent, spirited working animals.
As the clattering sickle approached a corner, the women would literally manhandle the horses, pulling resolutely and vigorously on the reigns, guiding those powerful horses to pivot into perfectly square corners before speeding along the next edge. It took strength I’m not sure I would have had (and I was in good shape back then) to control those strapping steeds.
The two teams were working the field in partnership, one leading, the other following several hundred feet behind. They were just getting started. They had a lot of haying to finish that day, and the heat was already oppressive. The searing summer sun was beating down, curing the fragrant, new-mown hay. While helpers were locating the gentleman I was to meet, I just sat at the wheel, enjoying the spectacle. I wish I could have watched longer to see how they bailed and gathered the hay. I wish I had a photo. But it was decades before camera phones … and out of respect I wouldn’t have asked these private folk for a snapshot anyway. It had to be committed to memory.
The farmer joined me in the pickup and guided me back through the woods, across the stream, and back up to the barn, where we unloaded the boar. And I said my goodbyes, thanked him for his business (at least, I hope I did), and drove home.
Why Do I Remember This?
Of course, mostly it’s just the surprise. I knew the Amish didn’t have electricity and didn’t use gas-powered machinery. But it didn’t occur to me to anticipate what I’d see once the lady told me that haying was going on. We even had one of those horse-drawn sickles, a relic of a long-past time, rusting into oblivion when we first moved onto our farm circa 1960. It was certainly a jolt of recognition to connect the abandoned, deteriorating piece of iron in our pasture with the noisy, but oiled and perfectly working, machines steered by those Amish women and drawn by those huge, powerful horses.
But here’s the thing. I’m not a world traveler by any means. But I’ve been fortunate enough to see the Empire State Building, Windsor Castle, the Eiffel Tower, Norwegian fjords, the Great Wall of China, places like that. They’re still there. I could go back and see them again.
But I can never relive that moment when that pickup topped the incline, out of the darkened woods, and there spread before me in dazzling sunlight was a scene from another era. It’s a perfect memory.