AT ONE tiny Pennsylvania village, New York seems like a galaxy away, although it is only three hours’ drive from the worldly city.
For Nickel Mines is a serene, rural hamlet wrapped in vast fields where local folks hang out their laundry on clotheslines, a scene so alien to heart-pounding New York.
Nickel Mines?
It was where five Amish girls were killed five months ago when a milk truck driver stormed into a school and started a shooting spree.
“There’s nothing to see there,” a motherly staff member at the Pennsylvania Dutch Visitors Centre in Lancaster County said when asked for directions to Nickel Mines.
Amish people, she said, are scattered all over the place. The school has been torn down and a new one is set to open soon.
Lancaster County is home to the oldest Amish settlement in the United States. The visitor’s centre provides abundant pamphlets for tourists curious to know more about a people who shun most modern trappings, where the men wear dark suits, and where horse carriages are the mode of transport. Theirs is also a life without electricity.
“Malaysia? Where’s that?” one Amish shopkeeper at Nickel Mines asked, upon introductions. The shop sells a myriad of stuff from candies to fabrics.
He was friendly enough to allow photographs of a horse-drawn buggy outside his shop but no pictures of him and the store, please.
To many Amish, posing for photographs is deemed an act of pride.
One young woman helping out at the store was pleasant but in a distant sort of way. She conversed with a customer in Pennsylvania Dutch (from the word Deutsch).
The Amish are descendants of Swiss and German immigrants who arrived in the United States in the 18th century.
One report estimated that there are 28,000 Amish in Lancaster County and 200,000 more elsewhere in the United States.
It is winter now and the countryside is a pretty sight.
Children slide down a snow-capped hill; horses, cows and sheep are inside their pens.
At Nickel Mines, horse drawn buggies pass by occasionally but the place is largely quiet.
Tour companies offer packages to Amish villages to visit the farms, the houses, the smokehouse to see how ham is smoked, and how they operate a water wheel.
“Why can the Amish have a bottled gas refrigerator but not an electric one? Why do they dress as they do?” are questions in one brochure, which promises an experience at an Amish country homestead.
Others offer buggy rides and visits to Amish woodworking shops.
Has there been heightened interest from visitors following the Nickel Mines tragedy?
“Certainly, people have been intrigued and very sorry. A lot of people talked about it and we received many phone calls from people who wanted to know how they could send their donations to the affected families,” said Peggy Nana-Sinkam, who is group sales manager of the Amish Farm and House at Route 30 East, Lancaster.
Others, however, cancelled their tour because they felt it would be disrespectful to check out the Amish at a time of grief, she said over the telephone.
The Amish Farm and House, she said, received many Asian tourists such as those from Japan, South Korea and China.
It was opened in 1955 after a man bought the place from an Amish family who had lived there.
Admission fee is US$7.50 (RM26.30) for adults and US$5 (RM17.50) for children.
“We were the first to educate people about the Amish way of life,” she said, acknowledging that the people who run the place now are not Amish. “None of us here are Amish, and we do not pretend to be Amish.”
Most travellers wanting to understand the Amish way of life would seek out quaint towns in Lancaster County such as Bird-in-Hand (population: 300) and Intercourse, a village formerly known as Cross Keys.
To these outsiders, it is a different world out there in the rural side of Lancaster County.
