The Wilder Life Read online

  The way back to the museum was a path that ran behind all the buildings, up the hill and a mile or so through the farm property. When Laura had lived in the Rock House and Rose had lived in the farmhouse, this was supposed to be the path that Laura and Rose had taken to visit each other. You had to pay an extra three dollars at the museum to walk the path. I seemed to be the only person doing it that day. It had rained that morning and the grass was still wet.

  On the walk over to the Rock House I had been the dutiful tourist, looking for things on the little map I’d been given, though really the only man-made attraction was a stumpy concrete thing, once a water cistern built by Almanzo. The rest of it was lush green country—little woods and neatly mowed clearings; a wild turkey had even appeared on the path in the distance ahead of me and scurried off as I approached. I’d expected the view to be nice; it was frankly gorgeous.

  Now that I was heading back I found myself trying to take in as much as I could. I paid attention to everything—the plodding bird calls, the keening horn of a distant train. Since I was alone out here maybe I could really feel the spirit of the place, whatever that was. That was sort of the same question that invariably came up with Laura and Rose: not whether one of them had helped the other write the Little House books—because it’s clear, from all the drafts and correspondence, that of course Rose had helped—but whose soul was in the books, who really inhabited them and made the girl in them come to life. But then what a stingy question it was, implying, sort of like that prayer in the TV movie, that it wasn’t enough that they were good books; somehow they had to be the right kind of good. They had to be written by a woman who guilelessly wrote only the truth, or who loved the Good Lord, or who was a real writer, or a genius, or “progressive,” or something. It was better to let go of all that.

  Nothing happened while I walked, except that I knew I was seeing things that Laura saw, and that Rose saw, and I liked that. We were all sort of the same person out here, everyone who came to this place and looked and looked. The path was so hilly that the highway and the houses slipped away and for a while there wasn’t anything else around, except for us.

  7.

  There Won’t Be Horses

  BACK AT HOME Spring commenced. The rainy weather I’d seen in Missouri made its way up to Illinois and then turned mild. Seeing Laura’s homey kitchen in Mansfield had made me excited to come home and continue my Little House lifestyle experiments. But after a couple weeks it was clear I was starting to run out of ways to live La Vida Laura.

  I’d made a few more recipes from The Little House Cookbook, with mixed results. The two batches of vanity cakes tasted all right, though they lacked the exquisite, airy melt-in-the-mouth texture that Laura had described in Plum Creek, and which had always made me imagine them as the Krispy Kremes of the prairie. They were the ones that called for two pounds of lard for deep-fat frying, and for the rest of the day after I’d made them the whole apartment smelled like a state fair.

  I’d also made a meal of fried salt pork and gravy, apples ’n’ onions, and buttermilk biscuits one night for Chris and me. Since I’d used the pork drippings to season everything, most of the meal was a raging success, save the salt pork itself, which was, well, really salty and much denser than we’d bargained for. After just a few bites, it was clear that a little salt pork went a long way. Chris pointed out that it was the sort of meal that was best eaten after a long day working in the fields, as opposed to migrating the contents of your in-box from the old version of Yahoo! Mail to the new one, which is what he’d been doing all afternoon.

  I was getting tired of recipes, though, and both soap and candle making were just more recipes, when it came down to it. But I had only a vague sense of what else I wanted to do, just that it couldn’t be anything too over the top, like build a log cabin. Ditto for anything that had an obvious component of drudgery (i.e., scrubbing laundry with a washboard) or viscera (as in animal butchering). By now I understood that there was a precarious balance to my Little House daydreams; it helped that the baser details had always been absent from the books so that one thought more about pretty butter molds than outhouses.

  I briefly considered a weekend at some rustic destination, and friends sent me information on hippie resorts, backpacker waysides, remote spots deep in Montana and a five-hour drive from the airport. But I soon realized I wasn’t interested in spending time off the grid for its own sake. I just wanted to be in Laura World, not a yurt. I didn’t want to simplify my life or live in another era. I wanted the places I knew in the books to still be there and I wanted to see them.

