In my eager mind, the great shining vistas of distant horizons gleamed
and beckoned. A world that would fulfill the deep yearning, the nebulous
shifting dreams of a hungry, driven youth. And it would be mine, all of it,
to pluck from the forbidden tree and taste and eat…

—Ira Wagler: Growing Up Amish
___________________________

It’s not quite the same. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since that night almost exactly thirty-four years ago when I got up and walked away from the only world I had ever known. And it wasn’t that big a deal back then, even, if you look at where I was going. To a desolate ranch in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. Nah, the big deal wasn’t where I was going. It was where I was coming from.

And that’s pretty much how I feel about tomorrow, when I’ll head out to places I have never seen before, places I have rarely imagined, even in my dreams. Because they were just so far out there, especially to a guy who’s pretty set in his ways, and finally content staying close to familiar boundaries. I look back at that seventeen-year-old kid clutching a black duffle bag, walking determinedly out the drive and down the road into the darkness. And I feel some of that old stirring within me. There’s a new world coming right up. A new road rising before me leading to new places, new things, new experiences. The thing is, I’m not seventeen anymore. I’m fifty-one.

It’s such a minor thing, to so many. A hop and skip over the pond, to all the experienced world travelers who have seen places I will never see, and done things I will never do. It’s not minor to me, though. It’s a big, big deal. I have never been to Europe. And it’s a little scary, to think of stepping out that far from the world I know. I’m pretty provincial, when it comes right down to it. Pretty happy to stay within a comfortable range of my little home in New Holland, PA, and to live life there as it comes at me.

Everything has come together well for this foray, I have to say. I’m packed and ready. How I got to this point is a bit of a mystery. There was so much I didn’t know about traveling overseas. Like a child in the woods, I just kind of stumbled along in good faith. And people told me things. Hey, you have to get online and fill in your passport info, for your plane ticket. Hey, you have to buy your Swiss Rail Pass here, in the US. You can’t get it over there. And on and on, seemed like. I think I have it all together now. I better have. There’s no more time for unpleasant discoveries.

I loathe flying. And it’s not just the TSA goons. It’s the compressed, recycled air on a seven-plus hour overnight plane ride that makes me flinch. I wish there were a bridge or tunnel to Europe. I’d drive whatever time it took in my truck to get there. But, of course, such a thing exists only in a fantasy world. In the real world, there are only two options. Plane or ship. And last time I looked, ship travel was way too slow and expensive. So the plane it is. A big, big plane with three rows of seats. I’ve never been in such a place. I’ll cross myself when I step onto that thing. Guarantee you that.

And, of course, right on cue, I came down with a savage head cold last Friday. I felt it creeping in and tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. I rarely, rarely catch a cold. Maybe once a year. Or less. Never had one, all winter. But now I do. I hunkered down and gobbled pharmaceutical pills by the handful, stuff I normally abhor. When you gotta breathe, you gotta breathe. I’ll take what it takes, to do that. I ingested huge amounts of vitamins and Superfood, and drank shots of Super Tonic, a home-brewed mixture of awful tasting stuff that my old friend Anna Beiler Lapp gave me. Sour and bitter, oh, yes, it was. But she claimed it would burn out the germs, and from the taste of it, I find no reason whatsoever to doubt her claims. That, and the fact that the stuff actually worked.

And other than the cold, which has receded a good bit, I’d say my state of mind is this. I’m quietly nervous and very excited. I’m going to Europe. It’s just mind-boggling to me. It’s really happening. Way back when, I wrote Sabrina. When it gets close, I’ll contact you, to see what the weather’s like over there and what clothes I should pack. We’ve been emailing back and forth. Seems like they’ve had a late cold spring, just like we’ve had here. Step aside, global warming. Global cooling is more like it. The weather alarmists know that, which is why they’ve quietly been shifting their talk to terms like “climate change.” But that’s a bunny trail. What I meant to say is that northern Germany is having a cold, late spring.

