The Hard Way on Purpose (18 page)

So the first two people I talked to at Igi-Fest, a pair of sisters in their seventies named Esther and Joan, responded coyly when I asked if I could talk to them about the upcoming election. Because my purpose was to try to understand the people behind the votes, I always began open-ended and never directly asked about the campaign or the candidates. But that didn't matter because people just assumed that's what I was after. I couldn't blame them.

Esther, winking, said, “We
know
who
we're
voting for.” As the conversation continued, they carefully referred to “our man” and “the other side” without naming names.

However, they also told me they both worked at a Republican phone bank, soliciting volunteers. And that they'd recently attended a George Bush rally. So their position wasn't hard to figure out. Still, I was charmed by the way they maintained this sense of reservation, that they felt their vote was personal, that maybe they even didn't want to offend me in case I was on “the other side.”

As I worked my way deeper into the festival, I found, amid booths labeled
ICE CREAM
and
ROULETTE,
a tent that sported the sign
RELIGIOUS INFORMATION.
The husband-and-wife team working a table inside offered me a pamphlet titled “Voter's Guide for Serious Catholics.”

This guide, without endorsing any particular candidate or party, contained what could only be described as a mathematical formula for choosing a political candidate, offering five “nonnegotiable issues” and the Church's position on each: abortion, euthanasia, fetal stem-cell research, human cloning, and homosexual marriage. (I found it curious, considering the urgency of Iraq and Afghanistan and the Catholic principle of peace, that war was not included.)

Following the five nonnegotiables, under the heading “How to Vote,” the guide explained how to apply each of these issues:

First, determine where each candidate stands on each of the five main points. Then “eliminate from consideration candidates who are wrong on
any
of the nonnegotiable issues.”

Once that process is complete, the voter can choose freely from any candidates who pass this test. If there are no acceptable candidates, “you may vote for the candidate who takes the fewest [wrong] positions . . . or you may choose to vote for no one.”

Applying a corollary formula, Hamilton County, which Cincinnati dominates, had voted for the Republican candidate in each of the previous six presidential elections; Cincinnati has a strongly conservative identity; ergo, Cincinnati is “red.”

Unless you ask the ever-unfolding question: Which Cincinnati?

The following evening, a few miles away, I went to another Cincinnati festival, the final night of a three-day punk and metal marathon at a combination rock club / Laundromat called Sudsy Malone's. (According to the ads: “You can do laundry, get drunk and see live music all in the same building!”)

The first message I encountered was scrawled above a men's-room urinal:

I'm worried about the economy.

The second message came from the doorman, a squintily gregarious twenty-five-year-old with a bull ring through his septum and those wide, earlobe-stretching rings that always give me the willies. He had a lot to say (he was definitely antiwar), but had to shout above a band called End It All. His name was Tom and he had a two-year-old daughter and lived with his mother, and he told me he thought the upcoming presidential election would be “like voting for Lucifer or voting for one of his lesser demons.”

Which rang oddly in light of the Christian voting pamphlet, because theoretically a staunch believer who calculated “zeros” for two opposing candidates might make the same harshly rigid judgment as Tom, using precisely the same hell-and-brimstone language, even though this imagined voter would be perceived as Tom's cultural opposite.

I left Cincinnati less certain about a lot of things but much more interested in the uncertainty.

*  *  *

I got a bad case of poison ivy once when I was in college. Every person I mentioned this to had a surefire remedy. Baking soda. Calamine lotion. Jewelweed. Bleach. Hot water. Each of these people spoke with such conviction that I couldn't be certain which was the right choice. (An aside: Don't try the bleach thing. Especially if you've already been scratching a lot. Seriously. Just . . . don't.)

A similar bit of the American nature plays out in Ohio every four years. Some swear that if it rains on Election Day, the advantage goes to the Republicans. That a candidate who can swing just ten votes in every Ohio precinct will be guaranteed the presidency. A colleague at the
Cincinnati Enquirer
told me his editors were toying with the theory that they could scrutinize demographic data so closely as to pin down the
one
undecided Ohio voter whose ballot would swing the state and thus the nation.

