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We live amidst the Amish. Tractors now seem strange to us, and slightly profane; teams of horses plow our fields. No longer does a horse and buggy stopped at an ATM rate more than a passing glance, and it only seems right that shopping centers should have hitching posts. Here, where we live, the mighty beasts of the landscape are made not of steel, but flesh and blood. Modern farm gadgetry is just a rumor.

Today I went for my customary Amish land run. A few times a week I trot twice around a two-mile loop, a course that takes me through four Amish farms and alongside several other Amish homes connected to these farms. When we first moved here two years ago, I ventured out with a sense of caution, even trepidation. Not only do a variety of automobiles race along these narrow roads, but horse-propelled buggies do too. What is the proper approach to a horse and buggy? Does one cross to the other side to avoid being chased or chomped? Can these bearded drivers be trusted to keep carriage and horse on a straight course? Closer to the heart, would the Amish sneer at one of the "English" (their name for us, since they speak a German dialect called "Pennsylvania Dutch") jogging on their roads, alongside their farms?

"Why does that man run, Papa?" I imagined an Amish child asking his father.

"Oh," replies the sage, "because even his body demands work of some kind. You can't sit around all day and expect rest for the soul at night."

My fears were in vain. Horses generally do avoid runners, and the Amish wave politely as we cross paths, sometimes even calling out a greeting. I've detected nothing more hostile than perhaps a muffled snicker.

Three times today I passed a middle-aged Amish woman and a young girl walking the opposite way around the loop, apparently out for exercise as well. At our first encounter we exchanged hellos. At the second, about ten minutes later, the woman caught me off guard, shouting, "You make us look sick!" "Yeah," I yelled back, "but I feel sick!" At our third meeting, she called out, with a hardy Pennsylvania Dutch accent, "Don't tell me you've done the whole loop again!" I merely nodded, now incapable of vocal exertion. "Give me a year," she retorted. As we parted, I felt my spirits buoyed by the exchange. Decent, peaceable, kind: The Amish, die stille im lande (the quiet in the land), as they were once known, are fine neighbors, even to those of us who indulge in such odd practices as jogging, a peculiar folkway of postindustrial America.

As I run, I often find myself trying to gauge just how the Amish are faring in their battle to keep the modern world at bay and their own way of life intact. This day, as the children bob by on their way to their little schoolhouses, a visual incongruence jars me: amidst the collage of blacks, blues, purples, and browns I see neon pink. Thermoses, it seems, have made it onto their back-to-school lists. Is this a bad sign?

Donald B. Kraybill and Steven M. Nolt, in their recent study Amish Enterprise: From Plows to Profits, warn that the broader consumer culture is indeed making inroads among the Amish; business concerns play an in creasingly dominant role in a sizable number of families. Apparently this is discomfiting to many within their community. Kraybill and Nolt record the cryptic counsel of one Amish woman: "You shouldn't be in business if you are married." Is she a crotchety member of a generation about to be passed by or a prescient observer of dangerous new times? My impressionistic evidence leads me to affirm the latter.

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October 4 1999, Vol. 43, No. 11