Sunday afternoon in Sarasota we drove to the Amish neighborhood of Pinecraft. I had heard about the Amish community in the city, and we had seen girls in white hair bonnets on bicycles downtown, but I had never explored the area.
As we expected, the businesses were closed, but the streets were animated with people riding large, three-wheeled cycles – the men in beards and black hats, the women in long dresses and white bonnets. The one-story houses often had cycles parked in front, a few had laundry drying on a line. They were small and close together, like in a compound, with tiny front yards and very few trees. Here and there a circle of people sat on a side porch. Sunday visiting. Occasionally a woman in a dark dress, her face to the sun, stretched on a chaise. I had never seen an Amish person getting a tan, at least not by lying motionless. We came across one supine woman reading a book. I stopped the car, and she got up to chat.
“Are you from Pennsylvania?” I asked her. She was. She said that she was going back tomorrow. Most of the Amish here, she told us, come down for a few weeks in the winter. I had thought that they were permanent residents, perhaps even farming here, but later I read that they had been lured down in the 1920s but found the soil unsuitable for the celery they thought they could grow. Yet they had enjoyed the sun, and the warm weather, so they started to come down every winter. And if you think about it, much of Amish life is spent outdoors; Florida gives the people the opportunity to increase the time they spend outside. And if it means riding a cycle instead of driving a buggy (Sarasota doesn’t allow horses on its roads), so be it. The woman told us that the house behind her was an Airbnb she had rented for her stay, and that next week young people would be coming for spring break. It was odd hearing these two modern-day institutions appear in the German-accented speech of a woman in 18th century dress.
We wished her safe travels home and headed down the street to the dead end. Turning around, we saw a woman in a swimsuit sunbathing in her front yard. She was from Indiana, she told us, and not Amish; she was staying in her sister-in-law's house. I said it seemed like a safe, quiet neighborhood.
“We had a break-in a few months ago,” she said. Of course, the car in front was a sign that the residents weren’t Amish, but why would burglars even go to a neighborhood where the majority of people don’t own jewelry or electronic devices? What would they find to steal – cutlery?
Monday, before leaving Sarasota, we returned to Pinecraft and stopped at Yoder’s Market. A café across the street was full of Amish drinking coffee and eating ice cream. Driving around Lancaster Country, I had always seen the Amish working - plowing fields, baling hay, tilling gardens - and it was new and refreshing to see them relaxing.
We walked through the cafe terrace and found a group of people sitting with suitcases at the back of a building with a sign on the side that said “Tourist Church.”
“There’s a bus coming soon that’s going to take them back to Pennsylvania,” an elderly woman seated on a three-wheeler told us. She wore a black sweater over a long blue dress. The young couple sitting nearby was waiting for the bus, the man in a straw hat and thick brown beard. The hats had changed from Sunday black to weekday straw. His wife told Hania that the Amish don’t travel on planes unless there’s an emergency.
“They’re supposed to get in noon tomorrow,” the woman on the cycle told me, mentioning the town of Intercourse, not sure I would have heard of it, but of course I had. (My uncle lives in Lancaster). “They don’t stop for the night. Then when they arrive there are drivers to take them home. They’re farmers, older men, who drive to make some extra money.”
A big, modern bus pulled into the parking lot. “Ephrata, PA” was written on the side. The driver stepped down and checked a list with a woman in a bonnet. Then the men started loading the luggage into the bow.
We said our goodbyes and headed over to Yoder’s Market, and then the restaurant, where I bought two slices of shoo-fly pie to go. They came in a plastic bag that read: “I (Heart) Yoder’s” and under it: “1 Chronicles 16:34.”
At home I looked up the verse:
“Oh give thanks to the Lord, for he is good;
for his steadfast love endures forever.”
Last month at my reading in Tallahassee, the conversation turned away from my memoir to my travels as a travel writer. I think it was a question about my favorite places that prompted me to talk about Vietnam, which I visited in 1994. I noted that it was the only place I’ve ever been where students would come up to me and politely ask if they could practice their English.
Driving home the following day, and listening to the BBC, I heard a report from Vietnam about how young people there target tourists in hopes of having English conversations with them. It is a common practice known locally as “hunting foreigners.” I was delighted to hear that it is still a thing, and wondered if perhaps I had been one of the first foreigners bagged. There were not a lot of tourists in Vietnam in 1994 and most of them were the linguistically undesirable French.
We saw a lot on our trip up the west coast of Florida, but these two scenes stand out:
A parade of bicycles, all of the riders in vintage dress, as we pulled up to our hotel in downtown St. Petersburg. One man pedaled in boater and bow tie; another, in a white cap, rode a unicycle. Inside I asked the receptionist what the occasion was and he said, unimpressed, that the group frequently gathers to ride through the city.
The blue water of Three Sisters Springs in Crystal River darkly dotted with manatees. From the boardwalk rimming the springs, we looked down on dozens of lolling sea cows. Occasionally one would poke its snout above the surface and make a soft snorting sound. Walking to the end of the boardwalk, we came to the narrow channel that connects the springs to the river, and here watched as manatees swam seemingly effortlessly from one body of water to the other.
For a few years now the New York Times has not printed a Travel section to go with the other sections in its Sunday paper. To read this section, subscribers have to go online, a simple effort that I have never made.
But once a year the paper deigns to print a special section listing 52 places to go in the new year. This is the most meaningless form of travel writing (claims someone who, under pressure from supervisors, did his fair share of annual where-to-go lists), based – when no special event or natural occurrence is involved – on nothing more than the whims and prejudices of a group of editors. Why are the Albanian Alps (to cite one of the Times’ picks) the place to go this year as opposed to last year – or next year?
Still, I peruse the special section every year, and this year I was disappointed to see that no place in Poland made the list. Is the country already too mainstream, with none of the edgy caché of Albania? Hard to know. I’ve been visiting Poland regularly for the last few decades and each time I go I’m struck by how attractive it has become, not just for tourists but also for residents. Planning a return this spring, I realize that I should be grateful that the New York Times found it wanting, as there will be fewer Americans – at least fewer Times readers – on the streets.
Friday evening in Key West, walking down Greene Street, I came upon a short man with straggly blond hair holding a large paperback book.
“Can I read you a poem by Anna Akhmatova?” he asked me.
I told him I was surprised he wasn’t offering a poem by Elizabeth Bishop. (Just the fact that a man was reading poetry on the street would have been surprising in any American city other than Key West – and perhaps San Francisco.)
“No,” he said flatly. “I only read poems that give me pleasure.”
Looking down, I noticed a violin in its case.
“Do you play?” I asked him.
“Not anymore,” he said.
“Did you used to play – on Duval Street?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Are you Swedish?”
“Yes.”
I thought he had looked familiar, minus a few teeth. At the last literary seminar I had attended, in 2006, I had been walking with Tim Cahill and his wife and a few other people down Duval when we had come across a busker playing the violin. Stopping to chat, we learned that he was from Sweden. I immediately told of the midsummer I had spent in Dalarna, where I had been treated to exquisite fiddling; Tim inquired about the instrument and the music it produced. (I wanted to impress; Tim wanted to learn.)
The Swede had seemed then, as he seemed this night, an integral part of the Key West experience – almost a kind of chamber of commerce emissary – though he was simply an independent contractor of the sort that fey island attracts.