Canton, twenty minutes south of Akron, sees a quadrennial media pilgrimage, as some analysts swear Canton is the quintessential “typical” city in America, and thus, if you can suss out its mood, you can accurately predict the national outcome.

The editor of Canton's newspaper, the
Repository
, has referred to this as the “Winerip effect,” after
New York Times
reporter Michael Winerip moved his family to Canton in 1996, became an actual citizen, and filed a series of insightful and refreshingly nuanced dispatches under the title “An American Place.”

*  *  *

The Amish man told me a joke:

“A traveling pollster knocked on old Eli Hershberger's door and asked who he was voting for in November.”

“‘I don't vote,' Eli said. ‘But I
pray
Republican.'”

The Amish man didn't smile when he told the joke nor laugh at the punch line.

And he didn't tell it to me because he was enjoying my company. He didn't want to talk to me at all. He was only doing it because he knew I'd get it wrong if he didn't.

In truth, even though they often claim otherwise, and even though the entirety of their arm's-length-from-mainstream-society public image (with special emphasis on church/state separation) would suggest the opposite, the Amish do vote. Probably in far greater numbers than we know. They're just very, very private about it. Just as they are about pretty much everything else.

The largest concentration of Amish in the United States is less than an hour from Akron, in Holmes County, Ohio, and its surrounding areas. I'd driven there on an early-autumn day, easing instinctively off the accelerator as I left the main highway, flattened turds on the roadway always being a signal to slow down. It's never long before you come across a square, black buggy clip-clopping along the edge of the road. Some of these drivers have attached triangular, orange safety reflectors to the backs of their vehicles, some have not. It depends on how strict they are about their distance from secular society, and from the rules thereof. They call us “the English.” Some tolerate us more than others.

For someone like me, who lives in the city, who has always lived in the city, who thinks city, this stretch beyond my borders had always been an inspiration. Entering this part of the state in the fall, as the leaves are changing and the earth is releasing the perfume of its postseason spice of harvest, the air infused with intoxicating, hyperbaric oxygen and nitrogen and an infinity of reds—it felt like another universe. One of the things I love about Ohio (and in great part because this is the opposite of the prevailing outside perception) is how radically diverse it is. Less than one hour in any direction from my house, I can be in a vast acreage of soybean fields that stretch to Iowa, or on the shore of one of the largest bodies of water in the United States that leads to Canada, or in one of the most malignant postindustrial regions in the country that stretches far to the north and east, or in the heart of the nation's Amish culture.

I began my tour with the Amish equivalent of low-hanging fruit, in Sugarcreek, a touristy, shopping-friendly village with a quaintly stylized motif—the Little Switzerland of Ohio—and a constant flow of tour buses, usually carrying retirees with cameras and discretionary cash.

The cameras are unwelcome. Amish people generally do not like having their pictures taken, but are also highly nonconfrontational, so sometimes crass insensitivity goes unchecked. A common sight on these roadways is an amateur photographer parked off to the side, aiming a camera at a bearded farmer driving horses across a field, the farmer trying to crane his face away from the lens while simultaneously keeping an eye on his team.

The cash is not unwelcome. Sugarcreek is neatly lined with shops that sell Amish rocking chairs and wooden Amish pull toys and Amish cookbooks and Amish woven rugs and little souvenir Amish-boy hats and little souvenir Amish-girl bonnets and heavy loaves of Amish bread and Amish rabbit hutches and Amish quilts and Amish whirligigs and DVDs about the Amish and little wooden boxes that just seem so . . . Amish. Moving beyond this orderly commercial center, stretches of road are stripped with banners and signs and sidewalk displays, and it is impossible not to regard it as a woven and wooden version of the dense suburban commercial strips along the interstates. (Serious shoppers can obtain an Amish Passport, which is like a preferred-customer discount card.)

Farther into the country, where clothes hang drying between trees and fading white houses without electrical wires stand amid chicken coops and low silos, homemade signs are propped at driveways and intersections, their block letters advertising eggs and apples and lop-eared rabbits.

The balance of all this is not unlike the balance of a place like Ohio against the larger America—always as complex as it is tenuous.