It’s always an honor, to be asked to come and speak at any University. At the local level, and at the international level. It really is. And I’ll leave it at that, because to me that’s not the most important thing. It’s the people I’ve met and will meet, it’s the experience of just living life as it comes at you and walking forward into it, that’s what all this means to me. If you focus too much on the reason you are somewhere, you’ll lose your gratitude for just being there. The honor will pass soon after it comes. They all do. And it detracts from the experience if you focus on the honor, instead of just living it. Sure, it’s a big deal. And I will always recognize that. But it’s not the the most important thing, in this moment or in any other. I try to keep a firm grasp on that perspective, always.

It’s looking like the trip will come down in two very distinct phases. Week one and week two. My time with Sabrina and her University students is pretty much scheduled. They’re basically taking care of me, putting me up in a hotel. There will be people there, to tell me what’s going on and when. And to show me the town and the surrounding areas. I’ll know what’s going on. I’ll do the book talks, and take part in a couple of classroom discussions. A few people at that little spot in the world will know who I am, and I’m feeling their welcome before I even head out. I’m very much looking forward to meeting them. I’m looking forward to hanging out with friends.

Next Thursday is Ascension Day, a holy day I grew up to respect. And Sabrina told me, it’s a national holiday in Germany. That day, she suggested, they could show me around the area. And the next day I would leave for Switzerland. Except she arranged one more stop, before I got there. At Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. Would I consider it? She had asked me. They won’t be able to come up with a stipend for your talk, but they’d love to have you, and they’d put you up for the night in a motel. Well, let me think. An offer to speak about my book in the town where the printing press of the western world was born? I’d pay for that privilege. Of course, yes, I emailed her. And earlier this week, they sent me the poster, to show me that it was no dream, that I was really going there.

And so that’s scheduled. Germany is pretty much all scheduled, all the way to the day I leave it. For Switzerland. And there, there is no schedule at all. I’ll go from a comfortable place to an unknown one. That makes me a little nervous. It’s a world I’ve never seen before. And I’m walking into it, almost blind. I know one family that I’ll be spending a day with. Otherwise, I’m a wanderer with no plans, a stranger in a strange land. With no guidebook, either. Yeah, I know places I want to see. I have my Swiss Rail Pass. But I have secured no lodging, because I don’t want to commit to any place at any time. I’ll get there when I get there, and it will be what it is.

Last weekend I was chatting with my good friend, John Schmid, who was in the area to sing at the annual Gospel Express fundraiser. I don’t usually go around such big crowds, but John was there this year, so I went. Afterward, we talked and he asked about my plans in Switzerland. I’m just meandering, I told him. Don’t really have any connections. Besides, I don’t want to bother people. If I bug them, they’ll feel obligated to put me up. John laughed. “That’s not how I see it,” he said. “You’re a little more shy than I am. I usually just figure people are going to be glad to see me. And put up with me.” I laughed, too. Yeah, we are different that way, I said. I didn’t think about it until later, but I should have told him. You sing to them when you get there. You got your songs to offer. I got no songs.

But I’ve thought a good bit about what he said. So I guess I’ll throw this out there, to see what happens. If you know anyone in Switzerland who would be willing to meet and chat with me for a bit, over coffee or a meal, or even put me up for a night, tell them to contact me at my email address, the one on the Contact Me page. Don’t send me their email address for me to contact them. I’m a little shyer than John. I don’t figure people are necessarily going to be eager to put up with me. So I ain’t gonna bug nobody. I’ll accept invitations, that’s pretty much it. At least the ones I can.

From what I hear, it’s pretty expensive to get connected online over there. It’s not like here, where there’s free wireless in every motel and cafe. So I’ll have to see how that works out. I hope to post pics on Facebook now and then, from where I am. And, of course, check my email. (I do have several emergency contacts in Switzerland, friends of friends. So if anyone gets an email from me claiming I’ve been robbed and need money, that means I’ve been hacked. Ignore it.) And I seriously doubt I’ll post a blog from there in two weeks. I’ll be writing, but I think it’ll work best to wait until I get back to post on here again. So it might be three or four weeks. We’ll see.

