Artisans and Minor Misdemeanors
One of my favourite places to go on a Saturday morning, despite the crowds, is the Mennonite Farmers’ Market in St Jacobs. I am told, because I have not really done any significant research in order to write this book, that next to Niagara Falls and Graceland, St Jacobs is the greatest tourist attraction in Southern Ontario. This could be yet another rural myth. Whatever the stats say Canadians have a passion for anything Mennonite, which may explain why you bought this book in the first place. As observers we revel at the opportunity to see Mennonites in their natural habitat. Mennonites are a modern day enigma.
Now I would be the first to admit that there are lots of things at that farmers market that have nothing to do with either farmers or Mennonites, in fact I have no idea why certain obviously non-Mennonite vendors are there other than sheer opportunism. In addition to the genuine Mennonite products such as pork sausages, pork chops, pork by-products, pork bacon, complete living pigs, (sorry I am writing this while still living in Kuwait, a Muslim country with a hate on for all things pork and I am hallucinating), one can also buy cheap toys from capitalistic Red China, plastic models, tube socks, velvet paintings picturing sad street kids and Hispanic looking women with large eyes, and once I bought a soft and cuddly blanket with a picture of a zebra on it. My wife got a toe ring; so there is a range of items from which to choose. However, the genuine Mennonite produce and products are characterized by a high level of skill, quality and craftsmanship.
As a Mennonite in the more ethnic sense of the word, coming from good German/Dutch stock I too take great pride in my own craftsmanship, although I’m not really known as a technical person, a handyman or even the type of person a woman would call on if something needed fixing. I did replace a light bulb once. I hasten to add, as I rise to my own defense, I did, as a kid, make a pretty mean alley-gun. Some Mennonites, in the true Gandian sense of the word are well steeped in the realms and philosophical constructs of non-violence and passive resistance. While others like myself and my childhood friends thought that a “people’s underground militia” was not necessarily a faulty back up plan.
Remember that scene in the movie entitled Witness, starring Harrison Ford in which he posses undercover as an Amish? In this particular scene he is baited into a fight by some secular asshole, and as the Harrison Ford character rose to the heckler’s taunts, he struck out and punched one of them. It was a good clean punch by any standard. This scene has high viewer ratings (I just made that up); I still remember it though, because everyone likes to see the underdog win. It is part of the American ethos.
What’s the moral of the story? It’s this, as a result of Ford’s most excellent, well placed and timely punch the secular-asshole-hecklers gave the Amish a wide birth and maybe lived to respect, or maybe even fear the potential threat posed by any Amish male. Assuming for a moment that Harrison Ford actually is Amish, and Hollywood movies are real, his actions may, i.e. that of a single person, be generalized to the larger non-Amish population to the point that all Amish can be viewed as potential and latent secret urban street fighters and therefore should not be messed with.
Obviously some degree of transference had taken place for me personally, when as a kid, and despite the fact I had not yet seen Harrison Ford play his Amish roll, I wanted to be that secret Mennonite super hero with the black cape, the speedy black stallion (buggy optional) with a long whip, and a hot Amish girl friend modeled after Penelope Cruz. I guess much like a modern day Mennonite Zorro. I think I look good in basic black.
As a kid I took great pride in Mennonite craftsmanship and tended to embrace the concept of “urban Zorro-like street fighters” because of my fascination with guns. And so it came to pass I fabricated my first marble gun, so called because it fired a small alley or marble with an incredible muzzle velocity enough to severely dent the door of any moving vehicle. I know.
I can’t actually take credit for the invention of this crude but effective weapon because living in the shadow of my more technically ept brother who probably got the idea from a friend and this tradition has been passed on likely since the early days of the Protestant Reformation. However, in 1958, lacking the capacity to Google building instructions for hand held weapons, as spoiled kids are able to do today, we had to improvise. Times certainly have changed and literally knowledge is power.
A marble gun is actually a simple project. The main raw material is a piece of pipe about a foot long, either copper or lead and readily available at most residential construction sites. Today kids can buy the pipe at Home Depot, but where’s the fun in that? The pipe must be flattened at one end, but not sealed. This procedure is easily done with a hammer also available at the above mentioned outlets. To fire this handheld instrument one only has to insert a fire cracker, which must, in diameter, correspond to that of the opening of the pipe. The wick of the fire cracker should extend through the slit at the flattened end of the pipe. Insert one marble being cognizant of the fact that the closer the marble diameter is to the inside diameter of the pipe the more forceful the fire power, as little energy will be wasted. A marble too small or a pipe too large would be an ineffective weapon, or as I like to say, a kinetic toy. Now try to imagine those same directions I just gave you done by an IKEA artist using key Swedish terms and I think you are at a mastery level.
