The Wilder Life Read online

  I was pretty let down when I realized the bed-and-breakfast option was no longer available. I’d even written Virginia an effusive e-mail to say how excited I was to be coming out to see the Sod House on the Prairie on my Laura Ingalls Wilder journey and how wonderful it would have been to stay the night there, but I understood that it wasn’t possible to do so anymore. Though of course by “I understood” I really meant “please make an exception for me, the hugest, sincerest, specialest Laura fan with my great big heart made of calico and sunflowers.”

  She wasn’t buying it. She wrote back a nice e-mail that politely ignored my veiled groveling, telling me she’d love me to stop by and say hello when I came to Minnesota—if she was around, that is. “Now that I am retired from my Bed & Breakfast, I come and go more freely,” she wrote. How dare she thwart my prairie dreams by having a life! I thought. But of course we could still see Sod House on the Prairie during the day.

  I got over my disappointment, though, once I’d figured out that we could stay in a covered wagon in South Dakota. It turns out that the land claim that Pa Ingalls had filed on in By the Shores of Silver Lake had been turned into a living history park and campground, with space for tents, RVs, and a few “covered wagons,” which rented for about fifty dollars a night. They weren’t exactly the covered wagons of the books: from the pictures on the website they appeared to be sort of rustic hard-top campers with sleeping bunks, but it was enough for me. I’d called in April to make sure we could get one in July, and we were just lucky enough to get a small one for a single night. The lady who’d taken my reservation mailed me my credit card slip to confirm the transaction; it arrived, a week later, in a tiny hand-stamped envelope with “Ingalls Homestead” in De Smet, SD, printed on the return address.

  Yes, that Ingalls Homestead: it hadn’t really sunk in until I saw the envelope. For a moment I was mystified that it had come from that place. To give you an idea of how far gone I could get with my Laura World obsessive moonie-ness, remember that by now I’d been to Mansfield and seen Laura’s house, her clothes, her bathroom, and yet I was still totally enchanted with the thought that the De Smet homestead land, this physical space where Laura had lived, actually still existed and that mail came from there. It was like getting a letter from the North Pole, only better.

  As the week of the trip approached, I didn’t want to leave anything to chance, so I ordered tickets online for the Walnut Grove pageant. The website for the De Smet pageant instructed me to call a phone number to order tickets in advance, but when I called, a young and slightly bored–sounding guy said, “Uh, the thing is? We’ve never run out of tickets. In like all the years we’ve been doing the pageant. I mean, you can just buy them when you’re here.”

  Walnut Grove, Minnesota, was our first destination, a full day’s drive from Chicago. The place has dual significance in the greater Little House universe. First, it’s where the Ingallses lived on and off between 1874 and 1879, when they weren’t recovering from crop failures or trying to run a hotel in Iowa. On the Banks of Plum Creek recounts the family’s first stint living near Walnut Grove, first in the dugout near the creek, and then in the “wonderful house” that Pa built. In the book, Walnut Grove is simply “the town,” the realm of all things store-boughten and nonprairie: the school, the church with its expensive bell, Beadle’s and Oleson’s rival mercantile businesses, and, of course, Nellie Oleson with her petticoats and parties and sugar-white cakes.

  In the NBC show, Walnut Grove is all that and then some: Walnut Grove is Walnut Grove, the legendary TV town that took most of the “prairie” out of Little House on the Prairie and instead gave viewers a community of folks in old-timey clothing who bravely endure blizzards, droughts, epidemics, racism, drug abuse, gang violence, and franchise restaurant encroachment.

  Late in her life Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote to the Walnut Grove newspaper and said that she was sorry she never mentioned the town by name in her novel. In light of that, it’s a little ironic that now the words Walnut Grove tend to invoke the world of the TV show rather than the actual town and its role in Little House lore. Then again, maybe name checking the town in the books wouldn’t have made much of a difference. After all, how could the Walnut Grove with a few intermittent years of Ingalls family history associated with it possibly compete for public attention with the Walnut Grove of ten television seasons plus twenty-five years of constant syndication?

