The Wilder Life Read online

  “I guess,” I said. “I already know how to churn butter. I even have a churn.” I told her about my fascination with the Little House books.

  “That’s great,” she said. “That was an amazing family. They could make all their own food and they had everything they needed.”

  Well, not everything, I pointed out. “Pa would go out and bring back sugar, right?” I was trying to remember the various going-to-town scenes in the books. “And cornmeal. Oh, and salt pork.” Those were always my favorite scenes, with Pa coming home with provisions wrapped in paper.

  “Which book was that?” she said, but she didn’t wait for me to answer. “They just had so much wisdom. How to raise the livestock, and harvest the honey, and all those things you’d have to know if supermarkets weren’t available. It’s just such good knowledge.”

  I nodded. Rebecca was interesting. Along with her braids she wore a short green sundress, little wire-rimmed glasses, and Birkenstock sandals. She had an even deeper tan than Heidi. She made the kind of eye contact that seemed to search your face as you talked.

  We had come just in time for the dinner the Wisconsin group had prepared. Rebecca got up from her chair to serve everyone Styrofoam cups of hot, yellowish tea. It tasted a little like mint tea but with a slightly bitter note.

  “It’s homemade nettle tea,” she told us. Chris kept blowing on the water of his cup as if to cool it.

  “It’s not that hot,” I told him.

  “I know,” he whispered. He set it down by his chair.

  The spread of food included beef stew, macaroni salad, and green beans that had been grown and canned by the church group. Rebecca had foraged the salad and the tea.

  “Nettles are so good for your skin and your lungs and your stomach,” she told the group. “They have so many healing properties. It’s just amazing to think about how nature is full of all these things God made for us, and everything has a purpose that He wants us to discover. It’s all for us to use.”

  “What about poison oak?” Samuel Ackerson said. He didn’t say much, but I liked him. “What’s it good for?”

  For once Rebecca seemed stumped. “Well,” she said. “You just never know.”

  I’d gone to the car to get a sweater and Chris followed me.

  “Is it just me, or are these people just a little Holy Roller?” he said, his voice low. Dinner had started with a lengthy, multispeaker blessing thanking the Lord for providing food, revealing the path of righteousness, making His purpose known, and bringing like-minded people together.

  “I think it’s because so many of them are in that church group,” I whispered, though Heidi had led part of the grace, and I was beginning to wonder if the term “like-minded” was perhaps code for something that we weren’t, even with Chris being a nice Lutheran boy who’d gotten me to go to church with him. “Look, some of these people who are into homesteading are just kind of like this,” I told Chris.

  I was keeping an open mind. And I had gotten used to encountering people of a somewhat more evangelical bent in the Laura Ingalls Wilder fan world—plenty of homeschooling moms blogged about the Little House books, for example, and I’d noticed more than a couple fish symbols on the cars in the museum parking lot in Mansfield, Missouri. They were all nice folks who shared my love of Laura but maybe not my support for legalizing gay marriage. Well, c’est la vie. I’d liked Karen and Keith and their family just fine.

  We went back to the fire pit. It was dusk now, and the fireflies were out in greater numbers than I’d seen in years. The meadow behind us appeared to glow with the fading sunlight. The fact that it was one of the most gorgeous summer evenings I’d ever seen gave way to thinking about where I was, and I finally admitted to myself that it felt strange to be here.

  I’d struck up a conversation with the younger of the two pastel-sweatshirt women, Linda, who had prematurely white hair and a kind, round face. She’d been to Chicago once, she said, or just outside it, really. I asked her what it was like in Morristown, Wisconsin.

  “Oh, well, a lot of people aren’t working right now,” she said with a sort of half-laugh. She explained that the engine plant had been laying off employees by the hundreds. She hadn’t worked there, but she was having a hard time finding full-time work after her divorce. She had a voice that made her sound like she was always on the verge of either a question or a sigh. “You just don’t know what’s going to happen next,” she said. “I guess that’s why we’re here.”

  I nodded, though I didn’t know quite what she meant.

