Billy Connolly’s Route 66 Page 9

  The people at Cozy Dogs were terrific and the souvenirs were great, but something was not sitting well with me. Then I realised what was bothering me. In 1996 they’d moved from their original location. I knew the building didn’t look like the kind of restaurant that would have been built in the 1940s or 1950s, the kind of roadside eatery that a young Bob Waldmire would have sat outside, watching the world drive past. It fed into my irritation about parts of America rejecting Americana. They used to build roadside diners and restaurants that were very funky, but now they’ve stopped doing that. Instead, they build plain little brick sheds that all look like public toilets. The Cozy Dogs had a plainness about it that I found kind of sad. What a shame.

  As for the Cozy Dog itself? Well, I guess it’s an acquired taste. But the chips are to die for, and the decor inside the restaurant is brilliant, so it’s still well worth a wee look. I just wish they sold vegetarian ‘not dogs’. Considering the restaurant’s association with Bob Waldmire, they really ought to have them on the menu. They’ve got his artwork up on the walls, so they should sell his favourite snack.

  Leaving Springfield, the weather immediately improved. The sun came out for a wee while for the first time since I started my journey. The rain had been belting down non-stop and I was getting a bit bored with it. I don’t mind weather if it changes all the time, but constant rain and greyness really get to me. And I’m speaking as someone who comes from Scotland. So I know of what I speak.

  I was making my first detour off Route 66 since leaving Chicago, and rode for what seemed like thousands of miles across vast empty plains of wheat, corn, soya bean and potato fields. Known as the Prairie State, Illinois has some of the most fertile soil in the world. The cold winters allow it to replenish itself, while the long, warm summers and reliable rainfall produce ideal growing conditions. The state produces enough soya beans each year to fill the Empire State Building more than fifteen times.

  My destination was the largest Amish community in Illinois. As I approached Arthur, about ninety miles due east of Springfield, it soon became obvious that I was entering a religious community where the way of life had changed little since the current residents’ ancestors had settled there some 150 years ago. About ten miles from town, there was a road sign I’d never seen before: a black silhouette of a horse and buggy on a yellow background. The sign warned that the local people lived and farmed in a unique way, one firmly based on centuries-old traditions and practices. Then I rode past a field in which the soil was being ploughed by horse.

  About four thousand Amish people live in Arthur, where they humbly follow their community’s strict but simple rules. Each family traditionally owns around eighty acres of farmland, which is used to feed the family and the wider community. They use only horse-drawn machines with metal wheels, and their main crops are wheat, oats, clover and corn. However, this pastoral way of life is changing for the Amish, who are struggling with ever-increasing land prices and decreased demand for home-grown, non-mass-produced food. In response, some members of this resourceful community are turning their hands to other skills, such as furniture-and machine-making, in order to supplement their agricultural income. Tourism is also becoming an important part of the Amish existence, as the cottage industries and country shops continue to thrive.

  That’s why I found myself pulling up outside a large, plain wooden shed and offices that served as the workshop of Mervin, the Amish furniture-maker I mentioned at the start of the book. I liked Mervin from the first moment I met him. He has an easy smile and a gentle manner, as well as that fantastic pudding-bowl haircut. Dressed in a plain shirt, dark trousers and button braces, Mervin was very welcoming and offered to show me around his workshop. He answered every question honestly, such as when I asked how he took orders from customers, given that the Amish weren’t meant to use modern appliances like telephones.

  ‘We’ve got a phone that we use to take orders,’ he said. ‘We’re not allowed to have phones for ourselves, but they’re all on the outside of the building.’ He indicated something that looked like a payphone, bolted to the side of his office. As an Amish businessman, he can receive calls from people who have no other way to contact him, but he can’t phone out, except in an emergency. ‘More and more of them have their own phones,’ said Mervin, referring to the other Amish residents of Arthur, ‘since more of them run businesses in the area.’