  I’m pretty sure the TV town was a little more populated than its historical counterpart, too: census statistics for 1880 state that the real-life Walnut Grove, Minnesota, had only 153 people living there, whereas the Internet Movie Database entry for Little House on the Prairie shows a sprawling cast list 234 names long. At any rate, it’s not hard to tell the Walnut Groves apart. From what I’ve gathered from various Little House on the Prairie fan sites, the TV Walnut Grove even has its own separate history: founded in 1840 by that jolly Norwegian guy who ran the lumber mill; destroyed by dynamite some forty or fifty years later by its own citizens.

  I know, right? You know, when I decided to try and catch up on watching Little House on the Prairie decades after the fact, there were a lot of things I hadn’t counted on, like the crush I developed on Doc Baker (it’s got to be those sideburns, I think) or the way I wept when some kid died of typhus, but I really hadn’t counted on seeing the town get all blown up at the end of the series. No, seriously, they blow it all up, supposedly to foil a crooked real-estate developer who suddenly owns the town somehow, and honestly, I don’t remember any of the other details beyond THEY BLOW IT ALL UP.

  By that point, the plot of the show sort of didn’t matter; by then, the story was really about the cast and crew who were saying good-bye. Among other things. According to Melissa Gilbert in her memoir, Prairie Tale, Michael Landon’s decision to blow up the sets was a deliberate gesture, since no one at NBC had bothered to officially notify him that the show had been canned despite the fact that he’d been working for them for over twenty years. When Gilbert quotes him saying, “I’m going to blow the whole fucking thing up,” my brain reflexively responds in Ma’s voice: Charles, no! But of course blowing the Effing thing up was very much in the spirit of the TV Little House on the Prairie, where there was no grievance that Michael Landon-as-Pa couldn’t settle with a good swift punch. (But only if he had to, which was approximately every other episode.)

  But in a way, the whole cancellation situation was also a little reminiscent of the original Little House books, with their moments of failure and disappointment. Here were these people who’d worked hard for ten years to cultivate their own little settlement on the prime-time frontier—because when you think about it, isn’t every TV season a wilderness to be braved? What show doesn’t want to stick it out through the long winters of sweeps months long enough to prove up on its time-slot claim?—only to find out that they’d lost it, that it was time to move on. Melissa Gilbert says that the cast didn’t want to see the sets used in other productions, “to have other people tromping through places where many of us had grown up.” There’s something decidedly Little House-ish about that, too, though it’s probably not the sort of thing the real-life Ingallses would have concerned themselves with, in all the times they had to move and leave everything they’d built behind. No, being homesick for all those little houses has long been left up to us, the readers.

  And the TV viewers, too. Because lest you underestimate the deep connection some people feel to the NBC Walnut Grove, I submit these verbatim excerpts of a Tripod.com webpage that I found one night, written in 2004 by a man known only as “Lorenzo.” It seems that the remaining Little House on the Prairie exterior sets in Simi Valley, California—the titular Little House, the church, the school for the blind, and a few more structures that hadn’t been “blowed up” in the finale—had burned down in 2003 during the destructive wildfires that year. Apparently this news left Lorenzo so bereft that he put up a single webpage to announce an ambitious endeavor:What I am looking forward to doing
, is rebuilding the Little House and the rest of the Town as well as planting Trees because the sets burned down, I will need to get the blue prints of all the sets and I would like to locate all locations of where each house in the town were located.... hopefully we could find trees the same size and put them in the same locations if possible—it would be great to have this Scenery again. It must be sad for Melissa Gilbert to see no trees or grass no town, since she grow up there.

