Six months.
In six months Elam Stoltzfus learned to: hang drywall, drive a pickup (Tony taught him in an empty parking lot), use an ATM, cook spaghetti from a box, do laundry in a laundromat, drink beer (didn't like it, but finished it — politeness), watch television (mostly news and baseball), speak English without an accent (almost).
He rented a room from a Puerto Rican family in northeast Philadelphia. Seventy dollars a week, breakfast included. The mother, Carmen, fed him rice and beans and called him 'mi hijo blanco' — my white son. Her husband Jorge worked at an auto shop and taught Elam to play dominos in the evenings.
Elam had money — he earned five hundred a week and spent two hundred. He could buy a car. Rent an apartment. Stay.
He could stay.
This thought came every evening as he lay in his room — small, with a window facing the fire escape — and listened to the city. Sirens. Music from the bar across the street. Teenagers shouting. Highway hum. The city never slept, and neither did Elam — at least, not fully.
There were things he loved.
The library. Free, enormous, with books he'd never seen. He read everything — history, geography, biology, novels. Learned the world was much bigger and much more complex than the Amish school had taught. Learned about dinosaurs, black holes, the Renaissance, the Holocaust. Each book was a window opening onto a new world.
Concerts in the park. On Saturdays a jazz band played in Fairmount Park. Elam sat on the grass and listened. Music — real, live, not from a radio — was a revelation. The saxophone said things that couldn't be said in words. The piano laughed. The double bass breathed.
Carmen and Jorge. Their noisy, loving, chaotic family — four children, a grandmother, two dogs, constant visitors. They were everything an Amish family was not: loud, emotional, unpredictable. And everything it was: warm, caring, together.
There were things he hated.
Loneliness. Not physical — there were more people around than he'd seen in his entire life. But they weren't his people. Nobody knew his grandfather. Nobody remembered how he fell off a horse at seven. Nobody could say to him in Pennsylvania German, 'How are you, Elam?' — and actually want to hear the answer.
Trash. There was so much garbage in the city that Elam couldn't get used to it for weeks. Plastic cups, paper bags, cigarette butts, bottles. On an Amish farm, garbage didn't exist — everything was used, recycled, returned to the earth. In the city, things were disposable. As were, it seemed, relationships.
Meaninglessness. People in the city worked to earn money to spend money to work to earn. A wheel without an axle. Elam couldn't understand: why did Tony work sixty hours a week while his children grew up without him? Why did neighbors buy things they'd throw out in a month? Why were the streets full of people going somewhere but looking like they didn't know where?
The decision came on a Sunday morning.
Elam woke at seven — as always, because a farmer's body can't sleep longer. Got up. Looked out the window. The street was empty — Sunday, the city slept.
And he suddenly realized he was homesick. Not for the house — for Sunday. For what Sunday was at home. Church service in someone's house — three hours of singing, preaching, prayer. Lunch at long tables — the whole community, a hundred and fifty people, one family. Children running. Men talking about crops. Women about recipes. Old men sitting in the shade in silence, and that silence wasn't emptiness but fullness.
He missed the quiet. Real, deep, living quiet in which you can hear grass growing and earth breathing.
He missed meaning. On the farm every action had meaning: plant — it grows — it feeds. In the city, meaning was lost behind layers of abstraction: work — get paper — exchange for things — things break — work again.
He missed his mother.
He called from a payphone — to the Stoltzfus barn, where the community phone stood. Waited twelve rings.
"Hallo?" Father's voice. Cautious, uncomfortable with the phone.
"Daat. It's Elam."
Silence. Then:
"Are you well?"
"Ja. I… I want to come home."
Silence. Long. Elam could hear his father breathing — heavily, like after fieldwork.
"Come," Father said. "Mother is waiting."
"Daat?"
"Ja?"
"Thank you."
"For what?"
"For letting me go."
Father was quiet. Then said — and these were the longest words Elam had ever heard from him:
"You can't choose home if you don't know what else exists. Now you know. Now you choose for real."
He hung up.
Elam said goodbye to Tony (who shook his hand and said 'I knew'). Said goodbye to Carmen (who cried and gave him a bag of rice balls for the road). Said goodbye to the room, the fire escape, the city view.
On the bus back he sat by the window and watched the city give way to fields. Concrete giving way to earth. Noise fading.
He thought: I don't hate the world. The world is fine. It's just not mine. Like shoes that don't fit: you can walk, but they rub.
The bus stopped in Intercourse. Elam got off. Took off the baseball cap. Pulled from his backpack a hat — his own, black, Amish — and put it on.
The hat fit perfectly. As always.
He walked home — three miles down the road, past familiar farms, past familiar fields, past familiar horses that raised their heads and looked at him like an old friend returned from a long journey.
Mother stood on the porch. She wasn't crying. Stoltzfuses don't cry.
But she was smiling.
Elam Stoltzfus was baptized that fall. He married Miriam Lapp, built a house beside his father's farm, and became the best furniture maker in the county.
Eighty-five percent of young Amish who go through Rumspringa return to the community. Not because they don't know the alternative. Precisely because they do.
Elam keeps his Philadelphia Phillies baseball cap in the workshop. Sometimes puts it on when he works alone. Tells nobody.