Tonight feels a little like the night before I walked out the lane at two in the morning with a duffle bag, thirty-four years ago. I got my bags packed. (Well, I’m working on it, I mean.) I’m as ready as I’ll ever be, I suppose. There’s a big difference from that first departure, though. I’m not sneaking out in the darkness. I’m leaving in broad daylight instead. And I’m telling the world before I go. But still, I can feel a bit of what was inside that seventeen-year-old kid back then.

And tonight I’m feeling something more, something I can’t say I’ve ever felt before. If I did, it was a long, long time ago. A couple of days ago, I was at work on a busy morning, trying to get stuff done before I leave. My cell phone rang. Unknown number, from Canada. I answered. It was my father, calling from Aylmer. I got up and walked out to the warehouse, so we could talk in private.

He was just calling to see when I’m leaving for Germany, Dad said. Oh. I said. I’m leaving Saturday evening, flying all night. I’ll get over to Hamburg around mid day on Sunday. And we just talked, visited a bit. He asked about the book, how it was doing. It’s taking me to Germany, I told him. He seemed impressed.

“Do you think they’ll understand your German?” he asked. I doubt it, I said. I’ll try it on them. We’ll see what happens. We both chuckled together. And chatted a bit more. “When are you coming up to see us?” He asked. Sometime in June, I told him. I want to come over a weekend. We closed it down, then. “Well, I hope you have a safe trip to Germany,” he said, almost wistfully.

I thanked him for calling, and we hung up. And I just stood there. Absorbed the moment, absorbed the emotions going on inside me. I’m still absorbing that moment when my father wished me well as I was leaving on a journey he could never take because of who he chose to be. All my life, I have yearned to hear such words of support from him as I was going to places he never went. And now he spoke them. It’s like I’m stepping onto a new road, a road I’ve never seen before.

I’ve been to a lot of places in my life. Set out on a lot of journeys where you just walked to keep walking. Traumatic excursions, some of them, of every imaginable type. Beautiful and breathtaking, others of them, on roads that led to destinations I could never have imagined. And on this road, at this moment, I know not what journeys may yet come.

But I do know there will never be another departure quite like this one.

They are still-burning, homely particles of the night, that light
the huge tent of the dark with remembered fire, recalling the
familiar hill, the native earth from which we came…

—Thomas Wolfe
_____________

I was busy that day at the office a few weeks ago, talking to a customer when the iPhone in my shirt pocket quivered and pinged. A text from somewhere. A few minutes later, when I had a chance, I checked it out. The message was from my sister, Rachel. She’s still connected to what’s going on, as she always was. And that day, she was passing on news I needed to know, as she often does. A simple message. Charlie Newland died. Funeral is tomorrow.

I wasn’t that surprised. But still, I paused from work and let it sink in. Charlie Newland. I’d heard through the grapevine that he hadn’t been doing that well lately. And when someone’s 89 years old, there usually is only one ending to news like that. But still. I let the emotions sink in, absorbed them. Charlie Newland. One more character gone, from the English world of my Amish childhood.

Sixty years ago last month, my parents bought a 110-acre farm in the new little fledgling Amish settlement struggling to life in Aylmer, Ontario. That farm would be the home place, where all my siblings from Rachel on down were born and raised. That farm was the only home I ever knew until I was fifteen years old. The place as it once was is branded into my brain. All the sights and smells and sounds and tastes of it. And the man who sold that farm to my parents was Charlie Newland.

I’ve always marveled at how the Aylmer settlement was born. How the young families managed to buy farms in such close proximity to each other. Nicky Stoltzfus lived a half mile east of us. The road separated Jake Eicher’s farm from ours. A half mile west, LeRoy Marner settled with his family. And just west of them, barely a quarter of a mile, Homer Grabers. Across the road from them, my uncle, Bishop Peter Yoder. And my uncle Abner Wagler a half mile west of there. How could that happen, so many farms so close to each other, all for sale at the same time?

