In the valley of the shadow: an elegy to Lancaster County PDF
Preview In the valley of the shadow: an elegy to Lancaster County
In the Valley of the Shadow : An Elegy to title: Lancaster County author: Testa, Randy-Michael. publisher: University Press of New England isbn10 | asin: 0874517699 print isbn13: 9780874517699 ebook isbn13: 9780585255262 language: English Mennonites--Pennsylvania--Mill Creek Valley (Lancaster County)--Social conditions, Amish--Pennsylvania--Mill subject Creek Valley (Lancaster County)--Social conditions, Mennonites--Pennsylvania--Mill Creek Valley (Lancaster County)--Pictorial works, Amish--Pennsy publication date: 1996 lcc: F157.L2T475 1996eb ddc: 974.8/15 Mennonites--Pennsylvania--Mill Creek Valley (Lancaster County)--Social conditions, Amish--Pennsylvania--Mill subject: Creek Valley (Lancaster County)--Social conditions, Mennonites--Pennsylvania--Mill Creek Valley (Lancaster County)--Pictorial works, Amish--Pennsy Page iii In the Valley of the Shadow An Elegy to Lancaster County Randy-Michael Testa PHOTOGRAPHS BY ED WORTECK Page iv University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755 Text © 1996 by Randy-Michael Testa Photographs © 1996 by Ed Worteck All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 5 4 3 2 1 data appear at the end of the book CIP Page v The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of Righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. PSALM 23 (A PSALM OF DAVID) Page vii Contents Preface: Picturing the Invisible ix Acknowledgments xi People and Places xiii Chronology of Events xv Introduction xix 1. Through the Valley 1 2. The Shadow 12 3. The Paths of Righteousness 31 4. Yea, Though I Walk 47 5. I will Fear no Evil 55 Epilogue: A Parable 71 Notes 75 Page ix Preface Picturing the Invisible Shortly after my book After the Fire: The Destruction of the Lancaster County Amish was published, I received a telephone call from a man who said he had read and been moved by the book. He also said he'd been doing some photography in Lancaster County and wondered if he might show me some of his work. Having met several of Pennsylvania's most notorious photographers of the Amish, I was doubtful at first. In the voice on the other end of the line I heard something that struck a chord, and we ended up talking for almost an hour. Finally, out of sheer curiosity I asked, "How did you get my telephone number?" and the voice replied, "I called your parents in Phoenixville, since your book says that's where they live. After your mother and I talked awhile, she said, 'You seem all right to me,' and gave me your number." The summer of 1993 marked the three hundredth birthday of Amish society. It also marked the escalation of a battle over the future of Mill Creek Valley in eastern Lancaster County, a battle fought on one side by Lancaster Conference Mennonite businessmen and local township officials attempting to build a huge retirement village and on the other by a coalition of Earl Township residentsOld Order Mennonites, Old Order Amish, and "English" (that is, non-Amish)determined that it be built elsewhere. I had spent time in Mill Creek Valley and knew its extraordinary countryside well, so at the end of the telephone call I suggested that we meet and look over the valley. In July, after I gave a talk at Elizabethtown College, a tall, gawky man in spectacles, with a wide yellow-and-black Kodak print box under his long arm, stood waiting as I left the podium. His name was Ed Worteck. I looked over the box of photographs and was impressed by what Ed saw. I said, "Let's head over to Mill Creek Valley." We drove past farmhouses whose occupants still hold the original deed granted their forebears by William Penn, past the homes of ordinary people who suddenly found themselves meeting in a tobacco shed late into the evenings. And every now and then Ed would say in his unassumingly polite, Maryland-tinged voice, "Do you mind if I pull over and take a photograph of this?" Bringing a camera into Lancaster County is like walking around with a cocked rifle. Many Plain People are afraid of what they know will hap- Page x pen when they see somebody carrying one. And while religious imperative forbids Old Order peoples from having their picture taken (regarded as the making of graven imagery), many tourists behave as if the Plain sects existed solely to enhance their vacation scrapbooks. One day, Ed casually mentioned that the church he was baptized in was founded in a house overlooking Mill Creek Valley, near the source of Mill Creek itself. Now I understood why he wanted to photograph the area. Ed wanted to show others what he saw when he looked past the soil. By choice he used the modern-day equivalent of standard nineteenth- century camera equipmentsomehow more suited to his subject. Ed refused to take pictures of Old Order Mennonites and Old Order Amish. If he wanted to photograph a barn, he first went up to the house and asked its owners; if they said no, that was that. The result is a collection of photographs unlike any before taken in Lancaster County. Its bucolic landscape has been the subject of innumerable coffee table volumes filled with artful shots of swirly farmland taken from the air, but such books are for nostalgia seekers and are unabashedly idealizedalways the hallmark of loss. They veil a grim reality: that Lancaster County's abundant agricultural heritage is intentionally being destroyed. But Ed's photographs are imbued with an impending sense of physical destruction and subsequent moral loss. Of her work as a Catholic fiction writer, Flannery O'Connor wrote, "It is what is invisible that God sees and that the Christian must look for." For her, seeing and rendering were red-emptive acts inextricably bound up with one another. For Anton Chekhov, the function of art was not to offer solutions but to correctly pose the questions. With eloquence and alarm, Ed Worteck's photography looks for the invisible while posing basic questions: "How has this happened?" and "Now that you have seen it, what will you do about it?"
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