Now there you stand with pipe in hand, loaded and all that is lacking is a target. Stationary targets pose little challenge and we, my friends and I, quickly graduated to moving targets, and really what moves better than a car, a rhetorical question I know.
Disclaimer:
It is safe to finally come out of the “closet” so to speak and tell this story now as I am a grandfather and soon to be 60 years old at the time of this writing, which means the statute of limitations has by this time run out about five decades ago. I am no longer liable in a legal, and I’m sure in any moral sense, to any of our youthful pranks, miscellaneous misdemeanors and lives I may have ruined along the way.
It was a warm summer evening about dusk near an abandoned warehouse at the edge of town. I have always wanted to write those words in a story, but since they don’t really apply here it should actually read: It was a warm summer evening about dusk as my friends and I walked through a vineyard about a half mile north of base camp, a tent in my backyard. We had been practicing with our alley guns the previous week and soon grew to know the characteristics of each in terms of range and force. Shooting at and denting metal garbage cans was fun for awhile, but our quarry that day was anything with wheels on Vine Street.
In debriefing with my cognitive therapist many years after these events transpired and when asked, by my support group, the fundamental question. “Why would you do such a dumb-ass thing?” I really couldn’t answer. I would like to say I was just following orders, or it was all about peer pressure, or simply I suffered from some mal adaptive personality disordered caused by generations of suppressed aggression due to the Mennonite propensity towards and support of a passive resistant life style. Who really knows? Maybe I just liked Harrison Ford.
In our adolescent minds the parallel rows of a vineyard were much like the rows of trenches used in World War I land battles on the Western Front. We fancied ourselves soldiers. Each row in a vineyard has a mound supporting the roots and probably keeping in moisture which also served as a good place to hide behind and observe the enemy. Kurt, Walter, John, Marv and I lay side by each waiting for the first car. We really only had American automobiles to target because our automobile markets had not yet been breached by cheaper high quality foreign imports. The phrase, “What was good for GM was good for America” still had some meaning back then. In retrospect I view our collective actions as a very early preemptive strike against NAFTA. We weren’t delinquents we were enlightened political activists and as in any righteous protest their would be some collateral damage. Retrospective rationalization is a marvelous tool.
I lit a match, held it to the fuse of my alley gun, stood and held it away from my face. I led my target by about fifty feet, it, a 54 green Pontiac was at a range of about 100 feet and then the ensuing explosion. My hand recoiled slightly there was a pause, the acrid smell of gunpowder and then nothing. I missed my first shot. Shit!
If nothing else my religion had taught me to be persistent and like Nelson at Trafalgar we held our firing line and waited. Each of the five alley guns was primed and loaded. We timed the lighting of the fuses with the next approaching car and then bang, bang, bang we fired in quick succession. Just as in a firing squad no single individual knows who hit the target, but we all knew that someone did.
The driver of the target car, the one with the huge dent in his door, slammed on his brakes and leapt from the car and ran wildly into the vineyard. Our “target” had the advantage of an angry adrenaline rush cursing through his veins. He ran like a madman. By this time we took off like Jack-the-Bear at warp speed. If we had Klingon cloaking devices we would have used them. We did have the advantage of a head start and our foolish energetic youth. We also had the adrenaline rush from extreme levels of fear. Our big plus, which put us over the top was that we knew the terrain. We had home team advantage. We also had trained for years in many of our hide and seek games as to how to travel between rows of a vineyard at top speed. It was all about drop and roll. Leap through the vine, roll, stand, two steps and leap. It was all about pace and rhythm. We were poetry in motion. We also knew that when we got out of the vineyard into the residential streets on the other side we had to split up in five directions and not return to base camp.
But, after all is said and done and the dust settles, what did we learn from this bizarre and scary foray into the dark side? And I hasten to add that we only did that same dumb stunt with the marble guns one more time before finding some other mindless diversion. I’ll talk about potato guns in a later chapter.
I can tell you in all honesty I, and I can’t speak for the others, learned lots. I learned that with proper training, practice, steely nerves with the use of a strategic group plan with proper communication and logistics one can accomplish almost anything. We were apt students. Growing up meant living on the edge. I think we did our Anabaptist ancestors proud. They often had to flee from their Catholic oppressors; somehow history has an odd way of repeating itself.
Marty Rempel
From..
