I’m learning that if you wish to be friends with an Amish farmer, your horizons will soon expand in new and mysterious ways.

Since the Amish world revives around the family, community, faith, and farms, you will be expected – no choice, really – to see or meet them all.

Modern hi-tech western civilization promotes a certain kind of isolation from other people. I can do much of my work on my computer and never see another soul.

I don’t think I’ve ever attended a community or public meeting in my town.

I shop from strangers, and we mostly eat alone.

Maria has an active and vital social life; she has made many wonderful friends and sees them often. Yet, our interactions with the community are, by nature, abstract and sporadic.

It is difficult to find a community where the people in the community have no urgent need to ever see each other, except at the post office once in a while.

The Amish have created a different world for themselves, one in which interaction with family and community is intense, necessary, and constant.

Isolation is not an option, spiritually or practically, for them.

I got an inside look into how this worked yesterday when Moise and I took another ride together.

I’m also learning how to be a friend and have a culturally and socially different friend in almost every possible way. The Amish society is a closed circle; someone like me can never go inside it. But there is a space on the periphery where real friendship and connection can blossom and grow.

I think Mosie and I have found it, his children also.

Yesterday, Moise hired me (a pie or cookies for each ride in payment, is what we settled on) to drive him to the Glens Falls, N.Y. bus station.

As an elder in the Amish religious council, he has to go to Canton, N.Y. when the council meets to decide religious matters.

I’m picking him up on Monday and going with him to buy a huge load of concrete for the foundations of his barn and his daughter’s.

My study sits in the front of the farmhouse, and I love the sound of the Amish carriages clip-clopping by.

When the clip-clopping stops and the dogs start barking loudly and the donkey’s bray, I know the cart is turning into my driveway, which happens two or three times a week.

Fate doesn’t seem to notice the horses, Zinnia grumbles but then wags her tail, and Bud does not want strange horses on the property. He thinks he can make them go away by dint of his mighty bark.

Moise came in the morning to ask for a ride to the bus station in Glens Falls.

I said yes; I went to pick him up Saturday at 2:30 p.m.

When I pulled in next to the barn – our pick-up spot – he was excited and dragged me up the hill to see the new blueberry patches,  all planted, watered, and growing.

Four more arrived at the farm today; the other 30 are coming to my farm next week.

He will come and get them with a couple of his children. The girls work just as hard as the boys and join in the plowing and planting. The boys don’t cook in the kitchen.

When we left, Moise told me in no uncertain terms that I would love to see the property his daughter was coming to live on in a few weeks and the farm where his son was living and working alongside his new wife.

Just a bit out of the way, he said, he would tell me how to get there. He did, he knew every turn and long dirt road.

There was also another spot he wanted me to see where another daughter was coming to live. His oldest daughter – the only child not living in or moving to this area – lives in Maine.

He did not expect her to move her; she and her husband are happy where they are.

I sensed this invitation was not casual and that he would have been hurt if I’d refused.

He wanted me to see where his family and some other Amish families had moved or were in the process of buying. It had the feel of a command; it would have been rude to refuse this clear invitation into his world.

I’m beginning to understand the rhythms of our friendship. He takes me into his world and explains it to me, and I take him into my world and explain it to him.

It is mutual, even nourishing, as good friendships are meant to be.

I always feel good when we meet and talk. I never have to wonder what was meant or really said.

A mile or two from his farm, he told me to turn left, onto this country dirt road; I’d never been on this road, or any of the roads and hills and pastures we were able to see.

We zig-zagged left and right, on one dirt road after another, up some hills, down some others.

I’d never been on any of the roads.

I expressed some surprise that he seemed to know every barn, field, house, and dirt road in this part of our county, yet he has only been here a short while and works every minute of the day.

He explained that once almost every day, usually towards evening when it gets cooler, he gets a horse carriage ready, and he and/or Barbara or one of the children will take a ride. He has gone as far as 40 or 50 miles (day or night doesn’t matter to him), and he loves unpaved dirt roads because they are easier on the horses.

He has no fear of traffic at night on country roads in a horse and carriage with no electric lights.

He knew the terrain intimately; he commented on every new construction, every barn being torn day, every new homeowner, every field of rye or hay or corn.

He told me about the quality of the soil and the grass, and the difficulties of plowing the hillside pastures, the acreage of every farm and pasture and plot of land, how much it sold for, was worth or could be sold for.

He showed me his daughter’s new properties; he is orchestrating Amish work crews to come over the next few weeks and build temporary homes, barns, and sheds.

“I like it here,” he says; he loves riding on these roads and hills in the carriage; he says it’s the best way to see, feel and absorb the land.

I asked how he knew the land so well in so short a time. Before he bought his farm, he said, he and a relative traveled every inch of the county and one or two nearby.

His biggest decision was to choose a farm on a busy road; most Amish prefer to live out of sight of the English or anyone else. He said he had very clear ideas about building a business with crops, baked goods, lumber, sheep, and goats.

For that, he needed to put aside privacy and be available to large numbers of people. A state road that leads to Lake George and the Adirondacks and western Vermont seemed right for that.

Moise had done his homework; he doesn’t make impulsive decisions like I do and hope they work out. He makes them work out.

The countryside he was showing me was gorgeous – green, rolling hills, beautiful old houses,   beautiful, intact forests, quiet country roads.