Seems like I recall murmurs from my childhood, something about the real estate guy who was their buddy. The one who sold them all their farms. He went out and shook up the English farmers. The Amish were coming. Strange people who drive horses and buggies. I’m talking, strange. There’s nothing you can do. If you’re thinking of selling, sell now. Who knows what will happen to farm prices, after they get here? Land prices will probably collapse. And a lot of the English farmers bit and took his bait. Makes a lot of sense to me, that scenario. Or maybe those times were just different from what we know, times where such things came down naturally, now and then, on their own.

Charlie was a few years younger than my father. Both were in their early thirties. Both were born in December. I don’t know when he and his wife Ruth had bought the farm and settled on it. It couldn’t have been that long. And the funny thing is, he didn’t leave the area. He bought another farm a few miles southeast of ours, over close to Richmond, along Highway 3. Well outside the borders of the Amish community at that time. And that’s where he lived, in all the time I knew him.

Charlie didn’t just disappear onto his new farm. We rarely saw his wife, a school teacher. And if you asked me, I’d tell you they didn’t have children. Because I can’t remember ever seeing any. But they did. Two daughters and a son. Of them all, Charlie was the only one who made any attempt to stay connected with us.

It’s one of the earliest memories I have of any English person, seeing Charlie standing out there in the barnyard, talking to Dad. Standing there in the dirt and gravel by the old water tank by the windmill, a slim man of medium height with a flushed red face and a ready smile, hands stuck in the front pockets of his jeans. Once in a while he’d reach up and adjust his John Deere bill cap. I was just a raggedly little barefoot kid, pre-school age. Charlie looked you in the eye, I remember. And he looked down at the ground a lot, too.

He liked to haul Dad around, on the occasional trip to London and such. And once, I got to go along. I sat there beside Dad in Charlie’s pickup as we sped down the highway, excitedly drinking in the new lands flowing past me. We headed north to 401, then west to London. It’s my first memory of ever seeing a four-lane road. I don’t remember a whole lot about what happened in the city that day, but I do remember that. Two lanes of traffic going in the same direction. How wild was that? Charlie and Dad chatted right along. The two of them were real friends, good friends. It may seem like a paradox from the outside, but it’s not. People are people, wherever they are. And friends are friends.

Charlie didn’t go to church. From my memories, which may be inaccurate, he was pretty much irreligious. And I’ve thought about it some, since those years. The English people around us in my childhood, how they weren’t religious at all, a lot of them. Guys like Charlie. Carl Sansburn. Max Firby, who lived right across the road from Carl, in the center of the community. They never went to church. Never displayed the slightest indication that they believed in much of anything. And it’s not that they weren’t honest decent people. They were. But I’ve wondered, and still do, sometimes. How did that develop, such a culture? Where you just worked and worked, seven days a week? What stories were told, when someone passed on? How was it dealt with, explained? And how would it be, to be raised like that? Where you know nothing else. It’s always been hard for me to grasp, that picture. So I can’t fully grasp the place those people were coming from, either. Who knows what they saw and lived?

Charlie was there, a part of the community, but not of it. He knew everyone, and the Amish all knew him. And one day, he was called on to do one of the hardest jobs he ever faced. I’ve written before of how my uncle, Peter Stoll, moved to Honduras with a small group of family and friends, back in 1968. The Stolls of that particular family and that particular generation had serious heart problems. And Peter was not spared. Sometime in 1971, he collapsed from a heart attack and died. In Honduras. His son, preacher Elmo Stoll, had remained in Aylmer with his family, working and writing for Family Life. And redefining what the Aylmer Amish were. The Honduras people passed the word on up to their relatives in the States and Canada. And someone had to go out and tell Elmo his father had passed away. Someone they could trust to get it done. They called on Charlie Newland.

The news was a huge shock to Elmo and his family, and to everyone in Aylmer. And I remember how it flashed through the community. How my parents, too, grappled with the suddenness of the loss. Peter was married to my father’s older sister, Anna. The next Sunday, church was at LeRoy Eicher’s place, a half mile east of us. We sat there, completely still, as Elmo somberly rose to preach. His face was drawn and drained from all the grief and shock and stress. He stood there for a long time, just looking at the floor. But then he found his voice, as he always did. “It’s not sad,” he said softly. “It’s not sad. It’s hard, but it’s not sad. My father is in a better place.” And he went on to tell of how it happened, how this English man came out that day. He never mentioned Charlie’s name, not in the sermon. But we knew that’s who it was.