“Growing Up Mennonite”
One of my favourite places to go on a Saturday morning, despite the crowds, is the Mennonite Farmers’ Market in St Jacobs. I am told, because I have not really done any significant research in order to write this book, that next to Niagara Falls and Graceland, St Jacobs is the greatest tourist attraction in Southern Ontario. This could be yet another rural myth. Whatever the stats say Canadians have a passion for anything Mennonite, which may explain why you bought this book in the first place. As observers we revel at the opportunity to see Mennonites in their natural habitat. Mennonites are a modern day enigma.
Now I would be the first to admit that there are lots of things at that farmers market that have nothing to do with either farmers or Mennonites, in fact I have no idea why certain obviously non-Mennonite vendors are there other than sheer opportunism. In addition to the genuine Mennonite products such as pork sausages, pork chops, pork by-products, pork bacon, complete living pigs, (sorry I am writing this while still living in Kuwait, a Muslim country with a hate on for all things pork and I am hallucinating), one can also buy cheap toys from capitalistic Red China, plastic models, tube socks, velvet paintings picturing sad street kids and Hispanic looking women with large eyes, and once I bought a soft and cuddly blanket with a picture of a zebra on it. My wife got a toe ring; so there is a range of items from which to choose. However, the genuine Mennonite produce and products are characterized by a high level of skill, quality and craftsmanship.
As a Mennonite in the more ethnic sense of the word, coming from good German/Dutch stock I too take great pride in my own craftsmanship, although I’m not really known as a technical person, a handyman or even the type of person a woman would call on if something needed fixing. I did replace a light bulb once. I hasten to add, as I rise to my own defense, I did, as a kid, make a pretty mean alley-gun. Some Mennonites, in the true Gandian sense of the word are well steeped in the realms and philosophical constructs of non-violence and passive resistance. While others like myself and my childhood friends thought that a “people’s underground militia” was not necessarily a faulty back up plan.
Remember that scene in the movie entitled Witness, starring Harrison Ford in which he posses undercover as an Amish? In this particular scene he is baited into a fight by some secular asshole, and as the Harrison Ford character rose to the heckler’s taunts, he struck out and punched one of them. It was a good clean punch by any standard. This scene has high viewer ratings (I just made that up); I still remember it though, because everyone likes to see the underdog win. It is part of the American ethos.
What’s the moral of the story? It’s this, as a result of Ford’s most excellent, well placed and timely punch the secular-asshole-hecklers gave the Amish a wide birth and maybe lived to respect, or maybe even fear the potential threat posed by any Amish male. Assuming for a moment that Harrison Ford actually is Amish, and Hollywood movies are real, his actions may, i.e. that of a single person, be generalized to the larger non-Amish population to the point that all Amish can be viewed as potential and latent secret urban street fighters and therefore should not be messed with.
Obviously some degree of transference had taken place for me personally, when as a kid, and despite the fact I had not yet seen Harrison Ford play his Amish roll, I wanted to be that secret Mennonite super hero with the black cape, the speedy black stallion (buggy optional) with a long whip, and a hot Amish girl friend modeled after Penelope Cruz. I guess much like a modern day Mennonite Zorro. I think I look good in basic black.
As a kid I took great pride in Mennonite craftsmanship and tended to embrace the concept of “urban Zorro-like street fighters” because of my fascination with guns. And so it came to pass I fabricated my first marble gun, so called because it fired a small alley or marble with an incredible muzzle velocity enough to severely dent the door of any moving vehicle. I know.
I can’t actually take credit for the invention of this crude but effective weapon because living in the shadow of my more technically ept brother who probably got the idea from a friend and this tradition has been passed on likely since the early days of the Protestant Reformation. However, in 1958, lacking the capacity to Google building instructions for hand held weapons, as spoiled kids are able to do today, we had to improvise. Times certainly have changed and literally knowledge is power.
A marble gun is actually a simple project. The main raw material is a piece of pipe about a foot long, either copper or lead and readily available at most residential construction sites. Today kids can buy the pipe at Home Depot, but where’s the fun in that? The pipe must be flattened at one end, but not sealed. This procedure is easily done with a hammer also available at the above mentioned outlets. To fire this handheld instrument one only has to insert a fire cracker, which must, in diameter, correspond to that of the opening of the pipe. The wick of the fire cracker should extend through the slit at the flattened end of the pipe. Insert one marble being cognizant of the fact that the closer the marble diameter is to the inside diameter of the pipe the more forceful the fire power, as little energy will be wasted. A marble too small or a pipe too large would be an ineffective weapon, or as I like to say, a kinetic toy. Now try to imagine those same directions I just gave you done by an IKEA artist using key Swedish terms and I think you are at a mastery level.
