Pixie in Paradise

The text I sent at 09:13am Wednesday morning to my closest friends just hours after my arrival in Wisconsin for a family visit:

“Man down, man down! We just left the house and one of us is wearing a camouflage “Make America Great Again” hat. We’re about to pick up three to four Amish people for an emergency run to a hospital 90 miles away to drop off relatives of a critically ill Amish newborn. Please send a helicopter and the largest bottle of tequila you can find…This is writer’s gold, but how am I going to survive? I thought listening to the news through breakfast was the toughest part of my day. Ah, the universe is on her period today. That bitch.”

This could quite possibly be the most unrealistic sounding story I’ve told you in the last year. If you’ve been following along, your eyes probably got really big right about now. I didn’t even get to tell you about my journey to the Midwest yesterday, from Arizona to Wisconsin.This means I didn’t get to illustrate how I almost choked a woman at the Tucson airport for chewing her cud so loudly while sitting next to me at the electronic charging station. Landing in Dallas, I had time to grab a macchiato that was quite delicious, before jumping on a twice-delayed flight to Wisconsin. There I retrieved my very large suitcase and proceeded to spend 30 minutes finding, and deciding not to drive, my first choice rental car. That story in itself would be a four-page tirade so we just have to skip it for now. I requested a different rental – easier to drive for someone who’s been walking and biking everywhere for a year – and off I went.

Twelve hours later I’m trying to peacefully enter my morning, gripping a coffee mug with intensity, and Farmer Ron (my dad) asks me what I want to do with the day. I leave the next morning to visit mom’s side of the family, so we only have 36 to 40 hours together – including sleep! I have 36 to 40 hours to keep my shit together, listen to a constant barrage of streaming Fox News on the television and some fairly boring games of Scrabble. 

I outgrew Scrabble. I really only played it with Grandma Esther when she was alive because she loved it. (Side note: it would be so cool if I could still play Scrabble with her now that she’s not alive). I’m not blaming Farmer Ron for making the game boring, if anything he makes it a real white-knuckle sport. He’s played the game his whole life and knows how to win. He is also the scorekeeper and while I know he’s an honest person, I think he tends to get a little overconfident in his ability to tally up each word’s numerical worth. Farmer Ron is a math whiz when it comes to basic math and percentages and finance stuff. I wouldn’t ask him to do calculus or quantum physics, but he’s got a great head for numbers. However, he severely lacks in the emotional intelligence department. I’m going to digress from that statement – for now – and try to see if I can illustrate just what kind of weird day I had.

I brought my own freshly ground Costa Rican coffee from home and my own chorreador, well, just the coffee sock. That way, I can make my own coffee that tastes like the stuff I make every day using the same process that the ticos (Costa Ricans) do. So I’m having coffee and it’s barely 6:30am, which is 4:30am in Tucson, where I just flew in from yesterday. I’m wrapped in my Fiji Airways blanket that I brought with, sitting at the kitchen table, watching a Scrabble game being played. Then, Farmer Ron’s wife leaves for work and his phone rings. His flip phone, which requires a few bangs on a hard surface once in a while for it to work, gets a lot of action from local farmers and the Amish. He needs a phone upgrade. But see, my dad is “almost Amish.” 

Farmer Ron has been living in south central Wisconsin for years in a rural area which also inhabits a few Amish communities. He raised beef cattle for several years and also had a small herd of goats that he milked, and bought and sold at various markets, which might be how he met and started working with the Amish. I don’t really know how they met. I just know that one day he was “almost Amish.” That is not a term meant to be derogatory or disrespectful to anyone or either of the two cultures involved. Farmer Ron has always lived a pretty simple life in terms of Western culture. He is the opposite of materialistic, and unless he’s going to church on Sunday, he is wearing farm clothes everywhere. On this particular day he wore a t-shirt and jeans, his uniform for transporting Amish goods for farmers markets, cattle, or humans. He barely uses computers, only using them for a few years at work, right before he retired from the post office. I think in the last two years he finally got a small tablet of some sort – not an iPad, a cheaper brand, and he only uses it to check the weather and pretty basic stuff. He mentioned he learned how to operate a gadget by watching YouTube videos. How modern! And no one can convince him to get rid of his barely working flip phone, he doesn’t want an upgrade.

