Today I drive myself to an Amish farm sale not far away.  Several days ago I saw the printed sale bill in Fisher’s dry goods store down in Georgetown.  Immediately I had visions of auctioneers chanting and fresh donuts frying.  I decided to go.

Despite the cold, I ride my bike.  It’s the sort of day where the wind howls and the thermometer never shows above freezing and young farm boys start begging their father to go out and see if the ice is fit for skating and hockey.

I cross the Mine Road at the Nickel Mines crossroads and immediately see the farm.  Dozens of buggies, horseless, are parked in a haphazard knot in the field at the end of the lane.  Farm implements line the drive—plows and harrows and hay rakes and corn pickers and planters—each one for sale, each one with its own motor to drive the moving parts, since there would be no tractor to connect a drive shaft to.  

Three Amish men stand around a big red baler, trying to get its motor to start.  A huge generator, provider of compressed air for power tools and electricity for milking, chugs away, throwing smoke and heat into the chill air.

I park my own motor-less carriage beside the others.  The Amish are not allowed to have bicycles.  Amish elders decided that bicycles provide a too-fast means of transportation, and their use might threaten to break up the close, communal way of life, so they are outlawed.  A horse can pull a carriage at an average of eight miles an hour.  On my bike I can usually go fifteen; I easily pass a buggy on my way to the sale.

At such auctions it is customary to sell small stuff in the morning, then the mules and other large machinery in the afternoon.  It is around eleven o’clock when I get to the sale.  Auctioneers stand on old farm wagons, selling box lots of household and farm goods.  They stream their mesmerizing chant and an occasional joke into portable loudspeakers slung around their shoulders.  In the yard, a small group of black-bonneted women cluster around a wagon piled with dishes, glassware, boxes of old magazines.  

The barn is white with dark green trim.  By its front entrance, seventy-five or eighty men bid on a set of deep sockets, two sledgehammers, an air compressor, drill bits.  “Who’ll give me five dollars for this bucket of drill bits?  Five now, give me five, who’ll give me five?”  An assistant, who holds up the relevant item, notes that one of the drill bits still has a five dollar price sticker on it.  “And I’m gonna sell this whole lot for five?  I’ll lose my job,” the auctioneer quips.  

His chant continues.  “Who’ll give me ten now ten now ten.  OK five now who’ll give me five?  Alright three now three now three.  One.  Who’ll give me one dollar, one dollar for the lot of drill bits?”  Someone nods, and so the bidding begins.  “One now one now two now two now one now what am I bid now two now, three now three now four, what am I bid now four now five now what am I bid now five now what am I bid now whatamIbidnow whatamibid…  Sold, five dollars, number 129.”  

Inside the barn, up in the hay mow large household goods wait for a new owner.  A Maytag wringer washer goes for fifty dollars to the first bidder.  An office chair goes for five.  No one bids on an ironing board.  The auctioneer comes to a foot-powered sewing machine.  “Does it work?” someone in the crowd wonders.  A lady pipes up, “It works good, the head is especially nice for fine sewing.”

Inside a small shed the ladies sell food.  “All proceeds go to a widow and family,” a hand made sign reads.  There is hot soup—oyster and chicken noodle corn and ham and bean—and hot drinks.  There is a table full of pies and bread and cookies.  In a corner two men deep fry donuts and french fries.  Another table has hamburgers and hot dogs (with sauerkraut) prepared on the grill outside.  A plastic tub holds hard pretzels saran wrapped with large slices of farmers cheese, only twenty five cents.

Old carpet remnants have been put down on the floor, and the shed is heated by a portable propane heater and by the press of bodies waiting for food.  I edge my way over to the donut corner and select a freshly made powdered, cream filled donut.  No other thing like it on the face of this earth, and only available at farm sales.  Then a patient wait over at the soup table, then join the informal queue in front of the table with a sign that says “cashier.”  A young woman with a colorful shawl wrapped around her head, the ends tied under her chin, sits behind the table and counts change out of an old metal cash box.  I pay two dollars for my soup and donut, then look for a warm place to sit and eat.

In an adjoining shed plain wooden tables and benches fill with Amish men eating.  Young, beardless boys hang out in the covered entryway while the old, gray bearded Grussdawdies silently sip soup at the tables.  The men are all the same, yet all different.  Each one has a beard and wears a straw or black felt hat.  Each one sports black pants and a black overcoat.  But underneath, handmade shirts of different colors show through at the collar—purple, blue, gray, green, maroon.  And the beards are all different—some scraggly, some gray and full, some blond and curly.  Below the hats long locks curl upward, testimony to the permanent hat head that is one of the trademarks of Amish men.

Back outside, the auction continues.  Five young women with colorful shawls on their heads pile into a buggy for warmth and to watch the proceedings.  The bonneted and black-draped older women have dispersed to the house or to the food shed, the housewares auction over.

Men wearing white and yellow work gloves still crowd around the wagon while the auctioneer sells miscellaneous stuff, the detritus of years of life on a farm where generators, air compressors, and horses provide the power instead of line electricity and tractors.  A whole wagon holds stacks of horse collars, yokes, and other hitching apparatus.  Air powered tools poke out of buckets.  A small group of men ponder the relative value of a 100 watt generator.

It is such a cold day.  One cannot take off one’s gloves for more than a minute at a time.  My cheeks feel numb from the cold wind.  Men and boys try to find shelter in the barn entrance yet still be close enough to bid.  I sit on an empty wagon and watch until I am too cold to stay.

Before leaving I visit the food shed once more.  The lunch rush is over, but the two men are still making donuts in the corner.  I ride home with a half dozen of their powdered, cream filled pockets of goodness in a grease-stained paper bag on my bike rack.