Days 12-14: Pittsburgh and Amish tour

Days 12 -14: Riding the Greyhound, Pittsburgh and the Old World Amish

We left Savannah at mid-day Sunday to start our trip north – Pittsburgh and then over to New York to start our exciting tour.

Having left it too late to book a train from Savannah due north to Pittsburgh, the equivalent distance of Melbourne to Sydney, we were left with the Greyhound bus.  The trip took all of 23 hours and was RUGGED!!!  We learned the hard way that the only ones who use Greyhounds are students and those for whom it is the only option financially.  Most certainly it is not used by middle-aged, middle-income people – except for us!

Each of the seven or eight legs of the trip involved the driver starting with the strict instructions, including that all cell phones must be on vibrate, no music must be heard and all conversations must be quiet. This we appreciated very much and thought that Aussie bus lines could learn something from Greyhound. At the end of each leg, we would roll into a very ordinary bus station, lucky to find even a vending machine dispensing Coco Cola and chips. At some of these we had to spend several hours. I managed to snatch patches of sleep along the way, but poor Rog was unable to do so and consequently finished the trip quite exhausted.

As the bus drove into Pittsburgh, we were reminded of Launceston.  It was beautiful hilly terrain, the hills dotted with houses and the city nestled in a valley at the bottom. 

Once at the bus terminal in Pittsburgh, we had an hour or so to wander the city central before Robyn arrived.  (She had wisely flown up with the children – a ninety minute flight.) 

Our short stroll left us very impressed with Pittsburgh. Clearly it is a very historic city and we just happened to choose a street full of historic plaques.  It featured in the War of Independence and a women’s historical society in early twentieth century had ensured that places of historical importance were identified and marked. A wide river with several bridges runs through the city.

Today, Monday, we have had the most wonderful day exploring Amish country and their lifestyle.  We will be going to another Amish area, Lancaster, on our Trafalgar tour, but we highly suspect that this might be quite a liberal ‘tourist friendly’ version of Amish that we see there.  Robyn and Damien had found on-line, a two hour tour that a non-Amish lady, Sue, conducts from a little town named New Wilmington, about an hour out of Pittsburgh.  

The drive was through beautiful countryside – gorgeous rolling hills and spring blossoms.  We knew we were close to New Wilmington when we had to slow down because there was a horse and buggy infront of us.

We saw one of the covered bridges for which this region is famous.  One of my favourite movies, ‘Bridges of Maddison County’, features one of them, so it was a thrill to actually see one.

Sue rode in the car with us and as we drove she told us about these particular Amish people and their way of life.  They are, she told us, ultra conservative, much more so than the ones we will see in Lancaster. The next bit is what we learned, so any who are not interested, just skip past the dot-points. I will place various photographs throughout, not necessarily immediately relevant to the text.

·      They are the Old World Amish – a very conservative sub-culture. They originated in Switzerland and Wikipedia tells me that they came to the area around 1850.

·      To them, people are either Amish or ‘English’.

·      They live within the local community, with a blue front door being the marker that it is an Amish home.

·      New Wilmington has a population of about 5000, with about half being Amish and half ‘English’.

·      Each individual Amish community throughout USA has its own rules, colour of clothing and colour of buggies, the number of pleats in their bonnets etc.  For this community, the women wear blue or purple and they have seven pleats in their bonnets.                                                                                                                    

      All of the New Wilmington buggies have a brown hood.  So they all know where other Amish are from by these identifying marks.

·      Their lifestyle is all about conformity.  For example, all their homes are the same design, and they all do the same thing at the same time.  Today it was washing day and so every house had washing flapping on its long wire line with the old fashioned wooden props. The washing would have been wrung with a hand wound wringer like we had in the 1950s.  Amish homes have no electricity, no hot water, no drains.  They have an outhouse and use wood stoves.

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Amish have their own schools, with children leaving after year 8.  We saw two schools on our tour around New Wilmington.  The teacher is typically an unmarried girl about sixteen years old.  Her main role is to teach conformity and good behaviour. 

·      Prior to entering school, the child will speak only Pennsylvanian Dutch, which is their first language and the language that will be spoken in all Amish homes. It is an oral language: no written form at all. At school the children learn English, including the writing and reading of it.  In 4^th grade they begin to learn High German, the language that is used at church and in their Bibles.

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Schoolhouse with teacher's buggy parked by the door.

Church services are held in homes and last three hours.  An Amish woman told us that they have church every second Sunday only and that this last weekend was relaxing because there was no church.  Services are attended by around 100 people.

·      Weddings are also held in homes – the bride’s home.  It will always be held on a Tuesday or Thursday after the last harvest and before the first harvest of the new season.  There is a very formal ceremony, no special clothes, no rings nor decorations – just a new dress for the bride.  The wedding will be attended by about five hundred Amish from all over the US, with them sometimes hiring buses to go to it. It takes the women about a month to prepare the food for a wedding.

·      Young people must marry within their own Amish community. It is not an arranged marriage: they are free to choose their own partner.

