!Caving with old order Mennonites --- agk's diary 5 May 2025 @ 18:47 UTC --- written in bed in midori notebook with dip pen, brause blue pumpkin nib, kuretake sumi ink typed on HP 200LX with "calvin" vi text editor in the garage before a housecleaning marathon posted from GPD MicroPC at a coffee shop --- I have a complicated relationship with old order Mennonites and Amish. My mom's family's from Penn- sylvania Dutch Amish country. My great-grandpa Amos (mom's grandpa, who taught me to play chess) and great-uncle Johnny (dad's uncle) spoke Pennsylvania Dutch. I have a few phrases from my family lexicon. When I was a young lady, I attended a protest with hundreds of Amish and old order Mennonites. They completely filled the Pittsburgh district court building. A midwife was absurdly being tried for murder of a term stillbirth. My best friend in nursing school was a Mennonite who didn't wear jeans til college. I saw Amish and old order Mennonite buggies, farms, and shops all my life in Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Kentucky. I grew up admiring from a distance the hard work, simple living, stubbornness, and faith. I projected a lot of fantasies on them. Almost ten years ago my rosy fantasy was destroyed. I cared for months for a teenage girl who escaped from an old order Mennonite community I'd sure as hell name if my professional ethics permitted. She was raped by men and boys including elders in her community so routinely for over a decade she tried with all her will and considerable strength to kill herself at specific times each day she was in our care. She didn't need a clock to remember. You could set your watch by her terror. She was the sickest, most heartbreaking psych patient of my career. The community's separation from "English" society and justice, and its co- hesiveness, means bad things can get very bad, with no escape. In locating resources for her I found plenty of evidence of that. Nothing like a fantasy lost. I hated them collectively with resentful prejudice. Last month I volunteered to lead a nature walk and cave tour for a group of eighty children, teens, and adult leaders from a local old order Mennonite community. They weren't from the same part of the state as the church that abused my patient. I went as humbly as I could, dressed modestly in black linen skirt, shoulders covered and breast contour hidden under a pink and purple button-down flannel. My lifelong curious admiration competed with my poisonous resentment and prejudice. We split the group in two: children and teens, each with adults. The women and girls wore ankle-length homemade dresses with pleated skirts and bodices, white bonnets on the crowns of their heads, hair in long braids, sneakers and mostly storebought jackets. Little black felted wool caps kept their bonnets dry. The boys and men wore black trousers and suspenders. The men and teens wore hats, young boys black ball caps. I was to lead the teens. I mention their dress be- cause it stands out in modern, "English" (as the Amish call it) society, and because it contrasts sharply with what I normally wear into a cave. I'd never before caved in a skirt or dress. A few girls stared openly at me in the picnic shelter. I stand out even in a crowd less different than me for my uncanny combination of free-spiritedness with respect for tradition. The adults clearly wanted no physically idle time left the kids and teens, so we kept the educational lecture short, then I took the teens on a nature walk in the rain while other cavers took the child- ren up the ridge for the cave tour. Boys to portapotties down by the creek, girls to outhouses up by the cave entrance, then into the woods. The men and boys walked in front in a group, even though I was ostensibly their guide. The women and girls were expected to defer. We walked behind. Two men had borrowed our wildflower identification books. They did their best, naming wood anemones and indian paintbrushes, mostly uninterested in what I might say. Only the women and girls met my friends in the forest--usnea colonies clinging to decomposing twigs, true and false solomon seal, fiddlehead and maidenhair ferns, greenbriar, blood- root, trillium flowers just opening, enormous-leaved umbrella trees. For each friend, stories of its culinary or medicinal use and preparation, rarity, root, preferences and pattern of growing. At the sight of the one true solomon seal in flower a teen girl was struck. She exclaimed something I hadn't heard in years. "Oh! It's beauty-ful!" she said. Such a sweet way to say that word. Twice a man asked me to repeat something he heard me tell the women and girls. I happily did. Each time the boys crowded round him while he told and showed what I taught him. The boys found three box turtles. The girls loved the black and yellow centipedes. Everyone's dresses and trousers, shirts, and maybe shoes got wet in the rain. Back at the picnic shelter tens of identical hard plastic lunchboxes appeared. I told a few adults I was concerned about the wet teens getting too cold in the 13C cave. Nothing doing. We prayed and ate. I spread peanut butter and jelly from canning jars on my sourdough bread and ate black eyed peas from another canning jar. After lunch I advocated again to the adults the teens could fill their water bottles with warm water from our kettle so our cave trip wouldn't be cut short by someone getting too cold. I got no traction, gave up, and found cups to let cold teens drink my water when suddenly all the teen girls-- and no boys--lined up for water