I once interviewed David Kline, a well-respected Amish author of books on nature and farming. His books are widely distributed, he has been reviewed (quite favorably) in the nation's major newspapers, embraced by the likes of Wendell Berry and Barbara Kingsolver, and he was unreservedly open to being interviewed. But to set up the conversation, I had to mail him a letter making the request, then await receipt of his return letter, which instructed me to call him at an appointed date and time on the community telephone that he shared with his neighbors, which was outside, in a common space. This convoluted arrangement preserves a delicate philosophy to resist technology, to preserve a lifestyle and an ideology and a set of values by a people who are rigid in their beliefs but not at all didactic about them. And it upholds a certain practicality, that the phone can be used as a tool, but its use should be considered, always considered. It's kind of awesome to someone like me who comes from a highly self-conscious culture where doing things the hard way is the highest ideal.

*  *  *

The Amish code is the closest thing I've ever encountered to the punk ethic. I came of age playing music in the underground rock culture of the 1980s. Almost everything I believe ethically and even morally either derives from that experience or was reinforced there. If you have ever rolled around on a basement floor soaked with beer and sweat at an all-ages show, amid swinging arms and stomping feet, you understand the entirely practical implications of “democracy” and “personal responsibility.”

A code, an ethic, among the strictest adherents approached something like a religion, complete with ritualistic tattoos, symbolic hairstyles, and strict rules of dress. (No stonewashed jeans, of course. But also no shiny leather or overt hats or other such indication of having considered “style.” Even though most of us spent inordinate percentages of our waking hours considering our appearance, and how to groom it in such a way as to seem we'd never given it any thought at all. Such studied nonchalance is pretty exhausting. That's why hipsters are so skinny. They burn a lot of calories trying to look as if they couldn't care less.)

The hierarchy of the local punk-rock scene tended to break down by hairstyle. Skinheads, by virtue of what they had sacrificed for their art (i.e., hair), represented the supreme leadership. Anyone with a socially risky novelty haircut (Mohawk, dreads, etc.) operated on the level of a high diplomat and usually got asked to be in other bands. The rest of us accepted our role as semi-insiders and tried to hide that we had middle-class parents and middle-class haircuts and middle-class futures and also a battery-operated, plug-in guitar tuner. Any outward suggestion of musicianship or ambition was suspect.

In similar fashion, devout Amish men stop cutting their beards and women grow their hair long after marriage, a symbol of their maturing in their commitment. (In 2011, a group of Amish radicals, in a series of attacks on peers whom they considered untrue to the Church, violently hacked off their victims' beards and hair. The ringleader of these attackers, it's worth mentioning, had the last name Mullet.)

In the Akron-Cleveland scene, the skinheads were the opposite of the aggressive, often-racist skinheads in other cities. Ours were basically hippies without the hair or the drugs. They were all pacifists. Some were vegetarians. Many were straight-edge, with black
X
's drawn (or sometimes even tattooed) on their wrists indicating they didn't drink or smoke or get high. The most austere of these also abstained from sex, although it's hard to say whether that was by choice. The purest of them all, a soulful, organic guy named Jimi Imij, embraced his ancestral Sioux culture so that he made traditional jewelry and knew the dances and lived in a commune of sorts, a punk-rock flophouse behind the hospital. I became fascinated with Jimi because he seemed heroically idealistic—the first genuinely indigent person I'd ever known, and who seemed to have chosen the condition as a moral imperative—and also because he reminded me of one of my fictional heroes, James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo, wearing Levi's shredded to fringe and living by a code I couldn't begin to understand. Jimi made something out of everything he found. As far as I could tell, he had never purchased anything in a store. He was always piecing together jewelry on the coffee tables in the rented houses where he flopped, working with serious intent in darkened living rooms crawling with cats and smelling of Bugler tobacco and hobo stew. Jimi would come across abandoned shoes and collect them, so that when I went to visit him, he'd offer me a pair of moldy combat boots from a box in the basement. My brother and I used to joke that if Jimi had a guitar—which he didn't because of his self-inflicted, semitranscendent poverty—it would be made of dirt. Years later he finally did have a guitar. He showed it to me; he had made it out of a piece of driftwood that had washed up from Lake Erie.