Traverse City Adventure: campfire prayers

DAY 15 • 26 AUGUST 2017 • TAPPAN LAKE CAMP

As we broke camp this morning - stuffing sleeping bags, rolling air mattresses, drying tent and fly and ground cloth, heating water for coffee with crunchy peanut butter on wheat bread - the young Amish couples in the next site close by spoke their Pennsylvania Dutch language in muffled tones.  

They were circled up around their fire the women kept burning through the night. The twin two-year-old boy and girl - Mariah and Brant - curled in laps. Mark read a passage from the Bible.  Romans, he said, New Testament. “Guidance for how we should live our lives.”  They discussed the verses and then they closed their eyes and Mark led them in prayer.  

The campground around them quiet, the sun trying to burn its way through the mists rising off the lake above the low mountains, the fire crackling now and then, God bidding us all good morning.

I asked for a sense of what the Bible reading suggested.  Bryan said one passage instructed people to not condescend to those of a lower economic status.  “Living a good life is not just about what you have or how much money you make.”

The engine on the boat they had brought to go tubing on the lake wasn’t  cooperating.  “Dennis,” Mark said, “if our boat was working, we would load up you and Becky and your bikes and bags and take you eight miles down the lake to make your journey shorter.”

Bryan gave me his address, not far away in a small town in the middle of Ohio’s Amish country.  Monica said we should come and spend the night.  “We will put you in a soft bed and cook a nice dinner for you.”  Bryan said he would even give us a ride in his horse and buggy. That would be fun.

Later, alongside a freshly cut alfalfa field on a hill I spoke with a farmer named Floyd Gladman.  

I talked about the hills we flew down - sometimes hitting 30 mph on our bikes - and then pushing them up too.  

“My grandfather farmed in West Virginia where everything is really steep,” Floyd said.  “One time he told me that God surely loved poor people.  He said the rich people lived down in the lowlands where the land is flatter.  ‘But we,’ he said, ‘get to farm both sides of the land.’ I’ve never forgotten that.” said Floyd, “and that was 75 years ago.”

He pointed to a blue-roofed church down the hill, at the end of the rows of cut alfalfa drying in the late August sun.  “That’s our church,” he said.  “We’re not associated with any larger group.  It’s just us and we answer only to Jesus.”

We ended the day in New Philadelphia, gateway to Ohio’s Amish country.  Looking forward to flatter roads and getting a taste of the widespread Amish culture here.