Neal Rubin
The Detroit News
20 Nowember 2005There's an Amish baby who needs help, and there could be a quilt in it for you. We'll get to that. But first, I have a revelation from a Branch County furniture maker:
Amish guys use power tools.
Ann Gordon lives mostly in Ann Arbor, where she's a Web designer for the University of Michigan. She also has a 10-acre farm in Montgomery that's home to a small company called Branch Hill Joinery, whose employees drive buggies to work.
It's Gordon, 54, who alerted me to the baby and the blanket near the small town southeast of Coldwater. And it's also Gordon who told me about the circle saws, routers, air compressors and milking machines that the men in the black pants have been using while we aren't looking.
Next thing you know, we'll find out Amish chickens take steroids, and the pants are Calvin Klein.
To be fair, it's not as though the Amish have been hiding anything. To them, we are all "the English" -- the outsiders -- and they don't know or care if we're disillusioned.
Also, some communities are stricter than others about the pollutions of modern life. But if you always pictured Amish craftsmen attacking logs with hatchets and chisels, it's like passing a buggy on a county road and seeing the kids in back playing Nintendo.
Michigan is dotted with Amish settlements, mostly to the southwest and center. Each has its own Ordnung, which is not a kind of drill press, but rather a set of rules. Plugging into the power grid is always verboten. Running a few life-enhancers off a generator might be all right.
Some clusters, says Central Michigan University professor Al Ellard, are so strict they won't even allow covers on their wagons. Too flashy. "You see them riding in the buggy in the wintertime, wrapped in quilts and blankets."
In Rosebush, however, just north of Mount Pleasant, "they actually drive tractors."
Ellard, raised a Baptist in Mississippi, compares the range of acceptable Amishness to most other religions. You've got your singing and dancing Baptists, and your no-fun-at-all Baptists. One thing all Amish have in common, however, is an aversion to Social Security and Medicaid, which takes us back to the baby and the quilt.
Three-month-old Jake Schwartz Jr. was born with his eyelids fused, which is probably even less pleasant than it sounds. His vision is fine, but his eyes open only a slit. Doctors worry that unless the lids get repaired soon, his brain will decide his vision isn't worth bothering with.
The operation will cost $8,000, Gordon says, and in the absence of insurance, the hospital needs cash up front. Since the Schwartzes are less than wealthy -- Jake Sr., 20, drives his buggy an hour to build wooden pallets for a living -- she came to them with an idea: They could raffle off a quilt.
Nah, said the Schwartzes, who are related to a family Gordon employs. "They didn't know about the Internet and things like that to spread the word," she explains, or grasp the attraction of a queen-sized quilt in the winner's choice of colors, hand-made by Anna Schwartz and her sisters.
Gordon talked them into it and set the price of tickets at $5, because "I didn't want to hit my friends up for a lot of money." Feel free to pay more than that, or buy multiples. Send checks, not cash, to Jake Jr. Amish Quilt Raffle, 424 Little Lake Drive No. 7, Ann Arbor, MI 48103.
Consider it a payback for all the tourism brochures that show Amish farmers in their picturesque buggies, silhouetted against the sunset.
Ellard, a professor in CMU's department of recreation, parks and leisure studies, moved to Clare five years ago. There, 15 miles north of Mount Pleasant, he found himself amid the Amish.
Throughout the area, he kept seeing them used as tourist bait. "The question I raised was, has anybody asked them if they're happy about that?"
After two years of interviews in Michigan and Indiana, he concluded that they're OK with the concept, as long as we English are respectful.
Also, we shouldn't take pictures; posing is considered vain. And we're absolutely not supposed to holler, "Hey! That guy's using a band saw!"