  In my ignorance, I’d always thought that Amish communities didn’t extend any further than Pennsylvania, but Mervin explained that they had spread across large parts of the United States. Originating in Switzerland, the Amish are a Christian group who migrated to America in the early eighteenth century in search of freedom to practise their religion as they pleased. Although I was right in thinking that they initially settled in Pennsylvania, which is still home to one of the largest Amish communities in the world, some families eventually travelled further west in search of more land.

  For years, the Amish lived very enclosed lives, almost entirely self-sufficient and spurning contact with the outside world. But times have changed, and Amish furniture-makers, renowned for their old-fashioned, high-quality woodworking skills, now sell their goods outside the community in order to survive. Mervin showed me how his team of cabinetmakers made every piece by hand in a large joinery workshop that he’d set up in 1996 after working for another Amish carpenter. Surprised to see some power tools in the workshop, I asked Mervin whether the Amish way of life allowed him to use electrical machinery.

  ‘No, all the tools in the shop are run off hydraulics and air,’ he said. For instance, Mervin’s saws and sanders were hydraulic, rather than electric. ‘We’ve got some electric lights and appliances. We’re allowed to have some electrical power, but we run it off diesel generators. We’re not allowed to have it come off the line, so we produce it ourselves.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ I asked. ‘Because it would connect you to the outside world?’

  ‘Not just that,’ he said. ‘Mostly it’s to stay away from as much modern stuff as we can.’

  ‘It seems to be working well for you. You seem to be managing pretty well without it.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Mervin asked if I would like to have a go at putting a cabinet together, but I turned down his kind offer. ‘I’m too clumsy,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to waste one.’

  The wood is mostly imported from Canada, although a small amount comes from the northeastern US states and the South. Mervin said the most important member of the team was the man who cut the wood. ‘If he doesn’t get it right,’ he said, ‘then it’s real difficult for the guys who put it all together.’ Clearly, the man who cut the wood was doing his job extremely well, because the finished products were all beautiful, with an astonishingly smooth finish. Such well-made pieces of furniture are surely destined to become the antiques of tomorrow.

  In his showroom, Mervin showed me an entire kitchen that had been constructed in his workshop. With excellent craftsmanship and fantastic attention to detail, it was splendid, top-of-the-line stuff – the kind of furniture you buy only once, because it lasts a lifetime. I’d dearly love to have something like it in my house.

  Mervin had a charming, very practical, down-to-earth attitude to making furniture. ‘Who designed this?’ I asked, pointing at one of the kitchen cabinets.

  ‘We see it,’ he said, ‘and then we just make it.’

  It was at this point that Mervin suggested we should go for a ride in his horse-drawn buggy, something I’d always wanted to do. He showed me out to the yard, then directed me into the stable so that I could bring out the horse. As I explained earlier, I’m a wee bit wary of horses, but Mervin helped me lead out a lovely chestnut. Very gently, Mervin attached some tackle to the horse while I continued to pepper him with curious questions.

  ‘As we were driving here I noticed that many Amish were waving at us from their buggies. Is that normal?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mervin. ‘We think that if you don’t wave, you
’re stuck up.’

  ‘Really?’

  Mervin laughed. ‘That’s the way a lot of people feel. It’s like: try to be friendly to everybody.’

  ‘That’s wonderful.’

  Mervin then attached the horse to a black buggy, which, like Mervin’s furniture, was a beautiful example of skilled craftsmanship. It had two sliding panels on each side, so the passengers could travel either entirely enclosed and protected or with the sides open.

  ‘She’s a little worked up today,’ Mervin warned as he adjusted the horse’s reins.

  ‘Why’s that?’ I asked, even though the horse seemed perfectly calm to me.

  ‘A few strangers about. She’s not so used to them.’

  As he fixed the horse, he told me that most Amish families owned a buggy or two, all of them made by local craftsmen. A larger model typically costs around seven thousand dollars. We set off and Mervin explained that he learned how to control a buggy as a kid. Then he showed me the ropes.