  Though I still didn’t quite believe it was possible.

  Years ago, maybe a decade, and long before I picked up the Little House books again, I came across a children’s book called Searching for Laura Ingalls while doing some work-related research at the Chicago public library. It was a nonfiction picture book by Kathryn Lasky, and it was about a girl traveling with her family to see the locations from the Little House books. The girl’s name was Meribah and she was an avid Laura Ingalls Wilder fan, so the family set out in an RV to visit the homesites in Wisconsin and Minnesota and South Dakota. The color photos that illustrated the book gave it a casual quality that seemed part documentary and part vacation album. I remember flipping through the book and feeling a twinge of my old love for the books and even some jealousy. This girl had gone and had the Little House vacation I’d wanted as a kid.

  But then on page after page in the book, the girl kept discovering that all the old things weren’t quite what she expected. She was shown sadly regarding the log cabin that was smaller and emptier than she’d thought, and she warily eyed gift shop merchandise at one of the hometown museums. She stood on the asphalt in downtown De Smet, South Dakota, waiting for a Fourth of July parade that never happened. She squinted in the sunlight of an open field where the Big Woods had once stood. I remembered enough about the books—just barely—to know what she’d been searching for.

  It figures, I’d thought, and put the book back on the shelf.

  By May, I’d all but given up on finding ways to play Laura, when something, out of the blue, revived my interest: I discovered my dream farm. Okay, so it wasn’t my farm, but still.

  I was on a website I’d bookmarked back in the fall for its very good page on butter churning, complete with photos. The site had an extensive section of “homesteading lessons,” which included instructions for making cheese, using a spinning wheel, and even rendering lard (which didn’t look terribly gross at all), but until now I hadn’t looked at the home page to see who was putting this stuff online. It turned out to be a couple named Samuel and Heidi Ackerson, who owned a small farm downstate. According to the website, Clover Meadow Farm sold homemade yarn and soap, raised heritage farm animals, and offered “a peek into the past.”

  “We continue the same farm practices that our ancestors used over a hundred years ago,” the page read. We as in Samuel and Heidi, who lived in southern Illinois, only a short drive from Chicago.

  The Ackersons, I discovered, worked their land with horse-drawn plows; they owned cows, pigs, and several heirloom breeds of turkeys, chickens, geese, and guinea fowl. They sold eggs from their front yard and took Thanksgiving orders for the turkeys. Heidi made soap, spun yarn, and made her own cheese and butter; Samuel had his own blacksmith’s forge, which he used to make wrought-iron fixtures. It all sounded like the idyllically industrious Wilder farm in Farmer Boy, where Almanzo’s mother worked at her loom and Father made roof shingles by hand, and the cellar was filled with bushels of homegrown apples and potatoes and jugs of maple syrup.

  I was getting pretty smitten by this place, especially when I read that the Ackersons gave tours of the farm and hands-on classes in traditional skills. It was like a living history museum, except it was real. None of this earnest-volunteer-in-a-pinafore business like at the pioneer villages I’d visited as a kid! The Ackersons were like the Amish, I thought, except without all the bizarre rules an
d shunning.

  I thought about contacting them, but would they understand that I didn’t want to tan hides or raise chickens, that I just wanted to play Laura Ingalls Wilder every now and then?

  I looked on the Ackersons’ “About” page. Samuel’s hobbies included historical reenactments, it said, and Heidi first fell in love with the past when she read Little House in the Big Woods as a little girl.

  That was all I needed. I had to see this place.

  I considered taking one of the tours that the Ackersons offered by appointment. But then I noticed on the site that they were hosting their annual “Homesteading Weekend” in June, a gettogether for “like-minded people who would like to share their homesteading skills and learn from others.” There was no set schedule, the description said, but the activities usually included demonstrations in blacksmithing, spinning, weaving, and cooking on an open fire with cast iron. It was just a few weeks away.

