The Wilder Life Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1. - Our Past Life

  Chapter 2. - Whose Woods These Are

  Chapter 3. - Going to Town

  Chapter 4. - Good Girls and Golden Curls

  Chapter 5. - There Is a Happy Land Far, Far Away

  Chapter 6. - The Way Home

  Chapter 7. - There Won’t Be Horses

  Chapter 8. - Fragments of a Dream

  Chapter 9. - Anywhere East or South

  Chapter 10. - The Road Back

  Chapter 11. - Be It Enacted

  Chapter 12. - Unremembered

  Acknowledgements

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ALSO BY WENDY MC CLURE

  I’m Not the New Me

  The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  New York 2011

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA •

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) •

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2011 by Wendy McClure

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McClure, Wendy.

  The Wilder life : my adventures in the lost world of Little house on the prairie / Wendy McClure. p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-48653-5

  1. Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 1867–1957—Appreciation. 2. Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 1867–1957. Little house on the prairie. 3. Frontier and pioneer life in literature. I. Title.

  PS3545.I342Z

  813’.52—dc22

  Book design and illustrations by Meighan Cavanaugh

  The names and identities of some individuals in this book have been changed to protect their privacy. Laura Ingalls Wilder changed a few names, too, you know.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.

  In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;

  however, the story, the experiences, and the words

  are the author’s alone.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Dad, with love.

  And for Chris, who read the books.

  1.

  Our Past Life

  I WAS BORN in 1867 in a log cabin in Wisconsin and maybe you were, too. We lived with our family in the Big Woods, and then we all traveled in a covered wagon to Indian Territory, where Pa built us another house, out on high land where the prairie grasses swayed. Right?

  We remember the strangest things: the way rabbits and wild hens and snakes raced past the cabin to escape a prairie fire, or else how it felt when the head of a needle slipped through a hole in the thimble and stuck us hard, and we wanted to yell, but we didn’t. We moved on to Minnesota, then South Dakota. I swear to God it’s true: we were a girl named Laura, who lived and grew up and grew old and passed on, and then she became a part of us somehow. She existed fully formed in our heads, her memories swimming around in our brains with our own.

  Or that’s how it felt to me at least. That’s how it still feels sometimes, if I really think about it. I mean I don’t believe in reincarnation, and obviously Laura Ingalls Wilder didn’t either, not with her respectable Protestant singing-off-key-in-wooden-churches upbringing. It’s just how reading the Little House books was for me as a kid. They gave me the uncanny sense that I’d experienced everything she had, that I had nearly drowned in the same flooded creek, endured the grasshopper plague of 1875, and lived through the Hard Winter. It’s a classic childhood delusion, I know, and in my typically dippy way I tended to believe that the fantasy was mine alone, that this magical past-life business was between Laura and me and no one else. Surely I was the only one who had this profound mind-meld with her that allowed me to feel her phantom pigtails tugging at my scalp; I had to be the only one who was into the books that much.

  This was despite the fact that I was just one of the millions of kids who discovered Wilder’s books in the 1970s and ’80s, not too long after the entire nine-book series was released in paperback in 1971, and around the same time the TV show Little House on the Prairie aired on NBC. Girls in earlier eras would have read the books in hardcover editions, perhaps as gifts from nice relatives who themselves loved the books as children.

  (And let’s be honest here: if you didn’t already know and love the Little House books, they would look and sound an awful lot like something your grandmother would foist upon you as a present, what with their historically edifying qualities and family values—basically, the literary equivalent of long underwear. In fact, I’m surprised that my grandmother didn’t give them to me, though had she done so, they might have gone unread, along with the etiquette guide and the thick, small-print, illustration-free book about the Amish. Thank you, Grandma. Sorry, Grandma.)

  Readers of my generation, though, could buy the Little House books cheap through Scholastic Book Clubs, and a great many more found their way to them after watching the TV show. And we were maybe the first generation of readers to be completely out of recollection range for the era these books recorded—we were born so late in the century that even our grandparents had only secondhand knowledge of covered wagons and dresses with bustles. The books were no longer really about anyone’s “good old days” anymore—nobody I knew, at least—and as a result the world they described, the woods and prairies and big sloughs and little towns, seemed to me almost as self-contained and mystical as Narnia or Oz.

