Independence Day

On a day when a gallon of gasoline cost $4.10 nationwide and a barrel of oil hovered at $140, both records, I found myself among eight thousand Amish farmers watching a parade of brand-new horse-drawn manure spreaders, combines, and hay balers. The occasion was the 15th Annual Horse Progress Days, an enthusiastic celebration of one of the world’s oldest energy sources: animal power. This year, the two-day event took place in Mt. Hope, northeast of Columbus, Ohio.

That its first day fell on the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence was an irony of illuminating proportions. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

Although I went mostly out of curiosity, I wasn’t unprepared. My family and I had stopped in Mt. Hope the previous summer for a three-day visit with David Kline, farmer, author, publisher and Amish minister. What I saw and heard during our stay deeply impressed me. I saw a vibrant agrarian community, living and working on a human scale that was wholly alien to me as a child of the suburbs. I saw draft animals at work, manure on the roads, pretty 120-acre farms, smiling faces, and tons of children.

And what I heard, when I asked David for a summation of the Amish experience at the end of our visit, was this: "It’s alright to live with less."

On the evening of my arrival in Mt. Hope, I unexpectedly witnessed the outline of an answer.

Standing at the railing of my two-story B&B, I watched an Amish family bale and load hay in an adjacent field. The hay had been cut a day or two earlier, to  dry,  and  now  needed  to  be  'put