  “Wait, so these people, you want to go to their house and learn how to make candles and stuff?” Chris said when I showed him the site.

  “Not their house,” I said. “Their farm.” I knew it sounded a little weird, but these people were experts. Clover Meadow Farm had been featured on a History Channel series about rural American traditions. That sounded plenty trustworthy to me. “They’re really serious,” I told Chris. “They plow with horses and everything.”

  For me the greatest appeal of the homesteading weekend was that it seemed just Laura-esque enough. At last I’d found the next logical step beyond re-creating a few dishes in The Little House Cookbook and churning butter. Learning some of these “homesteading” skills, I figured, would be perfectly in the spirit of the Little House books and Laura’s intentions. In Little House, Long Shadow, Anita Clair Fellman points out that by the late 1920s, when Laura was writing the pages that would eventually become Little House in the Big Woods, the highway near her home was being paved and “more than 50 percent of the population lived in urban areas and had ready access to canned goods and year-round fresh foods.” No doubt this sense of a rapidly changing world must have motivated Laura to write down the domestic practices of her pioneer childhood with enough detail to ensure that Ma’s ways were not completely forgotten.

  The Ackersons seemed to have the same objective. For the most part.

  I watched an online video of their History Channel segment, which showed lovely footage of the farm and the draft horses while the narrator called the farm “Little House on the Prairie come to life.” The segment featured the Ackersons as they gave a tour to a Chicago suburban family who were thinking of taking up a similar lifestyle. The Ackersons were shown churning butter and spinning yarn while the children looked on.

  Then Heidi gave an interview sound bite: “There might be a time in the future that these kids need to know this stuff,” she said. “Our resources won’t be around forever.”

  The meaning of that was not lost on me. Ever since I’d gotten the churn and started to build a small collection of “playing Laura” accoutrements, I’d occasionally think about how these things, along with my budding pioneer knowledge, might be of use. Wasn’t it nice that I could make bread starter from scratch, and that I had a kerosene lamp that could come in handy in a blackout?

  “You’re so totally set for the apocalypse with all this stuff, you know,” my friend Jami joked one night when I was telling her I was thinking about fermenting my own apple cider vinegar.

  “Yeah, right,” I said. But I felt a tiny swell of pride at the thought of being prepared for something. Even if I didn’t see the point of thinking too much about that something, which of course could be anything: peak oil, global warming, terrorist attacks, zombies. Oh, I’d had a moment or two of Y2K panic back in the day, and in the months after 9/11 I’d collected a dozen cans of cheap soup and off-brand spaghetti and stashed them in a box under the sink, a gesture that in retrospect seemed more about managing anxiety than anything else.

  Then there was the word homesteading. In the course of searching online for obscure butter-making utensils and other such things, I’d come across this word enough times to understand that it no longer meant proving up on a 160-acre land claim the way Pa Ingalls had done. It now stood for the pursuit of a self-sufficient lifestyle—living off the land, so to speak.

  This appeared to mean different things to different people. Some of the homesteader talk I found on the Internet sounded pretty appealing to me—the emphasis on organic gardening and local food production was very much in tune with the Michael Pollan books I’d read. The stuff about one-world government conspiracies—well, not so much. Homesteading was definitely a mixed bag: from what I could tell, people in the online world used the term to describe anything from a home canning hobby to living in an off-the-grid Alaska compound.

  So while I sensed that the Ackersons had some decidedly non–Little House reasons for their homesteading lifestyle, I wasn’t sure what they were. That was their business, not mine.

  Heidi Ackerson was extremely pleasant over the phone. She confirmed that, yes, anyone was welcome to come to the homesteading weekend, as long as they brought food for potluck. I told her why I was interested in coming, what with this Laura Ingalls Wilder hobby I’d developed lately. “I’ve churned butter,” I said, as casually as I could manage.