  “We were off the grid for four days back in December,” she said.

  “In Morristown?” I asked. “Wow, what happened?” I thought she was talking about an ice storm or something.

  “No, this was at our church,” she said. “It was sort of like a drill. We all stayed there to see what it would be like if something happened.”

  For a moment I was dumbstruck. If what happened? I thought, but I didn’t want to ask. So instead I said, “What was it like?” I was trying to imagine. “Was it cold?”

  “Yeah,” she said, with that half-laugh again. “We had a generator that we ran a couple hours a day. It really wasn’t fun. But I guess you’ve got to be ready, you know?”

  Before long it was dark. Chris was sitting across the fire with Ron, the baseball-cap guy. Ron was hunched forward in his lawn chair intently. He seemed to really like Chris.

  “I can tell you’re a man of deep faith,” I heard him saying.

  I needed to get Chris alone and tell him that the Wisconsin church group was a kooky survivalist sect whose name (Linda had told me) was something like New Life Testimony Revelation Ministry.

  But before I could, Rebecca called me. “Heidi’s going to show us her loom,” she said. “Come on.” All the women were heading toward the house.

  Oh, no, I thought. They’re separating the men from the women! Just like in cults!

  As it turned out, we really were just looking at the antique looms and spinning wheels that Heidi kept in an upstairs workroom. But I could only pay attention to conversations about yarn for so long, so I excused myself and went downstairs to the kitchen. The kitchen was huge, part of an expansion built on the house, and there was one long wall of painted wooden shelves holding dozens of Mason jars of canned goods.

  It was a gorgeous arrangement, almost mesmerizing: jars of peaches, fruit preserves, green beans, pickles, corn, tomatoes, even meat, their metal lids neatly sealed. I looked closely: they were real, not just the comforting décor that I’d long become accustomed to seeing at places like Cracker Barrel. What did they signify beyond that? Ma Ingalls would have likely been thrilled by this kind of abundance. Almanzo Wilder, struggling with Laura through one of their many setbacks, might have recalled his Farmer Boy childhood and conjured up an image of shelves like these. In 1944, Rose Wilder Lane had an entire cellar full of these jars, those eight hundred jars she displayed to a reporter as a symbol of her protest against income tax and the government. Heidi Ackerson had a hobby that was perhaps something more than a hobby. All the same, the jars were so pretty.

  Rebecca had come downstairs and now she stood gazing at the shelves, too. “Look at those. Isn’t it amazing?” she said. “It really reminds you that there are ways to provide in a time when you can’t go to the grocery store.”

  It was maybe the third time that she’d said something to this effect. By now, I knew, she wasn’t talking about late nights when you have to pick up the milk at the 7-Eleven. I knew, knew that she wanted me to ask what she meant.

  “You keep saying that,” I said. “Could you, you know, elaborate a little? As to the kind of circumstances where that would happen?”

  The tiniest smile flickered on Rebecca’s face. Then the line of her mouth straightened and she was serene.

  “Could you just, you know, clarify?” I asked.

  “Well, with the economy failing and all that’s happening,” she said. (I heard that phrase “with all that’s happening”
mentioned a few times over the weekend: I suspected it referred to the recession, terrorism, and the belief that the recently elected Barack Obama was evil incarnate.) “We’re getting into an emergency situation, and people are going to panic. We just don’t know what’s going to happen next. Don’t you sense that? And it’s on a worldwide scale.”

  I nodded, only because I wanted her to go on.

  “And all the disasters, which are signs,” Rebecca went on. “I believe that we are in the end times now. And the Lord will summon us to Heaven soon, but we don’t know what will happen in this world before that happens, and we need to be ready. What do you think about that?” she asked. “Does that scare you?”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I was just curious.”

  I really had been curious to see if she would say something like “end times.” Lucky me!

  “If you’re worried, we can talk about it,” Rebecca said.

  “Not right now,” I said. “But thanks!”

  I walked outside. She’d said “End times”!