and pocketed their warm bottles in deep dress pockets. While I'd never led a nature walk at the preserve before, I've led many cave tours. I took leadership of the whole group, boys and men included, as I led them in the cave. I set rules and laid foundations for the stories of human and natural history I'd help the cave tell them in the next 90 minutes. Nothing decomposes in a cave (corpses mummify). Caves are slowly cut by acidic water widening cracks in limestone. Flow- stone and popcorn are rock deposited by water that can no longer carry the dissolved minerals, each with characteristic color--red iron oxide, black manganese, yellow sulfur, white calcite. Quickly I led them to an unlighted hole off the main passage to play. I gave them permission to climb, crawl, and explore the tight passage with the gift of my spare headlamp. The boys went first, discovering and gathering around a sleeping little brown bat. They were joined by two men in examining the beautiful sleeping creature, then retreated. The girls wondered at the bat then adventured further down the narrowing, muddy passage before returning from their crawl. Of course those are the girls' work dresses, but it thrilled me as someone who wears dresses more than many women, and who used to ride motorcycles in a pleated, flowered dress. Some little second-wave feminist song sang quietly in my heart as they slid and climbed, crawled, and squeezed more places than the boys, unhindered by their ankle-length dresses. As I switched from play to education, I found these teens more attentive, disciplined, and capable than their peers in the public county schools and home- school co-ops. Nothing I threw at them, from acid- base chemistry to insect biology, 19th century tech to historiography seemed to lose them. The only subject they seemed weak in was plane geometry, as applied to acoustics. When I showed how poplar trees were bored out and banded together with hot strap iron to pipe water from Crooked Creek to the distant nitrate leaching troughs, a couple men and boys lingered over the archaeological site and reconstruction like I'm used to guys standing around a pick-up truck with its hood up. The cave's biggest room was used as an auditorium for barn dances and gospel revivals a hundred years after commercial mining of the cave's nitrates ended. It has concert-hall acoustics. Earlier I'd invited them to sing in there, but when suddenly they erupted in five-part harmony I was dumbstruck. I wandered the enormous room listening to their confident voices interaction with it. They sang six verses of a hymn to the tune of Higher Ground from the Mennonite hymnal my ears heard as "Lord plant my feet on solid ground." It was an extraordinary experience of my life to hear the choir of youth and rock, glorious and humble admixed. It was the fulfillment of a dream I'd had since hearing what that limestone cathedral could do with my lone voice. I hope when Alzheimers dementia one day eats my memory like it ate my grandma's and great-grandma's, I hope someone plays that hymn on a piano for me so I can remember the sound of it a capella in that beauty-ful space. The girls' dresses were like the wildflowers we'd enjoyed on the surface, the boys' awkward carriage like the saplings. I can close my eyes right now and hear it. I wish I could give that sound to everyone I love. As I completed the tour and brought together all elements of the cave's history as the mine and factory for the gunpowder used in my country's first war, I remembered Mennonites are conscient- ious objectors. Influential Mennonite (unrepentant sexual abuser of 100 women under his power, many his students, and) theologian John Howard Yoder argued Mennonites should in fact work to prevent and end war. I told the story of that era of the cave's history like I'd never thought to tell it before, not a tale of frontier ingenuity, but a story animated by human as well as conservation ethics. Enslaved people, our brethren, were compelled to hard labor, eighty to a shift, day and night in this dank, dark hole. The cave was choked with wood smoke, reeked of oxen, ox shit, human sweat, and sulfur. They dug and heaved cave dirt. Caustic wood ash cracked their hands and feet til they bled. When they died their bodies were carted out to decompose. Far as the eye could see, from ridgeline to ridge- line, the land, too, was desecrated, clearcut for wood ash to react with mined nitrates--all for gun- powder to kill people in that awful, stupid war. The lush beauty of the valley outside is the result of God's providence and over 200 years of recovery. My tailgunner on the tour has been caving the area since the early 1970s, is extremely well-informed, and can lead the most comprehensive cave tour of anyone I know. Along the trip I checked my facts with him at times. The teens got to hear the accounts we've collected enrich and contradict each other as we assembled history live in front of them. History written in books, or narrated on a cave tour gives the illusion of a transparent window to the past as it really was, I told them. But history in fact is constructed as they saw us do, by collecting, weighing, and reconciling accounts and physical evidence enough to tell plausible stories. They thanked us and went. I sat and thought. Maybe very bad things happen in that community. But what business is it of mine? I'm no cop or social worker with the power to do something about it. They can't hurt my daughter or I. I just hope they come back, I hope to see them again. I really liked them.