  “Maybe you can help show everyone how it’s done,” she suggested. She explained that at these weekends there were always more people coming to learn than to demonstrate.

  “Really? Sure,” I said. This churning business could get me places, I thought proudly. I liked the idea that I could trade on my butter skills in this homesteader economy. Didn’t Ma Wilder trade her butter for tin? Or use it to pay the cobbler? Something like that.

  Heidi said that weekenders could camp out at the farm, stay in a motel nearby, or even sleep on the floor of their living room, but I figured Chris and I could drive the two hours from Chicago.

  “What time does everything start on Saturday morning?” I asked, thinking we could get there by nine a.m. if we had to.

  “Well, we usually get started when we get up,” she said. “Between five and seven.”

  “Sure!” I said, trying my best to sound unfazed. Well, it was a farm. We would have to come out Friday night and set up our tent if we didn’t want to miss anything. And I did not want to miss anything.

  We arrived early in the evening on Friday, when it was still daylight. It was a tiny place, with just a farmhouse, a low red barn, a couple of sheds, and two small fields. Heidi was coming out of the house as we drove up (I recognized her from online), and she waved at our car.

  “You can park over by the tents,” she called. She was in her late forties or early fifties, deeply tan, with shoulder-length brown hair she kept tucked behind her ears in a way that made her look younger.

  As we slowly drove in, I could see that the farm had exactly the sort of barnyard one visualizes in children’s books like Charlotte’s Web—teeming with geese and chickens and turkeys. A border collie romped ahead of our car. I could see a large garden beyond the barnyard, and behind it, a meadow. It was even better than I’d hoped.

  There were three tents set up already at the edge of the fields, and people had gathered in the yard next to the house, where there were picnic tables and a fire pit. Some were setting up food at the table; nearly a dozen others were sitting in lawn chairs around the fire. A few children were playing on a nearby tire swing. It all looked like a typical picnic except for the two women who were working at spinning wheels. Spinning wheels! All right!

  We set up our tent and then joined the group around the fire pit. We introduced ourselves to Samuel, Heidi’s husband, who was tending the fire, and then several others whose names I hadn’t learned yet. Besides the spinning-wheel ladies, there was a woman in pigtail braids with a big book in her lap, two long-haired guys who were assembling a cooking tripod, two sweet-looking older women in pastel sweatshirts, and a tall, wiry guy with a baseball cap.

 
; “This is our first time here,” I confessed to the group as Chris and I set up our lawn chairs.

  “Same here,” said one of the pastel-sweatshirt women. The other nodded.

  The guy with the baseball cap spoke up. “But we all came down together,” he said. He motioned to the sweatshirt women and the men by the fire. “Us over here. And then Rebecca here, and Jim over there is her husband, and those are her kids, and then those guys over there by the tents are all with us, too. We came down from Wisconsin.” His name was Ron and he pumped Chris’s hand when he introduced himself.

  The woman with the pigtail braids was Rebecca. “We’re all from the same church,” she told us. “We heard about this on the Internet.”

  “So did we,” I said. “We came from Chicago.”

  “All the way from Chicago?” said Rebecca’s husband, Jim.

  “It’s only about two hours,” Chris explained.

  I looked around. Except for Samuel and Heidi and a handful of others (including the spinning-wheel duo, whom I’d spoken with just enough to learn that they were local friends of Heidi’s and liked to spin more than make small talk), most of the people were with the Wisconsin group. Like us, they were camping overnight here on the farm.

  Heidi explained that more people would be coming on Saturday and Sunday—locals, mostly—but even she and Samuel seemed surprised at the Friday-night turnout. “These Wisconsin folks called me up to make sure we had room for them,” she said. “I said, ‘why not?’”

  Some of the Wisconsinites kept to themselves, but the ones who sat near us were friendly. The book in Rebecca’s lap was a guide to identifying edible wild plants, and she explained that she’d just been out picking a salad, which sounded impressive.

  “So, you came out here from Chicago looking for something . . . different?” she asked me.