  From everything that I’d read, End Timers were waiting for the collapse of civilization the way fans of the Twilight series awaited the trailer for Breaking Dawn. They were bracing themselves to endure the myriad destructive ordeals that would wipe out infidels, atheists, unrepentant sinners, industrialists, government officials, and Salon.com readers, with the expectation that they, the prepared ones, would be among the worthy few who would be raptured to Heaven either before or after (this part was never clear) the massive worldwide crapfest. Compared to these folks, Keith and Karen seemed as secular as Brad and Angelina.

  I was heading back to my chair by the fire, but Chris intercepted me and led me in the other direction, away from the group.

  “If anyone asks,” he whispered. “We’ve been married three years.”

  “What?” I whispered back.

  “Ron thinks we are. I didn’t want to tell him we weren’t. That guy is freaking me out. He was practically speaking in tongues.”

  “These people do survival drills!” I hissed.

  “I know! Ron said they hid out for two weeks in the woods. He’s freaking me out,” Chris said.

  “What did he say to you?”

  “Too many things. He’s freaking me out. What did Rebecca say?”

  “Rebecca said ‘end times’!”

  “We’re leaving tomorrow,” Chris said.

  Later on in the tent I got out my notebook. The church group’s tents were only a few feet from ours, close enough for us to see the glow of their flashlights as they got ready for bed. We didn’t speak for fear of being overheard.

  I’m so sorry I made us come to this thing, I wrote in the notebook. I love you. I handed it to Chris with the flashlight.

  He wrote, I love you too but these people are freaking me out. We passed the notebook back and forth, writing our conversation. We decided that we would take in a couple of the skill demonstrations and leave by midday, sooner if things got any creepier. We also decided that if the End Times ever happened we didn’t want to be anywhere the hell near Rebecca and Ron and would take our chances with whatever postapocalyptic fate awaited us.

  I lay in the dark in our sleeping bag while Chris slept. How had my quest for Little House–style experience led us here? I thought about Rebecca in her sundress and pigtail braids. I had been searching for Laura Ingalls Wilder and I’d gotten Hippie Half-Pint instead, half full of her crazy, crazy Kool-Aid made from foraged berries.

  But that wasn’t the only thing that was making me uneasy. Deep down, I was starting to wonder if the Little House books had more to do with this sort of worldview than I’d been willing to admit. Not the end-of-the-world stuff, of course, but that “simple life” mind-set and all that it rejected. I thought about Rose and her cellar again. I thought about the moms who bragged online that their homeschooled kids were not only reading the Little House books but were learning from reprinted editions of the same McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers that Laura and Carrie used, as if all of twentieth-century pedagogy simply didn’t exist.

  I was also remembering the 2005 Disney version of Little House on the Prairie and how it starts, like the books, with Pa wanting to leave the Big Woods. Only this movie version gives the impression that what the Ingallses really wanted was a lifestyle makeover. The movie makes the Big Woods seem like a downright lousy neighborhood: young Laura narrowly misses a bullet fired by a careless hunter, and Pepin, with its incessant wagon-wheel-and-horse-whinny traffic noise, is as bustling as a strip mall. Pa hates doing carpentry work for an uppity wealthy man who browbeats him and withholds payments, and whereas in the books a trip to the general store was always a fun occasion, in this version Ma stresses over the prices and the family budget, and Laura and Mary grab at candy just like they were in a supermarket checkout. The subtext of these early scenes seems to be: surely there’s a better way to live, a way to opt out of the materialistic rat race and the hassles of 1870s modern life!

  I could see how certain aspects of the Little House books could help nurture a twenty-first-century homesteading dream. And while my default Little House fantasy always involved befriending Laura and exploring our respective worlds together, I knew that there was another extremely common daydream as well, one that Anita Clair Fellman mentions in her critique of Laura Ingalls Wilder fans in the book Little House, Long Shadow: One woman, who wore out her Little House books, linked her childhood covered-wagon play with a recurrent pleasurable fantasy that some unspecified catastrophe would prevent everyone from using modern conveniences.

