By Leah Eskin
Which is why the Guard is eager to expand the range, and why it intended to add two low-level flight corridors leading up to it. Starting roughly over Cedar Rapids and Madison, pilots could drop down, putting in a couple hundred miles of rigorous low-altitude flying and radar evasion en route to bombing practice. On site, they’d get a shot at new angles on old targets. “We’re trying to train smartly, efficiently, wisely,” says Neumann.
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“This would be spoiling the want-ing to live here,” said Gideon Miller, an Amish bishop and farmer. “For us, and for your people too.”
Today, the Amish number about 5,000 in Vernon County. Dotted between modern farming operations are Amish settlements where men in straw hats and ample beards lead teams of draft horses through the fields, women in dark dresses and white caps tend razor-straight rows of radishes and marigolds, and clumps of children–seeming miniatures of their parents–walk the winding roads or drift by guiding wooden-wheeled buggies.
“We didn’t want any part of it,” says Miller. He agreed to join the opposition.
Cattle buyer Charlotte O’Brien explains “startle effect” like this: When a sudden noise spooks a cow, her natural response is to run. And when one runs, so do the rest. “What other defenses do they have?” asks O’Brien. “They can’t defend themselves by mooing at you.” The resulting stampede can devastate a herd. Sometimes the cattle crush each other. Sometimes they injure themselves on fences–or through fences, in traffic.
“Human life isn’t much to them,” says Gideon Miller. “If a toy has any part that you could hurt yourself with, they have to make it differently. With this–if you get hurt, you get hurt.”