My point is, Farmer Ron is simple in his taste and belongings and he’s rather humble, in those things – when it comes to most things. I think that’s part of why the Amish started trusting him, but he also had to prove that he was a safe human for them to have any dealings with, and that he could be trusted. So he has, and they did.

Before I could even finish my coffee and figure out what to do that day, a call from one of the Amish communities came in on Farmer Ron’s phone. A very sick newborn was at a hospital 90 miles away from us and the family and a couple of relatives were wanting to visit the baby and its parents. I nodded my head in acknowledgement to dad while he was on the phone since he looked over and checked to see if this would be a possible scenario I would go along with for our day. I’ve spent worse days with my dad, alone, having nothing to talk about or even worse as I mentioned, stuck in the living room watching his news channels.

We got ready in 15 minutes and jumped into his big pickup truck and made our way to the first stop. Pulling into a property was the cutest family of four. A husband and wife with their beautiful four-year old daughter and five-month old baby boy. His name was Menno and he was chubby and very smiley, adorable in his over-dress and bonnet. I asked his mom why he was dressed that way and she patiently explained that they don’t switch over to pants and suspenders until they’re potty trained, around two years old. Makes total sense.

Before we even made it to our second stop, Farmer Ron’s “flipper” was ringing with another Amish contact needing help with transport. Dad explained he was busy for the day but would contact them back the following day. We then resumed our route, dropping off the four-year old at a houseful of sweet, shy Amish girls, ranging from what looked like two to sixteen years old. Two other little girls jumped into the back seat with Menno and his parents. The two girls were siblings of the sick baby and they were going with us to see their brand new little sister and their parents, who hadn’t been home in almost a week.

Also at this stop we were fed piping hot chocolate chip cookies, so hot they could almost burn your mouth, and they tasted amazing. I looked past the garden as I ate a cookie and saw a small boy, maybe ten years old at most, barefoot and repairing a fence – while two ducks stood very close, supervising. These two ducks acted like dogs, wanting to be close to the boy even though small fence posts were getting uprooted and tossed haphazardly near their heads.

We resumed our trip toward the city with the children’s hospital and it dawns on me that nobody in the backseat is wearing a seatbelt, there’s five people back there, AND two of the children in our vehicle don’t have any parents inside this vehicle either. Oh boy. All children stay well behaved and silent on our journey which is a huge blessing (for me). Menno is smiling and drooling and an all-around gem of a kid and he is huge. Five months old and eighteen pounds! We stop at the half-way point for a break and snacks and I hold this big child while his mom runs into the convenience store. Menno doesn’t even fuss and I shift him from one arm to the other so he can look forward at all of the strange people. While there at a rural gas station of the freeway, Farmer Ron recognizes a truck and cattle trailer parked at a gas pump. He looks up and says he knows the owner and needs to speak with him. Stepping two pumps over, dad discusses a cattle haul with him and then we’re off again.

We have one more hour to go before we reach the hospital and the Amish man, “P” in the backseat, knows I was living in Belize and Costa Rica. He proceeds to ask me a million questions about Belize. He had heard of the place from someone in his community and had a lot of burning questions.  The hardest thing to explain to anyone so far on this trip to Wisconsin has been trying to impress  upon  them just how hot  and humid it is ALL the time  in Central America. It’s like their brains refuse to process the concept.