  Admit it: you’ve gone there, and so have I.

  I considered this as I stared up at the ceiling of our tent. Who knew how many times those books made me idly wish for a now other than the one I was in, that the world would somehow crack open and reveal a simpler life?

  Chris and I were glad for daylight, even though it was five a.m. Getting up at dawn was hardly a problem, with two roosters screeching away over the continuous garble-gackle of nearly a dozen geese and turkeys.

  “I can sleep through car alarms in our neighborhood,” Chris said, “but not this crap.” We were the first ones up besides Samuel, who hurried out of the house to the barn for morning chores.

  The homesteading activities did not start, as Heidi had stated, between five and seven a.m. But she did serve the whole group an incredible breakfast of eggs, potatoes, biscuits, and gravy in the big kitchen, and despite all our offers to help, she did much of the work herself. Even though they’d gone and invited an apocalypse cult to their farm, I was still impressed with Samuel and Heidi and the life they’d made for themselves. By now, though, I was pretty sure that at least Heidi believed in this End Times stuff. While we cleared the breakfast dishes, she was at the sink talking to Rebecca, who I heard say that “with all that’s happening” phrase again.

  “My mother is still pretty skeptical,” Heidi said. “She says I shouldn’t let people hear me talk about being prepared because they’ll think I’m crazy. Well, let them think I’m crazy.”

  I already thought Heidi was crazy on account of the fact that she had a whole room full of yarn. I still liked her, though.

  Rebecca came up to me again after breakfast.

  “You don’t have to be frightened,” she said. “I feel joy for what’s to come because my family and I will be with Jesus. But I wanted to let you know, too.”

  “Thanks!” I said again. “I’m fine.” I had no idea what to say to Rebecca.

  After a night of End Times revelations, the soap-making demonstration was a little anticlimactic. Most of the women were gathered in the kitchen watching Heidi make a batch of scented cream soap. Chris and the men were in a shed across the barnyard for Samuel’s blacksmithing demonstration. By now more visitors were arriving for the day’s activities. It occurred to me that if we’d driven out from Chicago first thing in the morning, the way I’d originally planned, we might not have had such a close encounter with the New Life Promise Revelationers, or what
ever they were called. This all might have seemed like just a nice day at the farm, and we might not have had any idea that it was about the end of the world.

  The soap-making demonstration was almost over when I saw Linda’s head drop back against her chair. She was snoring softly.

  “Oh my,” Heidi whispered. She had just poured liquid soap into a molding rack. “Is she okay?”

  Evelyn, the older pastel-sweatshirt lady, had scooted her chair over and put her arm around Linda. “She’s fine,” Evelyn said. She explained that Linda suffered from sleep apnea and tended to nod off. She gently nudged Linda awake.

  “My sister-in-law has that, too,” one of the newly arrived weekenders said. “She has one of those machines that help you breathe at night.”

  “So do I,” said Linda sadly. “But I’m trying not to depend on it too much.” She looked miserable. I liked her more than the others in the Wisconsin group. At the campfire she’d told me that she’d been a social worker, but the job pressures had gotten to her. It didn’t seem like she had a lot of options in Morristown. Unlike Rebecca, I got the impression that she wasn’t terribly excited about the future. More than once she’d mentioned “being prepared” with a sort of weary shrug, perhaps because she sensed how hard the Coming Days would be for someone with a condition like hers.

  While the soap cooled, Heidi gave a quick lesson on skimming cream from milk, setting aside the separated cream in a glass jar to churn into butter later.

  “Speaking of butter,” Evelyn spoke up, “we have a guide how to can it. The information’s on the Internet but we typed it up, too.” In the interest of sharing homesteading skills, she passed out printouts of the butter-canning directions, which involved melting butter, pouring it into canning jars that had been sterilized in the oven, and waiting for the heat to seal the lids. I was trying to figure out what the point was.

  “Well, it’s not technically canning,” Heidi said, “but I’ve heard of people who’ve done it. How long is the shelf life?”