While “ready to party” and eager for “cruisin’ and boozin’,” they express the fear of dying outside the church and not going to heaven. Rumspringa is rather contradictory and does create tension in many of the young people experiencing it. Other Plain People - including, ironically, the slightly less restrictive Beachy Amish - do not permit it indeed, they question why the Old Order implicitly condones immoral behavior before one becomes a church member that would be an immediate cause for banishment if committed as a church member. Rumspringa mostly is practiced in the larger Old Order Amish settlements around LaGrange County, Ind., Holmes County, Ohio, and Lancaster County, Pa. Most of the 400 hours of interviews (conducted over six years) on which the book is based originally were done for a 2002 film documentary, “The Devil’s Playground.” Translation aside, his description of the phenomenon is excellent, using the sort of documentary technique mastered by Tony Parker in “Bird, Kansas,” “Lighthouse” and “Soldier, Soldier” - letting the burden of the story be carried by the characters’ own words.
He says it derives in part from the German noun Raum, meaning space in the sense of outdoor space to roam about, whereas rumspringa usually is taken to be the Pennsylvania Dutch corruption of the German verb herumspringen, meaning, literally, to jump or run around.
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