I am still a city boy in many ways; in my years here, I rarely venture off of paved roads and had no idea what I had been missing. The beautiful hills and valleys seem normal to me; I often take them for granted. Mosie never does.

I was intrigued at the idea of Moise and his kids heading out on a 50-mile carriage road as casually as my going to get some gas for the car or a bottle of wine.

I moved upstate to be near nature, yet I had really seen too little of it right around me, and it is just a few miles away and goes on for miles and miles. In just a few months, Moise knows this place better than I ever will because he sees it differently and is not bound by our frantic, pressured, and increasingly isolated lives.

He showed me two Amish farms that have been here for years and I never knew were here at all. He has visited each of them several times, and as we passed by, the families recognized him and waved. They help each other and worship together.

His world is deeper and richer than I ever knew.

Mine is rich but more limited than I realized. I love my life; I don’t wish to trade it. But we can each learn a lot from each other. Many people are interested in my writing about the Amish, some are cynical, suspicious, judgmental.

“You are in love with these people,” one man, wrote, “a healthy adult would have backed off by now.” What he meant, I think, is that I am s supposed to be disillusioned by now.

No one has ever accused me of being a healthy adult, I have nothing to lose. I’m a Beavis & Butthead person since I don’t know what I’m supposed to think, I can think.

The cynicism epidemic in our country rejects sincerity in any form.

It is not a simple thing to be a friend to someone that different. But my mind keeps going back to this: his community is diverse but united in common values; ours is being torn apart by angry people with different values.

Our western way of life can make us strangers in our own world, computers and cellphones and automobiles shrinking our world somehow, expanding them in others, not always stretching them, as we have been promised.

Moise and I talked once again about whether he should or should not sell the book about his daughter’s kidnapping in his shed along with the fruit and vegetables.

He asked for my advice. This crazy media culture was my world, I said. I know it well.

Moise has told me that he appreciates that I am a plain talker, and I have noticed that this does not upset or offend him, as it does other people. I recently lost a friendship because I felt my friend could not be honest with me. I find I can’t abide that any longer.

That is not an issue with Moise.

I said quite plainly that I thought it was a bad idea to sell this book about the kidnapping and assault on two of his daughters. Washington County, where we live, is not like St. Lawrence County, where he lived before.

The busy highway where he sells his donuts brings all kinds of people from the outside. If they bought and read his book, they would want to meet his daughters, and talk to him and Barbara and soak up every detail of the kidnappings and assaults.

And then tell their friends on Facebook and brag about knowing this family and want to visit. I’m a minor celebrity, but even my small degree of fame was sometimes intrusive and difficult.

There was a difference between being a tourist attraction in the Northeast and a destination for food and vegetable and lumber buyers.

Reporters would come and intrude and ask him questions he did not want to answer. Local people would come and ask him and his daughters to autograph the books. How would he and his wife handle that? How would the girls?

Instead of being known for the beautiful and delicious things he is creating, he would become known for suffering a traumatic, even sensational experience that no one in the family wants to talk about.

Why I wondered, would he even think about it?

He didn’t give me a direct answer, but it was clear that he was trying to support the detective who had been in charge of the case and who had written the book and asked him to sell it.

He asked me what I thought of the book, and I told him.

I know he was listening to me, and I know he heard me. It’s his decision. He is learning that I am stubborn too, he isn’t the Patriarch of me.

This ride was a new chapter in our adventures together. Moise is a private self-contained person; his family and community are the core of his world.

He was introducing them to me, showing me a world he guards and nourishes zealously. He was also teaching me the spirituality of soil and farming.

Last week, I stopped at another Amish farm a few miles outside of town – I’d never been there before – and as I got out of the car, the farmer came out and shouted, “Hey, Jon!, good to see you and welcome.”

We shook hands and talked, and I couldn’t help but ask him how he knew my name. He smiled and said, “oh, you are Moise’s neighbor, and he says you are a good friend to the Amish. We all know the friends of the Amish and who they are. You are the  Bookman.”

I was surprised, pleased. Of course, they all know who I was. That’s important information in that world, just as I have told people about Moise in mine.

They see one another in different ways, and they share their world completely. In a sense, their survival depends on it.

The tour led indirectly to the bus station; Moise had it timed perfectly.

He knew exactly how much time it would take to see all that he wanted to show me and still make it to the bus station.

When I let him out, he came back to ask me to call someone upstate to arrange for a ride for him and seven other Amish travelers. His wallet was four inches thick, stuffed mostly with cards and phone numbers for people who give rides to the Amish all over the Northeast.

When the person I called said they couldn’t make the pick-up, they were sorry; Moise didn’t blink. He went over to the other Amish men, and they all took our four-inch-thick wallets with cards full of phone numbers and addresses.

I never thought of the Amish as being cool, but they seem unflappable to me. I guess that’s a benefit of believing God is responsible for all of the occurrences in your life.

The first one I called the second time – Moise can speak, but he can’t dial the number – said he would be there, no problem. Moise cooly lit up his corncob pipe and asked me once more if he could pay me for the ride.

Just give me a pie, I said. He laughed; we’ll get you one of the first blueberry pies. Monday, we have to go and buy concrete together. They need my phone numbers.

Friend Of The Amish. Not a bad title.