·      At sixteen years of age, three things happen. Firstly, the young men will get their own horse and buggy. Secondly, both boys and girl will be allowed to attend the weekly ‘Singing’.  Thirdly, at sixteen an Amish young person may begin to experience Rumspringa, meaning ‘running around’, a time of freedom to experience life on the outside.  Susan said that they live at home but can dress as the ‘English’ do and have similar hairstyles. They can drive cars and not attend home prayer. They are, during this time, permitted to drink alcohol and use recreational drugs. The rationale behind this is for it to be a time to discern what they will be giving up if they choose to progress to baptism as an adult member of the faith.

·      It seems strange that the young people would not already know each other from within their own community, but Susan explained that they rarely leave their own family’s property because they are involved dawn to dark with household chores. The exception of course would be church, but obviously there is not a lot of socialising happening at church.

·      I asked Susan if the children are aware that they are ‘curiosities’ and she said that to them, we are curiosities because they know no other way of life.

·      That said however, she said that although TV, radio, computers, phones etc are banned for the Amish, they certainly don’t mind when they hear or see TV via an ‘English’ person.  Although they are not allowed to own cars, they may ride in a car and Susan said that when she is transporting an Amish person they may well say to her that it would be rude of them to ask her to turn off the radio!

·      They are not allowed phones, but apparently last year a ruling was made about them because the Amish acknowledge that for them to get on in the commercial world, they must be able to communicate by phone with suppliers and clients.  So now a business may have a phone but it must be 400 yards from the property and must be used only for business purposes. Apparently it is not at all uncommon for an Amish person to go to a neighbour’s home and ask to use the phone!

·      In terms of commercial businesses, apparently carpentry is their speciality and they supply hand made furniture all over America.  They use diesel to drive their power tools.

·      The Amish participate in local government and may vote if they want to.  Apparently in the recent election, many of the Wilmington thought it very important to vote – we wondered which way.

·      We were surprised to learn that the Amish use western medicine.  They do have their own herbal remedies etc, but will take western medicine when they know it to be more effective.  They also visit English doctors and some of the women will have their babies delivered in hospital.

·      They are very judgemental of each other, quick to criticise if they believe a member of the community is not following the discipline expected of an Amish person. In fact, a group of Amish men and women from Ohio are currently in jail as a result of the 2011 beard-hacking attack they made on another group whom they considered to be far too liberal.

·      They celebrate both Christmas and Easter. In fact they celebrate Christmas twice – the European Christmas (‘Old Christmas’) and then December 25^th.  They exchange Christmas cards and gifts and have special food at Christmas.  On ‘Old Christmas’ they spend the day fasting and then have a feast at night.

·      Apparently even the more liberal Amish shun photographs.  This is because of God’s commandment not to make any graven image.  They believe that a photograph of themselves is just that.  Roger made quite a gaff when we were visiting a beautiful Amish owned and run nursery.  The young girl at the counter had a manual adding machine on the counter.  I drew Thomas’ attention to it and Rog held up his phone, ready to take a photo of it. The young girl quickly turned away, thinking that she was going to be in the photo. With some embarrassment, we explained that this was not the intention and I think all was forgiven.

                                                                                                                                                                   

§  The Amish have their own grocery stores but English are welcome to buy from them also.  We visited one that has been established in the lowest of three levels of the family home.  She sold all kinds of dry goods that she had bagged herself, but also many processed goods, some of which, Oreos for example, were quite familiar to us.  Susan told us that it is a common misconception that the Amish eat and grow only organic.   The back of the little store was quite dark and was lit reasonably effectively by an oil lamp.

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The final highlight of the tour was visiting an Amish lady who sells quilts, again on her own property but this time from a building separate from her house. some she has made herself and others that she sells on behalf of other Amish women.  There were some magnificent quilts there, with the going price being around $950 US for a queen size, very intricate one that had more than a year’s work in it.  With it being nothing but hand stitching, we thought it was very good value.

Roger, bless his soul, found a collection of quilted one yard square wall hangings and picked out one that he knew I would like for its colours. He suggested to me that we buy it – a most generous gesture given that I had assured him that I would most definitely not be hankering to buy an Amish quilt because I knew they would be too expensive. I just love it and will treasure it, not as a wall hanging but as a beautiful knee rug.

(This is not my quilt - it is the $950 one.)

Having left our tour with Susan, we had lunch at a most homely restaurant named the Tavern on the Square.  It just happens to also be owned by Susan our tour guide, but it is really the only eating place in town.  The very substantial menu  managed to also squeeze in four mentions of God and two bible verses!   The restaurant occupies the entirety of an old house from the mid 1800s. Its original owner was a doctor and he and his wife were abolitionists (of slavery). This was a ‘safe house’ for runaway slaves to find food and shelter on their way north to Canada. 

Having had a most delicious lunch, we wandered a few streets of the quaint town, typical of what I had imagined of American towns. Some of the houses, all two storeyed, were very pretty and with the spring blossom out, made excellent photography. 

    The town has several churches – all Presbyterian!  There is also a small Presbyterian university, with the honour of being one of the first two Pennsylvania universities to grant degrees to women – way back in 1857.  Two plaques in the garden honoured classmates who had fallen during the 1917-1919 world war!

  

Our final stop for the day was to visit a village over the hill – this is where the Methodists are – and to stop into one of the many shops selling local handicrafts. We were not at all tempted as everything on display was of the country American style that was quite popular here in the 1970s. While some things were quite quaint and well crafted, others were just cutesy junk!