  Lorenzo (whose only available e-mail address bounced, to my dismay) hadn’t quite worked out the particulars of his plan—“I will still need to get permission to rebuild the whole town of Walnut Grove, so please check back soon,” he wrote—but he was hoping that with the help of volunteers, donated materials, and proceeds from selling Little House memorabilia, T-shirts, and other merchandise that he had yet to procure, he could make it happen. He believed the rebuilt set could not only function as a tourist attraction for fans but also open up the possibility for new Little House on the Prairie episodes and TV movies to be filmed. He also seemed to just want to experience a little of the community spirit that the TV Walnut Grove embodied—that sense of hey-we’ll-all-come-together-and-build-this-thing that characterized so many episodes. It would all start, he said, with a fund-raising rally in the parking lot of the Simi Valley set location.

  “And I would like to have a Dance party there,” he wrote at the very end of his missive. “So bring your dancing Shoes, to dance to the 80’s.”

  (That part makes me especially wish that Lorenzo’s vision had come to pass.)

  And who could blame him for wanting a place like Walnut Grove, this place he knew so well in his mind, to still exist? It was the same reason why Chris and I were driving over five hundred miles in a single day, across the dullest part of Minnesota ever.

  It was late afternoon when we started seeing the wind turbines, dozens of them. They filled the horizon and kept emerging from every direction ahead of us. Sometimes they loomed close to the road, great big spindly things with huge pinwheel heads turning slowly. We’d never seen so many of them before and had never seen a landscape so transformed by them. The sight was like something Laura would have seen—the open land one day changed by the seam of railroad tracks and the swooping lines of telegraph wires; the whole main street of De Smet emerging above the prairie in just two weeks.

  We drove through the turbines for nearly an hour. The last ones we passed stayed visible for a long time behind us, lit up by the low sun in the rearview mirrors. I could still see them by the time we turned onto Route 14, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Highway.

  Like a lot of the towns we passed, the first thing you see of Walnut Grove is its grain elevator. The business district lies behind it, beyond a gas station. The railroad tracks that run through town—parallel to the highway—look to be the same line that was still being built west at the time of the Little House books.

  There’s plenty of indication, official and otherwise, that the town is a Laura Ingalls Wilder destination, from the signs by the road to the faded but elaborate mural that depicts Laura in front of Plum Creek, looking a little grim-faced as she carries two giant buckets.

  This Walnut Grove, the real one, had its first settlers in 1870; they were the Nelsons, the same Norwegian family who were neighbors to the Ingalls family in On the Banks of Plum Creek. When the railroad came through in 1873, the town began to establish itself; it was still a new town when the Ingalls family moved to nearby Plum Creek a year later.

  The history on the town’s website doesn’t go much beyond that—you’d almost think the town just ceased to exist sometime in the late 1800s the way the TV town did (albeit with less of a bang). What happened instead was that Walnut Grove simply stayed a small town. You can guess that some of what’s not written about Walnut Grove’s past 120 years is also the history of thousands of small towns in the rural Midwest: the decline of family farms and job opportunities.

  For the last thirty years, the connection to Laura Ingalls Wilder has influenced the town’s fortunes in ways both typical—i.e., Little House tourism—and unexpected. Minnesota has one of the largest Hmong immigrant populations in the United States, and some accounts say that Walnut Grove’s first Hmong residents were attracted to the town by the TV show. According to a 2004 Minnesota Public Radio segment, Harry Yang, the proprietor of an Asian grocery store in Walnut Grove, settled there on the advice of his daughter, who was a fan of the show and who thought it would be a good place to live because the people on the show seemed nice. The subsequent Hmong who moved there increased Walnut Grove’s population (to nearly nine hundred, by some estimates), and now make up a quarter of the community. An essay by David Griffith in the book New Faces in New Places: The Changing Geography of American Immigration reports that the Hmong families in Walnut Grove helped the housing market, kept a school from closing, and have been admired by many of the longtime residents for their traditional family values.

  Indeed, we saw Harry Yang’s grocery store on Main Street. It was closed for the evening, along with the handful of gift stores, the museum, and Nellie’s, a diner that faced Route 14 and appeared considerably more unassuming than its namesake restaurant on the TV show. The business district was only about two blocks, and there weren’t any motels in town. We had reservations at the Wilder Inn in Tracy, a town just to the west, so we headed back out on Route 14.