Charlie had pulled in and stepped out of his truck. He greeted Elmo somberly. Today he wasn’t the smiling, cheerful Charlie we all knew. And then he just stood there, shuffling his feet, staring at the ground, mute. He could not find the words to tell another man’s son that his father had died. I mean, who could? Elmo felt sorry for him, he said, even after Charlie finally stammered the message he had come to tell. I felt sorry for him, too. Who would ever want a job like that? I couldn’t imagine it. But the bottom line is, he did it. Faced a hard thing. He did what his friends in Honduras had asked him to do.

And time slid on, and things happened as they did. In 1976, my father uprooted his family and moved to Bloomfield, Iowa. It was just the flow of life, but I’m thinking guys like Charlie and his friend Carl Sansburn were sad to see us go. They had seen it, the Amish settlement planted there around them and take root. And now, 23 years later, one of the original founders, my father, was picking up and leaving.

They accepted this new development with good cheer, though. The summer before we moved, in August, Charlie hauled a load of us to Bloomfield to build the new dairy barn we would need that fall. Dad and Joseph, Titus and me, and a couple of my sisters. A merry lot we were, off to new lands and new adventures. Of course, Carl piled in, too. He wouldn’t have missed that little trip for anything. Charlie had a cap cover on the back of his pickup and that’s how we traveled. Packed in the back on cushions and mattresses.

After we moved, that was pretty much the end, we figured. We wouldn’t see our English friends from Aylmer much, anymore. But Charlie and Carl weren’t having any of it. Every couple or three years, the two of them headed out in Charlie’s late model pickup. Two old friends, hitting the road. They always headed south to Marshfield, Missouri, first. To see my uncles, Homer Graber and Bishop Peter Yoder and their families. Then they would drive the three hundred miles almost due north to Bloomfield. Pull in, all smiles, to stay and hang out for a day or two.

And we were always genuinely delighted to see them. All of us were. I’ve never seen Dad more relaxed than when those two guys showed up. They’d sit there and visit and visit, catching up on all the latest gossip and reminiscing about old times. Mom smiled and smiled and chattered, and Dad threw back his head and laughed a lot. And always the three men, Dad and Charlie and Carl, headed up to Ottumwa for at least one full day to run around and do some shopping. It was like old times. They always returned by late afternoon, Charlie’s pickup sagging under the load of groceries and other stuff Dad had bought.

And sometime in the 1990s, I can’t pinpoint exactly when, Charlie hit a pretty rough snag on the road. I never knew his wife that well, saw her maybe half a dozen times in my life. And I know nothing of the details. Of who said what and who did what. But, after raising their children, at a time they should have been settling in to enjoy life and grow old together, something snapped. And they divorced. I wasn’t there and didn’t see it. I don’t know how it affected Charlie. But he came out to my sister Rosemary’s place, where Dad and Mom were staying at the time. He told them. He was divorcing. “It’s wrong, but it just is what it is,” he said. Dad and Mom clucked and sympathized with him. And he was still their friend.

I have no clear idea of the time frame of some of the details that followed. But I know they happened, because Mom told me. Smiling and chatting, back in those days when she could, back when I knew her in no other world.

“Charlie wanted to ask out this nice widow lady he knew,” Mom told me, chuckling. “And she told him. She’s not going to go out with anyone who wasn’t baptized. Go take care of that, then come back and see me.”

And for the first time in his life, whatever his motives, wherever his heart, Charlie Newland made a profession of faith. Went through whatever it took, to take instructions and be baptized. There was probably a good bit of judgment going on around him among the Amish about the whole situation, right there. (Might be a good bit of judgment going on in some of you who read this, too.) I didn’t sense any in Mom, though. She was just happy for him. Anyway, after he he was baptized, the nice widow lady was receptive. They began seeing each other quite regularly. And somewhere in that time frame that eludes me, they got married. “And Charlie is so happy,” Mom said, smiling. “He brought her out to meet us. She’s such a nice lady.”

