Amish

PERHAPS IT WAS inevitable. Casting is reportedly under way for the UPN television network's newest "reality" series: Amish in the City. The idea, which is patently offensive, is to plunk down a group of Amish teen-agers in a big city - apparently Los Angeles - and watch them get "freaked out" by their environs. So said CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves, who oversees UPN programming. Mr. Moonves' words are worth quoting in greater length: "To have people who don't have television walk down Rodeo Drive and be freaked out by what they see, I think, will be interesting television."

LANCASTER, Pa. -- For nearly 300 years the gentle, God-fearing Amish have worked this land, their backs turned on an outside world whose modern ways they do not want.Now a proposed toxic-waste dump in the heart of these bucolic farm fields has cast a long shadow over their historic presence, portending a spectacular collision of cultures that has some Amish contemplating the first mass exodus since their flight from Europe.State environmental officials have already approved the dump site, an old clay mine on a mountain at the headwaters of four watersheds serving soil-rich Lancaster County.

FREDERICKSBURG, Ohio -- A river of black horse-drawn buggies flowed over the hills near here in a funeral procession that stretched to another time -- when America was younger and the automobile for most was only a dream or a nightmare.Five Amish children, who were killed last week when they were struck by a car on a country road, were buried yesterday in one of the largest gatherings of the Amish in recent years.All weekend, hundreds of Amish people poured into this town of 500 residents some 60 miles south of Cleveland, where there are almost as many hitching posts as parking spaces.

A group of three men hammered spouting onto the frame of a barn under construction at Donald L. Lomax's 82-acre cattle farm on Calvary Road near Churchville.At the other end of the structure, another worker cut a sheet of tin that will become part of the 3,800-square-foot barn's roof.Meanwhile, two other men -- one old, one young -- carried lumber from a stack into the two-story barn where it will be used to panel a wall.This wasn't the scene of just any construction site.The workers were a group of about 30 Amish men from southern Lancaster County, Pa., whom Lomax had hired to build a new barn.

Amish farmers from Cecil County were among those attending the opening of last week's tobacco auction in Charles County, where the Farmers and Hughesville warehouses are the state's only remaining tobacco auction sites. Although the number of tobacco farmers has fallen in almost every county since Maryland started its buyout of farmers in 2001, the number is increasing in Cecil County, traditionally a nontobacco area. The reason is the Amish. Amish tobacco farmers - who for religious reasons do not participate in government programs - have crossed the Pennsylvania border into Cecil to try their luck at tobacco in Maryland.

Between the ages of 16 and about 24, many young Amish men and women are allowed, even encouraged, to leave their cloistered communities and spend time in the outside world, testing their faith and values against the temptations of Anheuser-Busch, Old Navy and Girls Gone Wild. It's a rite of passage known as rumspringa, Pennsylvania Dutch for "running around" or "running wild." Some Amish youths treat the rite like a seeker's sabbatical. Some simply find themselves a mobile home to rent out of sight of their families and proceed to consume large quantities of beer, like Coneheads.

Most people don't get worked up over man-made structures designed to house tractors, lawn mowers and other tools.But the 26-by-44-foot stick-frame shed that Groftdale Barns' Moses Riehl built left homebuilder Patrick Hagan absolutely awe-struck. "Its structure is just beautiful, and his work is really fantastic," Hagan said.Although Moses Riehl and his fellow Amish builders still get around pretty much by horse and buggy and frequently eschew other modern devices, they have garnered a reputation up and down the East Coast for fine craftsmanship, beautiful buildings -- often, but not exclusively, barns -- and a work ethic few canmatch.

NICKEL MINES, Pa. -- The old silos, the red farmhouses, the hills striped in autumnal brown: The scenery along Pennsylvania Route 896 in Lancaster County is every bit a Grant Wood painting come to life. But the American landscape painter would not have recognized the harsh shade of green - something akin to faded AstroTurf- that covered a lone patch of ground yesterday where the West Nickel Mines Amish School had stood. "It's hydroseed," said a weary Mike Hart, a spokesman for the Bart Township Fire Company, which early yesterday shared the difficult task of razing the schoolhouse where a gunman killed five Amish girls Oct. 2. "It looks strange now, but it will help the grass come up. Seven to 10 days and it won't be a bare patch anymore."

Many people, Aaron Beiler was told recently, think the Amish are putting on some sort of show for the benefit of tourists. "A big percentage of people think it's just a big Disneyland or something," he says with a laugh.Tourists who observe the Amish horse-drawn buggies keeping their own steady, serene pace at the edges of well-traveled Lancaster County roads might be forgiven for mistaking Pennsylvania Dutch country for some sort of Williamsburgesque living-history theme park. The "Plain People" in their long beards and straw hats, or their caps and modest, aproned dresses, are so purposefully out of step with hustling mainstream America that they might be living long, long ago or far, far away instead of thriving right in our midst.

NICKEL MINES, PA. -- Along the miles of twisting country roads that divide and unite this community, people went about their business yesterday, tending acres of corn and pumpkins, ordering meatloaf lunch specials at homey diners, and browsing knickknacks at tourist haunts. But like most everyone living here, Sam Riehl, a sturdy Amish farmer whose dark hair refuses to be tamed under a straw hat, fought yesterday to understand Monday's schoolhouse shooting and hoped to find a way to help those it touched firsthand.