Visits with the Amish: Impressions of the Plain Life

Chapter 6: Snaps, buckles, and straps

Even though most Amish people still live on farms, more young people today must make their living in other ways because of the rising prices of farmland. They may make furniture, buggies, or harnesses. Some Amish even work in factories . These trades involving manual labor are permitted by the church, because a man can still work with his hands or “by the sweat of his brow.” Once their eight years of formal schooling end, young people start their vocational training, learning the occupations of their parents . From their mothers, teenage girls learn how to raise garden vegetables , sew their own clothes, and prepare home-cooked meals. Teenage boys learn farming skills or a trade from their fathers. The Amish consider this apprenticeship to be an essential part of a young person’s education and the best way to prepare for a 51 6 snaps, buckles, and straps chapter successful life in the Amish community. Teenagers learn to work with steady focus and efficiency, which is the Amish way. “We don’t care whose time it is, we just don’t like to waste it,” as one Amish man put it. The Amish are known as reliable and careful craftsmen. Even though electricity is not used in the home and on the farm, many Amish communities allow carpenters to use drills, saws, and other power tools on the job. Amish businesses must still operate without a telephone, though. Even if an Amish family runs a grocery store or harness shop, like the family in this story, they would probably still own an “acreage” or small farm to raise cash crops, chickens, cows, horses, and vegetables. That way, the children could still learn enough farming skills to run their own farm someday, which is the desire of most Amish people. In the meantime, the family could raise most of its own food. It’s a central part of every Amish community. The neighborhood harness shop is where farmers take their leather harnesses to be cleaned, oiled, and repaired. It’s also the place where a young man can buy a shiny new harness for his first horse and buggy. Jonathan looks forward to making his own harness soon. At 16, he spends his days working side by side with his father in the family’s harness shop just off a gravel road in Iowa. Today Jonathan stands at a tall machine called a riveter, punching shiny silver rivets into leather straps. Dye the same color as his black hair stains his hands. “I’ve been doing a lot of dyeing the last few days,” he says, shyly smiling. Does it come off? “Oh yeah, Mom thinks so. Kinda takes a while.” Jonathan no longer attends the one-room Amish school down the road, having completed his formal education with eighth grade. During the past two years he has learned the trade of his father— 52 part two snaps, buckles, and straps cutting, trimming, dyeing, sewing, riveting, and assembling the leather harnesses that Amish farmers use on their huge Belgian and Percheron workhorses to pull wagons and plows. But when I comment on his skills, he smiles and says, “I suppose other people know things about farming that I don’t know.” Because he and his father spend their days in the shop, they operate only a small farm of 35 acres, growing soybeans and other cash crops. There’s also a vast vegetable garden behind the house, where Jonathan’s mother and sister Ada, 13, raise the family’s food. Jonathan’s father, Rudy, built the shop himself three years ago, along with the large white house it’s attached to. The smell of raw leather and dye hangs in the air. Huge sheets of leather, loosely rolled like giant cinnamon sticks, pour out of shelves at the rear of the shop. Harnesses and bridles loop from ceiling hooks. Hundreds of buckles and snaps, rings and rivets nestle in open-faced boxes that line up neatly on wooden shelves. One entire wall is for silvercolored parts, the other for golden-colored parts. Bits and scraps lap the cement floor like a collage—thin spaghetti noodles, triangles, squares, and dots. While most of the machines in the shop work by leverage and involve no power, two oversized sewing machines run by an air compressor stitch leather straps together. The air compressor can be switched on for short intervals, leaving the shop...