  ‘It’s not hard at all,’ he said, as I took the reins.

  ‘Not with you here, it isn’t,’ I replied.

  We pootled along for a little while, chatting idly.

  ‘You know what I find very impressive, Mervin? You keep talking about the rules for this, the rules for that, and the rules for the other. You seem very comfortable with it.’

  ‘It’s something you get used to, you know.’

  ‘From the outside, people think it’s kind of fanatical. But up close you seem very happy with what you’re doing.’

  ‘It’s nice to keep your family together and just kind of do your own thing.’ We plodded on a bit further in silence, then he said: ‘I guess, as far as the rules and stuff go, it’s … ’

  ‘Do you find comfort in it?’

  ‘Oh yeah, oh yeah.’

  ‘You certainly seem to,’ I said. ‘You seem to be a very happy man.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Another thing. On the way here we stopped at an Amish restaurant, and when we were among Amish people there, I thought they would keep themselves separate, but they made a point of saying “hello” and “good morning”.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ Mervin nodded, then turned to me. ‘So, you got any children, Billy?’

  ‘Four girls and a boy.’

  ‘How old are they?’

  ‘The youngest one’s twenty-two and the oldest is forty-one.’

  ‘All still living with you?’

  ‘Well, two of them still live with me.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘The rest are out working in different places.’

  Mervin interrupted our conversation to explain that if I wanted the horse to go a little faster, I should give her a gentle tap and click my tongue. ‘There you go,’ he said, showing me how.

  ‘How many children have you got?’ I asked.

  ‘Five. We had six but the youngest one passed on,’ said Mervin. He hesitated before continuing. ‘We had an accident when he was fourteen months old.’

  ‘Oh, fourteen months. That must have broken your heart.’

  ‘It was kind of a sad situation. I was out in the barn and I was using the skip-loader to move a hay-bale and I backed over him.’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘Yeah, and … so it was kind of sad.’

  I looked at Mervin. He was telling me about this tragedy in such a quiet, calm, matter-of-fact way that it broke my heart. He’d simply accepted that it had been God’s way. Whether I agreed with that was a different story, but he accepted it and that was the whole cheese.

  ‘It’s been twenty … The second of April. It was twenty years ago, so it was kinda … ’

  The anniversary had just passed, a couple of weeks before. ‘Oh, my goodness me,’ I said.

  ‘You know, it’s still tough.’

  I nodded. ‘That must have taken a bit of getting over.’

  ‘Yeah. We still think about it a lot.’

  ‘I bet you do.’

  ‘But, you know, life goes on and … you’ve just got to make the best of it sometimes.’

  ‘Of course you do.’

  ‘It’s one of those things.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  We sat in silence for a few moments, watching the countryside slowly slide past and listening to the clip-clop of the horse’s hooves.

  ‘We had a lot of rain lately,’ said Mervin, ‘and we got water across the road here.’ He explained how you get the horse to cross a deep puddle. ‘If she runs, that’s fine; but if she wants to walk, let her walk.’ It seemed like a good approach and the horse took us through the water.

  Next we took a spin around the fields, a vast, flat landscape with little protection from the elements. Winters here are long and hard, but Mervin said they were bearable and I could understand why. Sitting behind a horse clip-clopping down the road was a lovely way to travel, and I seemed to have got the hang of it.

  ‘It’s not hard at all,’ repeated Mervin.

  ‘It’s very nice. I would love to go into town like this.’

  We both cackled.

  ‘And when you’re young and single,’ I said, ‘is this how you go out with your young lady?’

  ‘Yeah, we can. They get those gatherings and then they’ll sometimes end up taking the lady home and getting acquainted and so forth.’

  ‘Is that allowed? Are you allowed to be alone with your girlfriend? Or do you need a chaperone?’

  ‘It’s allowed.’

  ‘And do you do that thing here where you … Is it called rumspringa?’