I explained to P that I wrote about a lot of my adventures on a blog (I had to explain the technology, of course), and told him I was also working to put a manuscript together for the book version, which will go into much more detail than the blog. P asked about my book and seemed interested, saying he wanted to buy a copy. While extremely flattered that an Amish person wants to buy my travel adventure story, I hemmed and hawed and finally told him there will be swear words in it. I didn’t mention that there could be some mention of sex and women’s empowerment and living a non-traditional life: basically, everything anti-Amish. Of course, Farmer Ron stiffened and bristled and got a very intense look, explaining that my book was that way because he’s not allowed to proofread it. Well, no fucking shit you’re not. Are you either of my two editors? No. Who writes a book and sends it to their parents to make sure it’s not going to bring disgrace on their dysfunctional family? I would venture to guess that 50% of all books published are bringing disgrace to someone’s family, in someone’s opinion. Thank goodness no one is asking their estranged family members permission to publish. And also, any guesses as to why the Self-Help genre is getting so big? It’s either because we are all becoming more messed up or we’re finally doing the inner work. We’re realizing how messed up we might be and also realizing that if we share it with the world, it might benefit others. Why keep crazy to ourselves, folks?

We finally pull into the hospital and pile out of the truck. Somehow, the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) lets all of us into the waiting area. Keep in mind I haven’t met any of these Amish people until today. (I visited my friend the following day. She lives in a separate Amish community, in the same neighborhood). After several minutes, the father of the sick baby comes out to greet us. He’s a very cordial man and seems happy to see everyone, including two of his children we also brought with us.

This is a very stressful time for him and his family. This baby has an incredibly poor prognosis and they will have to make some very tough decisions very soon. He isn’t afraid to talk about this predicament while standing there. He hangs onto his large coffee mug/press combo and philosophizes a bit about the baby’s illness and on life and death. Shortly after that he explains why he’s got the large coffee contraption and goes right into the finer points of making good coffee, a subject our backseat Amish friend brought up first. 

After everyone is settled at the hospital Farmer Ron and I head downtown to a pub patio for a lunch of hot wings. Afterwards I go across the street for a fancy coffee, as I don’t know how much more energy I’m going to need to get through this day. Spicy chicken wings and coffee: the perfect recipe for keeping a human body calm, cool and collected. Sheesh. Our next stop is at a pharmacy so I can try to find the right sized diapers for an 18-pound five month old. Menno’s mom said she didn’t quite bring enough coverage for his bottom for the entire day so I volunteered to go hunt some down while we were at lunch. I took my hot macchiato into the Walgreens store and chose a bag of diapers, praying they would work or we could have an interesting ride back home. I’ve never had to pick out diapers, obviously, but my little red chihuahua, Wulfie, wore maxi pads – with wings – in his little blue “Speedo” (male dog diaper).

It was time to head back to Farmer Ron’s house, dropping off our Amish friends along the way, but this time we were taking one more person with us. We went up with four adults and three children and we were about to attempt to bring back the sick baby’s grandmother. She was going to come back and help look after the other children – eight girls! Now I’m not good with math, but I’m okay with geometry, and I could tell that putting Grandma in the backseat with three children and two adults was not going to be comfortable at all. Why? Let’s put it this way: deductive reasoning. I had been up front on the way up by myself. I am a small human, a rather narrow human, if you will. Grandma wasn’t quite as narrow so I thought it would be way more comfortable for her and everyone in the backseat if I gave her my place up front with Farmer Ron and I became the sixth person in the back row. Yup. Sixth. From side to side it was Menno’s mom, Menno, me, a little girl, Menno’s dad, and another little girl on a lap. That’s how we rolled for almost two hours. It wasn’t uncomfortable, considering some of the ways I have traveled through Central America!

Menno’s dad had more questions about my travels and adventures and Grandma had apparently also been listening from the front seat. When I had to answer questions about scuba diving I started to worry that it would melt her mind. “Are you in a tank?” No. “Are you in a box?” No. How do you breathe? Etc. What can you  possibly see down there? There can’t be much can there? I said, “There’s more beauty than you could ever dream of. It’s beautiful and filled with so many of god’s amazing creatures.” See how I stuck that landing? I had to throw in a bit of kudos to the Creator in terms an Amish person could relate to, to illustrate the story.

So there I sat in the back of the truck with five additional people. I seem to always find myself in a journey of mental and emotional expansion which almost always involves a less than optimum seat on a physical journey to another destination, amidst a culture I know relatively little about. 

It’s the only way to travel.