  Except even better, because unlike those wholly fictional realms, the “Laura World,” as I’d come to think of it, was a little more permeable. It shared space with the actual past, so things from it could make their way into my world, where I would look for them everywhere. No doubt it helped that countless family restaurants and steak emporiums of my 1970s suburban childhood went for rustic, antique-strewn decorating themes, with knickknack shelves full of tin cups and assorted old-timey crap. It didn’t take much more than, say, the sight of a dusty glass oil lamp on the wall above a booth at a suburban Bonanza to make me feel like I was communing with Laura while I ate my cottage fries. Which I preferred to think of as “pan-fried potatoes.”

  Not like I was a d
orky kid or anything.

  Since I edit children’s books for a living, I get asked a lot about my favorite books as a kid. When I tell people I loved the Little House books, I know it’s a perfectly respectable answer, the sort of thing folks expect me to say. Then sometimes they go on and ask me whether I also loved various other Important Children’s Books, like Where the Wild Things Are and The Little Prince and The House at Pooh Corner, and I’ll do my best for a while, trying to play along, and then at some point I have to hem and haw and shrug because, well, you know what I really liked? I liked books that had pictures of toast in them.

  Well, not just toast, but, you know, cups and ladles and baskets and hats, lovingly rendered, all in their places in a room or even just in little vignettes, but at any rate, things, in all their thinginess. I had, and loved, a battered 1960s-era “pictionary” with wagons and hot dogs and butter dishes floating in plotless arrangements on the page. I pored over the page spreads in Richard Scarry’s Book of Something-or-Other, looking at all the little rooms whose contents were meticulously catalogued and the dressed-up raccoons and pigs and squirrels who sat in them, drinking “coffee” and listening to the “radio” and eating, yes, “toast.”

  (Though yes, there are those of you who will no doubt point out that, actually, the Little House books have hardly any toast at all, that in fact The Long Winter is the only book in the series in which toast appears, and then only once do the Ingallses get to even butter it before the town gets snowed in and provisions run low, and then the toast is eaten plain or dipped in tea for the next five months and two hundred pages, and the flour that they make the bread from in the first place is ground from seed wheat in the coffee mill with the little iron hopper and the tiny wooden drawer, and after Ma bakes the bread she makes a button lamp, because do you remember the button lamp, in the saucer, with the little square of calico that she twists up and greases into a wick? Shall we go on?)

  Toast or no toast, I think I’ve made my point here.

  The Little House world is at once as familiar as the breakfast table and as remote as the planets in Star Wars. If you had every last log cabin and covered wagon and iron stove needed to conjure this world up, you couldn’t, not completely: it’s a realm that gets much of its power from single things—the lone doll, trundle bed, china shepherdess, each one realer than real.

  Most of the Little House books I read came from the public library, usually off the paperback racks—the Harper Trophy editions with the yellow borders and spines, their corners worn soft after years of circulation. Sometimes I found the battered old hardcovers on the shelves, multiple copies of each book in thick plastic jackets. I remember studying the list of books in the series; their titles appeared in small caps in the front matter of every book, and I loved the way the list had its own rhythm: Little House in the Big Woods. Little House on the Prairie. Farmer Boy. On the Banks of Plum Creek. By the Shores of Silver Lake. The Long Winter. Of course I memorized them. Little Town on the Prairie. These Happy Golden Years. The First Four Years. The words plodded along reliably, like the feet of Indian ponies.

  And, oh my God: I wanted to live in one room with my whole family and have a pathetic corncob doll all my own. I wanted to wear a calico sunbonnet—or rather, I wanted to not wear a calico sunbonnet, the way Laura did, letting it hang down her back by its ties. I wanted to do chores because of those books. Carry water, churn butter, make headcheese. I wanted dead rabbits brought home for supper. I wanted go out into the backyard and just, I don’t know, grab stuff off trees, or uproot things from the ground, and bring it all inside in a basket and have my parents say, “My land! What a harvest!”

  There were a host of other things from the books that I remember I wanted to do, too, such as:

  Make candy by pouring syrup in the snow.

  Make bullets by pouring lead.

  Sew a seam with tiny and perfectly straight stitches.

  Have a man’s hands span my corseted waist, which at the time didn’t seem creepy at all.

  Twist hay into sticks.

  Eat salt pork.

  Eat fat pork.

  Keep a suckling pig as a pet.

  Chase a horse and/or ox into a barn stall.

  Ride on the back of a pony just by hanging on to its mane.

  Feel the chinook wind.