  ‘Yeah, they call it rumspringa.’

  Rumspringa literally means ‘running around’, which is an apt description. It’s the period between the ages of sixteen and eighteen when adolescent Amish kids decide between being baptised and officially joining the Amish Church or leaving the community. It’s also when they look for a spouse. It’s a rite of passage, and maybe a time for sowing a few wild oats. Some Amish communities allow their young men to purchase small ‘courting buggies’, while some families paint their yard gate blue to indicate that a daughter of marriageable age lives there.

  It seems a very sensible system to me. By recognising that adolescents need to rebel and defy their parents, it allows a degree of misbehaviour to be tolerated. Some of the kids turn their backs on Amish practices, wearing non-traditional clothing and styling their hair differently (they call it ‘dressing English’), driving vehicles, drinking or taking drugs and engaging in pre-marital sex. Up to half of them may temporarily leave the community or eschew the traditional practices, but almost all eventually return and choose to join the Church.

  I told Mervin I thought the rumspringa was a very sane thing to do.

  ‘Yeah, but there’s some things that go on that I don’t really like or … ’

  ‘That you don’t approve of?’

  ‘Some of the kids get carried away.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And people’s people, you know? People’s people.’

  ‘Do people get disappointed if the youngsters don’t come back?’

  ‘Some do. That varies from family to family. It might be more disappointing to one person than it is to another.’

  ‘It all seems very basic and understandable to me.’

  ‘Well, we just try to be simple, you know? A lot of them get it out of their system and then … ’

  ‘Settle down?’

  ‘Yeah. We’re all humans, just like the rest of them.’

  I like that attitude. There’s something very accepting – and very Scottish – about it.

  I was intrigued how Mervin met his own wife, so asked: ‘How would an Amish guy find an Amish wife?’

  ‘Well, a lot of them have activities going on. Or, like what I did, I met her, my wife, at a certain place and got acquainted. Then we started dating each other. I’d take her places.’

  ‘Did you meet in a sort of community thing, a dance or a get-together or something like that?’

  ‘I was probably where
I shouldn’t have been.’

  That made me laugh.

  Mervin told me that the various Amish communities across America all have the same basic rules, but with some variations, according to geography. ‘You know, because you live in a certain circumstance, a certain rule doesn’t work.’ A few are allowed to have mobile phones or to fly on aeroplanes because they are considered necessities. Occasionally, Mervin will take a train into Chicago for business purposes, but in his community aeroplanes are still forbidden. I’d love to have seen him with his hat and beard striding through the Windy City.

  ‘In this area we don’t fly,’ he said. ‘But it’s one of those things – maybe one community needs something where another one doesn’t. When I was younger, I asked one of the bishops how we should decide what’s appropriate and he said it’s important that everybody agrees to whatever we’re doing.’

  ‘That seems to bind everything you do. With the Amish, everybody has to agree.’

  Mervin nodded. ‘You know, it varies. It’s not all one hundred per cent. Just everybody tries to do their part. It makes it easier for everybody.’

  ‘I like the way you combine resources. If someone’s got cancer and the treatment is expensive, you all take part in paying for it. I think that’s a wonderful thing.’

  ‘I really appreciate that, too. Helping each other binds people together. It’s kind of the key thing.’

  ‘Visitation’ is another big thing among the Amish. It’s all about maintaining their community. They’ll gather at each other’s homes to drink coffee and eat popcorn. Alcohol is not permitted, but Mervin said the youngsters often have a drink anyway. ‘They go through that age when it’s an attractive thing, even though it’s not allowed.’ Weekends and holidays are spent dropping in on friends and relatives. ‘If someone needs visiting, maybe they’re sick or they need company, we go see them.’

  In their spare time, many of the Amish folk fish for bass or sing in choirs, particularly on Sunday evenings, when all the generations congregate together. They go to church at least every fortnight, often visiting other churches in the district, although communion is only ever taken in their local church.