At the HOP

Location: Goshen, In

Today starts the Escapees "Escapade" or Fall Conference. For the last two days I have been at a pre-conference "HOP" -- or Head Out Program. These are special event or themed excursions, and this particular one was a bus tour of the area surrounding Goshen. Friday's agenda was a guided walking tour of Notre Dame, a tour of an RV plant, and a visit to the RV/MH Hall of Fame. The what, you say? the Recreational Vehicle/Motor Home Hall of Fame -- the Elkhart area is the heart and soul of the RV industry, so it was a natural place for the Hall of Fame. The best part of the Hall of Fame was the museum displaying vintage RVs -- ones pulled with Model Ts, for example, or having a wood burning stove.

Saturday was Amish day -- a visit to the Amish-Mennonite Visitor's Center, a quilt shop, a buggy shop, a farmer's market, a drive through Shipshewana, and a woodcraft shop where we got to build our own birdhouse. Then the best -- dinner at an Amish house. You do not eat in the family's actual living quarters. Instead, they have constructed a dining hall, and that was where we had a marvelous dinner of ham, chicken, salad, potatoes, noodles, vegetables, and (of course) pie. If you ever eaten Amish food, you have an idea how good this was!

On both days, we had a local guide on our bus who would talk about the area as we travelled. Friday, our guide was a Mennonite man named Bill, who has strong family connections to the Amish, and Saturday we had a very personable, friendly, and funny Amishman named Orley. They were both very knowledgeable, and extremely willing to answer any questions we had -- and we had a lot!

Some of the more interesting things we learned were:

• The Amish have little white phone booths in the fields that are used by several families when they need to make a call. These are not pay phones, but regular land lines that one homeowner has put in his name. When one of the neighbors makes a call, they are responsible for entering the information into a log so the phone's owner can collect the charge each month when the bill comes. One sadder-but-wiser Amishman learned to block "1-900" numbers when he put in a new line and the local kids discovered they could call these numbers for free!
  
• Each district (approximately 40 households) has a Bishop, who makes all the rules for the district, a Deacon, who conducts marriage ceremonies and funerals, and two Preachers (all are male). This is why the rules can vary even within a community -- each Bishop is free to make regulations for his district as he sees fit.
  

  
  When there is a vacancy for a Preacher, each adult (women are included here) in the district can submit a name of a man in that district who they feel would be a good Preacher. Any man who receives two or more votes is automatically in the running. Song books, one for each candidate, are placed on a table and one of the books has been previously marked by inserting a slip of paper invisibly in the pages. Each candidate then picks up whichever book "calls" to him, and whoever has the marked book is the new Preacher. Refusal is not an option, and the job is for life. A similar process selects the Deacons and Bishops from the existing Preachers. The Amish believe that a divine hand guides the selection of these leaders.

• Some retired Amish snowbird to Florida for the winter. In the early fall, at least 6 bus companies run special buses to Florida, some scheduling three buses a day. These buses pick up throughout the Goshen/Shipshewana area, and then go straight to the Amish community in the Sarasota area with no additional stops. Many "English" (anyone who is not Amish) also use these buses.
• There is a thriving business of shuttle vans that will take the Amish wherever they want to go. This provides transportation for doctor visits, shopping, and surprisingly for vacations. Two or three couples may decide they would like to go, for example, to Niagara Falls, so they hire a van to take them there and split the cost (and the van driver and his wife get a free vacation, too). The charge for the van is about $1 per mile.
• Less than 10% of the Amish here live on a farm. Most of them work in the RV industry.
• New buggies use LED lights that run from batteries. Many buggies have solar panels to recharge the battery.
• Using a sleigh in the winter is problematic. They roads get salted and cleared so quickly that a trip into town for coffee could begin with a Dickensonian sleighride through the snow and end with a cleared road that is impassable for the sleigh. To solve this problem, some sleighs have wheels that can be dropped down to transform them into a carriage.
• The Amish can buy "Amish Medical Insurance." It is expensive from their point of view -- for a family of seven children, a husband and a wife, a year's premium will be around $500. The Amish believe in paying for what they can, and there are no malpractice lawsuits.
• When there is no logical explanation for an Amish practice or rule, the response to "Why?" is simply, "because that's the way it is."
  

Bay City Oddities

As of Thursday, I am in Goshen Indiana attending an Escapade (an RV Rally).

For the last few days, however, I have been pulling up microfilm obituaries in the Bay City library, and making side trips to cemeteries. My favorite cemetery, from a purely aesthetic point of view, was the Heavenly Rest Cemetery in Linwood, MI. Even the sign was charming, as cemetery signs go.

The cemetery is out in the countryside, and obviously has less stringent rules than many other cemeteries have. People are free to plant and decorate the grave sites pretty much as they wish - and they do. Their endeavors were both creative and touching. One site even had wind chimes hanging from a tree over the grave of a man who died suddenly when only in his twenties. The chimes added an ethereal, beckoning atmosphere, and the small offerings at his grave showed he had been loved.