Now there you stand with pipe in hand, loaded and all that is lacking is a target. Stationary targets pose little challenge and we, my friends and I, quickly graduated to moving targets, and really what moves better than a car, a rhetorical question I know.
Disclaimer:
It is safe to finally come out of the “closet” so to speak and tell this story now as I am a grandfather and soon to be 60 years old at the time of this writing, which means the statute of limitations has by this time run out about five decades ago. I am no longer liable in a legal, and I’m sure in any moral sense, to any of our youthful pranks, miscellaneous misdemeanors and lives I may have ruined along the way.
It was a warm summer evening about dusk near an abandoned warehouse at the edge of town. I have always wanted to write those words in a story, but since they don’t really apply here it should actually read: It was a warm summer evening about dusk as my friends and I walked through a vineyard about a half mile north of base camp, a tent in my backyard. We had been practicing with our alley guns the previous week and soon grew to know the characteristics of each in terms of range and force. Shooting at and denting metal garbage cans was fun for awhile, but our quarry that day was anything with wheels on Vine Street.
In debriefing with my cognitive therapist many years after these events transpired and when asked, by my support group, the fundamental question. “Why would you do such a dumb-ass thing?” I really couldn’t answer. I would like to say I was just following orders, or it was all about peer pressure, or simply I suffered from some mal adaptive personality disordered caused by generations of suppressed aggression due to the Mennonite propensity towards and support of a passive resistant life style. Who really knows? Maybe I just liked Harrison Ford.
In our adolescent minds the parallel rows of a vineyard were much like the rows of trenches used in World War I land battles on the Western Front. We fancied ourselves soldiers. Each row in a vineyard has a mound supporting the roots and probably keeping in moisture which also served as a good place to hide behind and observe the enemy. Kurt, Walter, John, Marv and I lay side by each waiting for the first car. We really only had American automobiles to target because our automobile markets had not yet been breached by cheaper high quality foreign imports. The phrase, “What was good for GM was good for America” still had some meaning back then. In retrospect I view our collective actions as a very early preemptive strike against NAFTA. We weren’t delinquents we were enlightened political activists and as in any righteous protest their would be some collateral damage. Retrospective rationalization is a marvelous tool.
I lit a match, held it to the fuse of my alley gun, stood and held it away from my face. I led my target by about fifty feet, it, a 54 green Pontiac was at a range of about 100 feet and then the ensuing explosion. My hand recoiled slightly there was a pause, the acrid smell of gunpowder and then nothing. I missed my first shot. Shit!
If nothing else my religion had taught me to be persistent and like Nelson at Trafalgar we held our firing line and waited. Each of the five alley guns was primed and loaded. We timed the lighting of the fuses with the next approaching car and then bang, bang, bang we fired in quick succession. Just as in a firing squad no single individual knows who hit the target, but we all knew that someone did.
The driver of the target car, the one with the huge dent in his door, slammed on his brakes and leapt from the car and ran wildly into the vineyard. Our “target” had the advantage of an angry adrenaline rush cursing through his veins. He ran like a madman. By this time we took off like Jack-the-Bear at warp speed. If we had Klingon cloaking devices we would have used them. We did have the advantage of a head start and our foolish energetic youth. We also had the adrenaline rush from extreme levels of fear. Our big plus, which put us over the top was that we knew the terrain. We had home team advantage. We also had trained for years in many of our hide and seek games as to how to travel between rows of a vineyard at top speed. It was all about drop and roll. Leap through the vine, roll, stand, two steps and leap. It was all about pace and rhythm. We were poetry in motion. We also knew that when we got out of the vineyard into the residential streets on the other side we had to split up in five directions and not return to base camp.
But, after all is said and done and the dust settles, what did we learn from this bizarre and scary foray into the dark side? And I hasten to add that we only did that same dumb stunt with the marble guns one more time before finding some other mindless diversion. I’ll talk about potato guns in a later chapter.
I can tell you in all honesty I, and I can’t speak for the others, learned lots. I learned that with proper training, practice, steely nerves with the use of a strategic group plan with proper communication and logistics one can accomplish almost anything. We were apt students. Growing up meant living on the edge. I think we did our Anabaptist ancestors proud. They often had to flee from their Catholic oppressors; somehow history has an odd way of repeating itself.
Marty Rempel
From..
“Growing Up Mennonite”
No comments:
Post a Comment