  “Wait a minute,” Chris said, after we’d been driving for a few minutes. “How far is Tracy?” He was reading By the Shores of Silver Lake, which meant he’d just read the part where Laura, Mary, Carrie, and Ma had taken their first train ride, to the end of the line in Tracy, an experience that merited its very own chapter, “Riding in the Cars,” one of my favorites.

  “Seven miles, but that doesn’t sound right, does it?” I’d seen how close it was on the map, but I didn’t quite believe it myself. I’d always had the idea that the train ride described in Silver Lake took hours. Well, maybe not hours but certainly long enough for Laura to give Mary a highly detailed inventory of the train’s interior, the passengers, the view outside, and the fascinating water fountain (and didn’t it sound like the best fountain in the world?); take a drink from aforementioned fascinating water fountain; buy candy from vendor; distribute candy among siblings; and finally, consume the candy in that protracted trademark Ingalls one-restrained-lick-at-a-time fashion, yes?

  Now, though, the trip by car on Route 14 was just long enough for the oldies radio station to play “Oye Como Va” and part of “Bette Davis Eyes.”

  On our drive back to Walnut Grove for dinner, we tried to figure out the puzzle. Maybe, back in Laura’s day, distances were measured in special prairie miles, or else the whole town of Tracy had simply been picked up by a tornado at some point and moved about thirty miles closer, or else there was a wormhole, or something . It wasn’t until we remembered that the train in the book went only twenty miles an hour at its fastest that it started to make sense, in a wretched math-word-problem kind of way. A train nudging along the prairie at the same rate as the #81 bus in Chicago rush-hour traffic would be a long trip indeed, long enough for a rich, epic swath of Little House description.

  We had dinner at the Walnut Grove Bar and Grill, which sported a Miller Lite banner reading GREAT FOOD/COLD BEER /SMOKE-FREE ROOM/HOME OF LAURA INGALLS WILDER. The waitress told us how to get to the pageant grounds, and so just past dusk we drove out, over the creek, up a hill, and into a little valley where the amphitheater lay. The final rehearsal was in progress—we could see just a glimpse of the stage, cast members dancing in a pool of light beyond the parking field. We turned the car around to head back. It was a warm night and we had the windows down as we drove down the hill. Even though the stage was a quarter of a mile away, voices from the rehearsal still carried; we could hear a girl’s excited shriek on the wind.

  We Invite You to Experience the Lifestyle of Laura Ingalls, read the sign along the side of the road just outside the McCone farm, home of the Sod House on the
Prairie attraction. We’d come out here just after breakfast at Nellie’s, driving east on 14. We parked in the driveway of the farmhouse and Virginia came out to say hello and collect our admission fee. She was in her fifties, and with her quiet good-naturedness she reminded me of one of my favorite grade-school teachers. She pointed out the gate that led out back to the exhibit.

  “Enjoy it,” she told us. “Feel free to look around as much as you want.”

  We walked along a narrow path through the prairie; the grass was tall enough and the sod house so low-slung that we could only see the roof, which had a thin layer of grass growing on top.

  From the signs along the path we learned that the main sod house was “a rich man’s soddy.” As sod buildings went, the dugout where the Ingalls had lived in On the Banks of Plum Creek had been a pretty basic model, but the place the McCones had built was the extra-fancy kind, really the Cadillac Escalade of sod houses—big, with glass windows and wood floors and plaster walls. It looked a little crusty on the outside, but inside was one big, bright room, with two beds made up with patchwork quilts, an iron cookstove, a wooden table and chairs, a cradle, two rocking chairs, a wardrobe, and a washbasin and pitcher on a stand. The wooden ceiling beams were just a few inches over our heads and the door and windows were low on the walls. It all looked exactly like the place where an old woman would live in a fairy tale.

  In fact, I’d forgotten for a moment that I’d come here to feel like I was in Laura World, but from looking at the guestbook on the table, it was clear that other visitors had had strong associations.