Some had surrounded the headstone with a ground cover of annual flowers. Some had left statues, pictures, messages, or flags. Newer gravestones had been engraved with colored images of things the deceased loved -- mountains, deer, and fish. One actually had a man and woman sitting outside their RV! There was one other adornment that caught my eye -- a natural visitor who added an eight-legged flare to the statuary:

  

When not at the cemetery, I was in the genealogy section of the library, where an odd thing happened. I had just finished looking up some obituaries (they are a treasure of information regarding relationships and who was alive when) and was on my way out when I decided to wander through their small area of books and reference materials. The last row had Bay City high school yearbooks. The main Bay City school has been Central High, and there were two rows of their yearbooks, lined up year after year, decades and decades of students. My mother was born in Bay City, and I found her picture easily in the 1935 book, housed on the top shelf of the two.

I looked down to the bottom shelf where a tiny collection of non-Bay City yearbooks were shelved, and saw a box labelled "Arthur Hill High School" that contained four yearbooks. Arthur Hill is an old school in Saginaw, 18 miles away, and it has been in existence for decades just like Bay City Central -- but only four of the yearbooks made it to this collection. My father was graduated from Arthur Hill High School in 1928. And, as you may have guessed by now, his yearbook was one of those four. So, against all odds, my mother's yearbook and my father's yearbook have been housed only two shelves apart, almost in a direct vertical line, in this small library in Bay City Michigan. Who would have guessed?

The photo below shows the two shelves of Bay City Central yearbooks and the shelf below it containing the non-Bay City books. Where I found my mother's is marked by the pink arrow, my father's, in the Arthur Hill box, with the blue arrow. I added their high school senior pictures from these yearbooks.

It's hard to believe they were ever that young -- heck, it's hard for me to believe that I was ever that young, and I was there!

The Truth Is Out There

Location: Mt. Pleasant, MI

They say skeptics like me will not be convinced until "it" happens to us. I have always been skeptical of:

• The Moon Landing Was Faked Movement
  
• UFOs
  
• Homeopathy
  
• Psychics
  
• Evolution Debunkers
  
• Paul-Is-Dead Conspiracy
  

But maybe I need to rethink all of this, now that I have seen a conspiracy up close and personal.

Turn the clock back to September 1, 2007 (Cinematic moment: envision the pages fly off a calendar -- "look, there goes one! There goes the other!" Scene done). Net in hand, I prowl the stream banks looking for insect candidates for my macro portraits. I find two -- the Cabbage White shown in the preceding post, and a Meadowhawk dragonfly. I net them (and didn't embarrassingly fall in the water like I did the first time I tried that - a story for another day), take them back to the RV, and let them play in my tiny studio that used to be a plastic bread box, complete with a custom backdrop and two-source lighting. I snap photos of them as they pose, wings in various stages of opening and closing. I then let them return to their homes in the great outdoors.

The Cabbage White left almost immediately, but the Meadowhawk did not want to leave and kept flying back in. Twice he even landed on my arm, but I was firm and made him go out into the cold, dark night (okay it was a summer night, and the moon was only four days away from full, but for a dragonfly this was probably very cold and dark). Sadly, the next morning I found his little red corpse at the foot of my steps. He had only tasted freedom for twelve inches before succumbing. One small foot that marked the difference between a life of flitting on a babbling brook in the sparkling summer sun --- or being bird food.

I'll never know what would have happened if I hadn't forced him away, if I had let him stay in the comfort and safety of the RV. But my thoughtlessness has cost me. I now know that CONSPIRACIES ARE REAL (we True Conspiracy Believers always type in all caps because we think it makes us sound sincere), as I have become the latest victim of what can only be called the Insect Illuminati Conspiracy. For as I left to go to the laundromat today, I started to pull open the truck's door and was immediately bitten in the finger by an bee or wasp who had been hiding there, just waiting for revenge. As the pain swelled and I began to feel a numbness where I was bitten, I looked down at the ground, and "I" was twelve inches from the body of the little red dragonfly. Justice was served.

Read more about Insect Conspiracies here. The Truth is out there.

A Cabbage White Closeup

Location: Mt. Pleasant, MI

I thought you might be interested in seeing my own little "Norma Desmond," ready for me to do the "CB's closeup" thing (if you have no idea what I'm talking about, run to the video store and rent "Sunset Boulevard").

You have probably noticed the little white butterflies that seem to be all over the meadows and grasses during the summer. They are rather small, and in the world of casual butterfly watchers they are not as cool, as, say, a Monarch or a Swallowtail. That little white butterfly is probably a Cabbage White (Pieris rapae).

One came visiting last night (with the help of a net, but I'm SURE it would have jumped at the chance to visit me without the help). If I am wrong about this being a Cabbage White, would the entomologists out there please let me know?

If you have seen the butterflies, you have probably not given much thought to what they really look like. One of the things I love about insect macro photography is getting to see a part of the world we would otherwise miss. Here is the closeup view (as always, click on image for larger view):