Havre de Grace. -- The other day I had occasion to journey into rural Pennsylvania. As always, it was like a visit to another country, but a familiar one, and as usual I returned refreshed.
Pennsylvania is different. I was conscious of the difference years ago when I lived on a little farm there, and I'm conscious of it still. You sense it soon after you cross the Mason-Dixon line, if you do so at the right place. Despite the homogenizing pressures of modern life, the cities, the small towns and the countryside, especially in the Amish and Mennonite sections, are all distinctly Pennsylvanian.
Late fall is a good time in any farming area, but it seems particularly so in Pennsylvania. Most of the corn has been picked, and manure is being spread on the stubble. Next summer's wheat and barley are already springing, optimistically green, out of the cold dark ground.
Away from the cities, the roads are good and for the most part uncrowded. From high places you can see a long way, and what you see is reassuring. In much of Pennsylvania, although not all of it, the farms appear productive and well-kept. Unlike so many Maryland farms, they're not slipping back into sedge and multiflora rose as they wait hopelessly for the inevitable subdivisions.
At the same time, the farms still look like farms, which isn't the case everywhere in America where agriculture thrives. There are fields in Pennsylvania, not just great stretches of cropland from which all fence lines and hedgerows -- and, in much of the agricultural United States, farmhouses too -- have been eliminated to facilitate the passage of enormous machines.
Thank the Amish for that. An Amish family needs 60 to 70 acres of land to make a decent living. That's about all a father and son, working with horses, can handle. In the Amish equation, more acres don't mean a better life.
If an Amish farmer wants to expand, and has the labor to do so, he might add some more livestock, or plant vegetables or specialty crops. If he wanted more money he might build furniture to sell off the farm, or get a crew together to build barns for suburbanites down in Maryland. But he wouldn't seek more land.
Farming with horses or mules, as the Amish do, makes for a quieter and cleaner countryside. It limits the expansion of family farms, and thus helps preserve such farms from generation to generation. And it reinforces family life; the horses need to stop and rest in the middle of the day, and as they don't come with headlights, they don't work at night.
David Kline, an Amish farmer from Ohio, notes in a wonderful collection of essays called "Great Possessions" that if he had a tractor and chose to kill weeds with chemicals instead of a cultivator -- "no-till" farming, which is all the rage these days -- he could take over his neighbor's 50 acres in addition to the 70 he farms with his son. Then the neighbor would be "free" to work off the farm.
But then, Mr. Kline goes on, "I wouldn't be able to do the excellent farming he is doing now, and I would miss the rich fragrance of his fertile soil. More than that, I would miss my neighbor."
The Amish and their less austere brethren, the Mennonites, have been in Pennsylvania since 1791. They're wary not only of too much modern machinery, but of too much modern government. They want to see that their family farms are preserved, but are suspicious of government programs that offer to help them do so.
In Lancaster County, however, they've been actively dedicating preservation easements to the private Lancaster Farmland Trust. the last six years, 54 farms -- average size 70 acres -- have been preserved, including Emma Krantz's 82-acre place in Strasburg where the movie "Witness" was filmed.
Pennsylvania is a state of particularly ugly cities, large and small, and unusually drab suburbs. But its plain small towns, often with farms right at the edges, are as appealing as its countryside.
They're conservative and traditional places, reflecting a conservative and traditional state. Religion is important, even among the English, as the Amish call outsiders. So is food. Rural Pennsylvania is full of family restaurants serving sauerkraut and pot pie to well-fed folks, many of whom at this season are especially hungry because they've been deer hunting.
James Sterba reports in the Wall Street Journal that there are more armed men hunting deer in Pennsylvania at this moment than there are troops in the U.S. Army. Twice as many, in fact. And he means men, not people, for he cites statistics saying that deer hunters are 92 percent male. He doesn't say how many of them voted for Bill Clinton.
Anyway, on my recent venture into Pennsylvania I didn't even hear a gunshot. That was mildly disappointing. Those of us who don't travel much anticipate adventure when we visit foreign places.
4( Peter A. Jay is a writer and farmer.