  I say I wanted to do all these things, though that may not have been what I truly desired. For instance, the sewing presented itself in the form of my grandma’s embroidery lessons, but despite my early Little House–inspired enthusiasm, I didn’t have the patience; couldn’t take how slow and laborious it was to stitch just one letter on the sampler I was doing. The needle kept becoming unthreaded, and more than once I accidentally sewed the embroidery hoop to my skirt. I was trying to spell out MY NAME IS WENDY MCCLURE. It felt like homework, and after a while I wondered what was the advantage of writing one’s name this way, when you could just take a Magic Marker and be done in ten seconds. I got as far as MY NAM before Grandma finished it for me. Though I was relieved, I knew that Ma Ingalls wouldn’t have let Laura off the hook so easily. I understood, deep down, that I lived in a different world from Laura’s, one where grandmas appreciated just that you tried, and that you didn’t have to know how to stitch the letters of your name, and that you could just watch The Love Boat instead. It’s not that I really wanted to make bullets or race around on ponies, it’s that I wanted to be in Laura World and do them.

  And Laura World, for all its enticing remnants washed in on the tides of time and antique shops, was another world, and to visit it was all but unthinkable. From what I could tell, the places where the Ingalls family lived were either mythical nowheres, like the Big Woods and the Prairie, or else impossible to find: Where, on a map of Minnesota in one’s parents’ 1970 encyclopedia set, would one even begin to look for the unnamed town in On the Banks of Plum Creek? And De Smet, South Dakota, where the family had settled at last, was in one of those big empty states at the top of the map, as remote, it seemed, as the moon. I knew that some kind of actual there existed from the books, but somehow I never considered that any of them could be reached from where I was.

  For our summer vacations my family took camping road trips, long, epic ones sometimes, to the southwest, where my grandparents lived, or east to New England. We’d seen the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia and Paul Revere’s house in Boston; if the places where Laura Ingalls Wilder had lived were really important, if there was anything to see, I supposed my mom or dad would know about it. Though of course in my mind the only old places where you could go were places where history happened, and I didn’t think of Laura’s life as history. It was more alive than that, and more secret somehow, too.

  Although I never asked if we could visit any of the places where she lived, I remember spending one long day in the car as we traveled through central Kansas, keeping up an extended reverie in which I hoped that we’d come across the cabin the Ingallses abandoned at the end of Little House on the Prairie. We’d see it in the distance, waiting for someone to come back to it. I wanted that someone to be me: I wanted to find that door and open it and complete the story.

  For a while I had a close imaginary friendship with the Laura of On the Banks of Plum Creek, who felt closest to my age in those books. I was eight or nine; I had knowingly conjured her up to talk with her in my head. I daydreamed that she’d shown up in the twentieth century and I had to be her guide.

  I’ve discovered from talking to friends that this was a common desire. My friend Amy, for instance, wanted to “show her around” (that was the exact phrase she says she remembers using: show her around). Surely a fantasy this specific must mean something. I suppose it allowed us to infuse our own world with Laura-like wonder as we imagined her awed appreciation for the safe, cluttered lives that we led.

  One of the review quotes from my paperback editions, taken from the venerable children’s literature publication The Horn Book, says: “Laura Ingalls of the 1870s and ’80s has stepped fro
m pages of the past into the flesh and blood reality of a chosen friend.” I don’t know if the desire to take that chosen friend to McDonald’s is quite what The Horn Book had in mind, but Amy sure wanted to do it.

  As for me, I wanted to take Laura to North Riverside Mall. In my mind I ushered her onto escalators and helped her operate a soda machine. I took her with me on car trips and reassured her when the station wagon would pull onto the expressway ramp and accelerate to a speed three times faster than the trains she rode, faster than she would have ever imagined a human could travel. It’s okay, Laura, I’d tell her.

  So Laura was my friend, and it’s perhaps a testament to the utterly solitary nature of my relationship with her that for the whole time I was enthralled with the book series as a child, I didn’t know that a TV show based on it was airing Monday nights during prime time. How could I have missed this? Two major reasons as to why:1. While I was dimly aware that a TV show called Little House on the Prairie existed, somehow my eight-year-old mind clung to the specious idea that the phrase “little house on the prairie” was simply a general expression, like “home on the range” or “humble abode,” and thus there was little reason to believe that a show called Little House on the Prairie was in fact about that little house on the prairie, the one that I adored, as opposed to just some other house on some other prairie someplace where this Michael Landon guy (who of course wasn’t Pa, I mean, look at him) lived. I suppose if I’d tuned in even once, all these mistaken assumptions would have been cleared up for me, but for the fact that:

  2. WKRP in Cincinnati ran in the competing time slot on CBS in the late 1970s and my parents and brother and I watched it every week. Because Holy Howard Hesseman, that show was funny.