And it’s strange, really, when you think of it. How my parents and Charlie were right there around each other, in Aylmer, as the encroaching twilight closed in around them. Mom has left us, for all intents and purposes. And as she was sinking, Charlie showed up now and then to see her and Dad. She left before Charlie did, except she hasn’t. Dad, meanwhile, is slowing up a good deal, too. I’ve wondered sometimes how that must feel. To see all those you knew from long ago take off and leave you like that. And you remain. Receding, but you remain.

I knew Charlie wasn’t doing all that well, lately. And I look back to when I was up there last August. He was frail then, they said. I can’t remember if he was still at home, or in some facility somewhere. I do know that I didn’t make the effort to go see him. I thought about it a few times. But I was there to see Mom, and that took up about all the emotional strength in me. So I didn’t go see Charlie.

I last saw him probably four years ago, or so. The door at the office opened one day, and a smiling Charlie walked in. I had no idea he was even around. I gaped, then hollered and welcomed him. Rushed to him and shook his hand in welcome. He smiled and smiled and talked. He was just traveling through the area with another couple, he said. He introduced me to his lovely new wife. She smiled at me and chatted. And we stood around and talked for a good half hour or more. I showed them around the place. Told them what I did.

That was before my book was anything but a dream, but at a time when my blog was pretty well known, especially to those who had any kind of Aylmer connection. And he’d heard of it. He read my stuff on his computer at home, he told me, smiling. “I enjoy your stories. Especially the ones about Aylmer.” I laughed and thanked him. Yeah, I said. You know, one of these days I’m going to have to write a blog about you and Carl. Charlie and Carl, I’ll call it. About you two guys being our friends, and how you traveled together to come see us for years after we moved to Bloomfield. How we all stayed connected. I’m going to have to write that. And I will, one day. He beamed and beamed at me.

And I never got that story written. I thought about it now and then, tried to scratch it out a time or two. I figured it would come, but it never did. You can’t harvest a field that has no crops. So you go to fields that do, and speak from there. And now Charlie’s gone. And now I’m writing about him. Maybe that’s how it was supposed to be, all along. I don’t know.

I do know that I’m honored, to tell of who he was. But I kept only half the promise I made to him, back when we last met. Because somehow, it seemed like his name alone was all the title this post needed.

***********************************************************

Earlier this week, I attended a continuing legal education (CLE) class over in Mechanicsburg. I have to do twelve hours of those things every year, to keep my law license active. I try to pick classes that halfway interest me, and last Monday’s was actually a pretty good presentation. But I always dawdle in such places. You pay your fee, they don’t care what else you do. Sleep all day, it doesn’t matter.

Anyway, that day, as I sat there bored, fiddling with my iPad, I googled my name for the first time in a long time, just to see what would come up. I was pretty astounded. Hundreds of pages. One caught my eye, and I clicked to check it out. Reviews on Goodreads. Over 5,000 votes on my book. I flicked down through them, checking out anything from one star to five. I read a dozen or two. Some of them weren’t very kind. And I thought to myself, good grief. Some people really need to get a life. But then I thought, I’m the one googling my own name, and reacting to what others wrote. I’m probably the one who needs to get a life, here.

When a big thing’s coming at me, I normally don’t pay that much attention until it gets close. Kind of eye it off to the side and watch it approach. And that’s how it’s been with my upcoming trip to Germany.

Sabrina and I communicate, now and then. She has fretted a bit, and reassured me a few times. I’ll get the itinerary to you. Let you know what’s going on. And I responded. It doesn’t matter. Whatever you plan will be fine. I’m totally OK with it. I’m excited, just to be coming over.

And just this week, she sent me the poster they designed. I was pretty impressed, still am. And it really focused me a good bit. It’s getting closer and closer. I can feel it. Departure time. My next blog will be posted on the eve of my journey. I’ll fill you in then about some of my plans and what I’ll be doing.