The buggy defines Amish life. It is symbolic and iconic; practical and dangerous. The Amish-except for the Beachy Amish-reject the car absolutely. The Amish I know best are deeply committed to keeping their community together. Buggies and plow horses slow down the Amish corner of the world, making it easier and more practical to stay separate. Cars would make it too easy to navigate the outside world. Nearly every English person who drives a car in Ohio's Amish country has a story about a crash or a near crash with a buggy. Every thinking English driver around here is on high alert-caution sign or no caution sign-especially at night.

The Swartzentrubers of this area refuse to display the reflecting orange-and-red slow-moving vehicle sign or to use battery-powered lights. To come upon a Swartzentruber buggy at night is to spy the faint hint of a lantern's red light, as if your headlights have shone on a reflector stuck in somebody's front lawn; but as you get closer you'll catch what look like long silver splinters of something you can't identify, ostensibly floating independently of anything else, and this will be your signal that you've come upon a buggy in the dark, where parents and five, seven, nine of their children will be riding home from a long church Sunday of worship and socializing, perched on benches in the open night, belted to their seats by nothing more than their blankets and prayers, hoping you'll see them in time to stop or pass.

Feeling warm for the first time in over twelve hours, I take my place on a crowded wooden bench at a long stretch of tables covered with coffee and toast, jam and apple butter. I keep my eyes on my plate as much as possible, trying not to bring attention to myself or to cause my friend Samuel any unnecessary trouble. As a member of the Swartzentruber Amish, the most conservative of the world's Amish, Samuel has been granted special permission from his bishop in order to have me drive him and his four-year-old daughter from Ohio to Canada for his mother's funeral, and I do not want to illuminate my outsider status at this funeral meal by awkward gawking or unnecessary chatter.

The over two hundred Amish mourners and I are fed in shifts. About fifty people at a time sit down to eat bread and jelly and to drink coffee. Nearly a hundred of us, almost all Amish except for me, had talked and rubbed our hands together outside in the freezing north, waiting for our turn at the tables.

Once word spreads among the mourners that I have driven Samuel up to Canada, allowing him to bury his mother and return home in time to be at his wife's side when she gives birth Amish men begin approaching me, making conversation, asking how I know Samuel, making me feel welcome, at least for that day. The Amish women are polite but do not converse with me, and they keep their distance when the men are not around.

As I accept another piece of bread that I do not want but am afraid to refuse in case that would offend somebody, I begin to sense just how private and insular these Swartzentruber Amish are. Everybody at the funeral must understand that to have an "English" (non-Amish) person present at this sacred event has ever so slightly loosened the fabric of this tightly bound community.

The only person I make eye contact with is a small boy sitting directly across from me. He has curious eyes, as if he's studying me with the look of a bemused anthropologist. Like every other Amish boy seated around the table, my little anthropologist is dressed in a dark-blue jacket and pants with a collarless white shirt underneath. His hair is cut in a Dutch-boy style, with short bangs across his forehead and hair over his ears. His black felt hat and hundreds of others like it hang on every hook and nail on the four walls. In summer months boys and men wear wide-brimmed straw hats. Males of all generations wear hats with bands that are precisely five-eighths of an inch wide, the mark of a Swartzentruber Amish man. The boys' hats have brims that must be exactly three and a half inches wide, and to the untrained eye they are distinguishable from the men's hats only by their size. A trained eye can detect that the brims on the men's hats are wider by half an inch, and the hat brims of the ordained are a half inch wider than that. How the hundreds of men here today pick out their own hat and not somebody else's is just one more in a myriad of Amish mysteries.

People are polite, nodding greetings, offering me another slice of bread or milk for my coffee.

Rumbles of conversations in Pennsylvania Dutch punctuate the meal. Frost frames the windows.

Not far from me, down the table and on the young anthropologist's side, is a woman wearing a head covering clearly different from those of the other women. Her husband wears dark clothes, but not the garb of the Swartzentruber Amish. They don't seem to belong in the same way everybody else does. After the funeral I see them get in their van and head home. Later I learn they're Samuel's uncle and aunt, both of whom left the Swartzentruber Amish years before.

Not until a decade later will the curious boy and I meet again. Then I will learn the boy across from me was Samuel's nephew, Jonas, and I will know him as a young man who has created an aching chasm in his family, breaking his parents' hearts, risking eternity in hell, causing strife in his church, creating heartache all around, to which I am more than a mere witness.

But on this day ten years ago, I'm glad that somebody at this solemn gathering is looking my way, occasionally smiling shyly, letting me believe, if only for a second, that I'm not a dangerous outsider.