The Wilder Life Page 22

  As we walked back to the car, I could see other people trying to have their private creek moments, children and adults alike, everyone standing in their little rings in the water.

  We had time to kill before the historic bus tour and decided to wait it out over lunch at the Walnut Grove Bar and Grill. We sat in the bar room, at a table next to the only other people there, two guys nursing a pitcher of beer. They both wore baseball caps. The older guy was big, with a shaggy gray beard and overalls; the younger guy had a sunburned face and he kept getting up to throw darts at the electric dartboard.

  “You in town for the Wilder festival?” the big guy with the beard asked us. Yes, we told him, and I asked him if he lived nearby. He shook his head. “We’re here for fishing,” he said.

  “From Iowa,” the younger guy added as he poured more beer into his glass.

  “We were at that lake around here yesterday. Lake Shetek,” Big Beard said. “And then we heard about that Laura contest, so I brought my grandkids down so they could enter.”

  It was then that I noticed the two girls at the pool table in the corner. They looked to be about nine or ten. They appeared almost identical at first, both sweetly chubby and with their fine brown hair French-braided into pigtails. They were taking turns trying to hit the pool balls, the huge pool cues teetering in their hands.

  “The Laura contest? Wow,” I said.

  The girls sensed our attention and wandered back over toward the table where their grandfather sat; they seemed happy to not have to entertain themselves. One of the girls wore glasses and appeared to be slightly older; the younger one grabbed a handful of popcorn from a basket on their table. She had a black T-shirt with something spelled out on it in rhinestone letters.

  “So you’re here with your grandpa?” I asked them.

  “Our uncle, too,” the younger girl said. Neither girl seemed particularly shy. They both had a deadpan matter-of-factness about them that I loved. They didn’t tell me their names, but I didn’t ask, either.

  Grandpa Big Beard told us about how they hadn’t been quite sure when the Laura contest was; he and his son had been coming up to fish for a couple of weekends hoping they’d catch it. Finally they’d figured out the right weekend. Only the contest wasn’t until tomorrow.

  “Grandpa thought it was today,” the older girl said.

  “But we’re going to do it tomorrow,” her sister said.

  “Are you going to get all dressed up in your prairie clothes?” I asked them. The girls exchanged a look with each other.

  “Well, we already are,” the older girl said.

  “Oh,” I said. Now that I looked more closely I could see both girls were wearing longish skirts. The older girl had one with a handkerchief hem, a brief trend from a couple of years ago, and she wore it with a slightly crumpled white button-down shirt. To my eyes it looked more parochial school than prairie, but I tried hard to see what kind of elements might have appeared right to her—a certain flounce in the skirt, perhaps, and with the tuckedin blouse, a sort of Sunday-morning sense of propriety as reassuring as the ribbons Ma tied in Laura’s braids. “Oh yes . . . you are dressed up, aren’t you?”

  “See my skirt?” the younger girl said. Her tiered brown prairie skirt went almost to her ankles and was a little too big in the waist; I wondered if it was borrowed from an older sister, maybe. I could tell that her shirt had once said Farmer’s Girl, but the rhinestone letters spelling Girl had worn off completely.

  These little girls here in the bar, I watched them as they drank Mountain Dew and ran over to the self-serve popcorn machine and filled their baskets. I wondered how it would go for them the next day when they’d line up with all these other little Lauras—lucky kids in pristine color-coordinated prairie dresses that their mothers had bought (or perhaps even sewn for them in between homeschooling sessions). I didn’t want to think about it. The older girl was wearing a scruffy pair of women’s shoes, chunky old platform loafers with buckles. Clearly she understood the essential grimness of nineteenth-century footwear and had tried to find something similarly dreary. How did she know there’s nothing bleaker than dress shoes from 1998? In her own way, she’d nailed it, I thought. I admired her.

  While we waited for our food, I’d taken out my laptop so I could upload some pictures to it from my camera. The younger girl came over to watch the screen. Meanwhile, Grandpa Big Beard talked to us about the TV show, which he said he watched every day. He said he liked it better when the Hallmark Channel aired the episodes in the morning instead of the afternoon. Recently they’d put the show on hiatus for a month and put Golden Girls in that time slot and he’d had to “get on the computer” so he could protest. He noted that he’d gone to the network website just two days after the show had stopped airing and he was the 127th person to post a complaint.

  “Who wants to hear about the sex life of that woman, you know, what’s her name, Bea Arthur?” he said.

  “Not many people,” Chris guessed.

  The older girl stopped in front of our table on her way back from the popcorn machine.

  “I’m going to be a singer when I grow up,” she said to us. “My favorite singer is Taylor Swift.”

  Whatever her prairie fantasies consisted of, they existed right alongside dreams of superstardom. I’m sure it had been the same way with me and every other girl who’d ever been nine years old and loved the Little House books. I wondered whether wanting to be both a pop star and Laura meant that you understood, on some level, that you probably couldn’t be either. Then again, who was I to second-guess these girls? They played with the touch screen on the Internet jukebox, gazing at one screen after another, sharing the space the way the Ingalls girls might have shared Pa’s big green book of animals.

  I noticed their grandfather was wearing a Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum T-shirt and I asked him about it. He said he’d gotten it last year when he visited. “Carrie and her twin sister came up here to the festival last year,” he told us. I knew he was talking about Lindsay and Sidney Greenbush, the twins who’d played Carrie Ingalls on the TV show. They must have made a guest appearance in Walnut Grove, the way some of the LHOP cast members did. “So I was going to try to see them, but they was gone by the time I got here,” he said. I liked how he seemed to do things at his own pace.

  Chris checked his watch. We had about fifteen minutes before the bus tour started. Then again, it was only a block away. Everything in Walnut Grove proper seemed to be only a block away from everything else.

  “So which one of you is going to win the Laura contest?” I asked the girls, who had pushed their chairs over so far they were practically sitting at our table by now. “Or are you both going to win?” It was a dumb question, exactly the sort of thing a grown-up would ask.

  “I don’t know,” the older girl said, shrugging at her sister, who shrugged back.

  “Ummm . . .” said the younger girl, picking at the rhinestones on her shirt. Finally she pointed to the older girl. “She’ll win.”

  “Yeah, I’m going to win a million dollars!” the older girl said. She paused and thought for a moment. “Wait, so what do you win, anyway?” She looked at me, but I didn’t know.

  “I’m going to win a million dolls,” the younger girl said. “That sounds good.”

  “It does,” I agreed.

  “And you could be Ma,” she said. The older girl nodded in agreement.

  “You think so?” My heart leapt at the suggestion, even though I didn’t know what it meant, although it could mean lots of things. Over the last hour the girls had gravitated to Chris and me as if to say, Take us with you maybe.

  “Sure,” the older girl said. “If there was a contest.”

  “I wish there was a contest,” I told them. It was true. The idea of dressing up in prairie clothes as an adult had been a slightly foreign notion that I was willing to entertain, but suddenly I wished, right then, that the Walnut Grove Annual Laura-Nellie Look Alike Contest had a grown-up division that I coul
d enter; and that I had a green delaine dress and a straw bonnet that I could wear. I wished that these girls had calico dresses with matching pinafores and sunbonnets and that we could sit around all day together eating popcorn. I would teach them how to crossstitch and resist the negative messages in fashion magazines. We could make button-strings, braid rag rugs, and wash and dry dishes carefully. I wanted to be their Prairie Ma, sort of like a fairy godmother but more earthbound, making sure, to paraphrase Caroline Ingalls, that all was well and that they ended up well.

  We boarded the school bus for our tour and waited as the cramped seats filled up with people. From the front window of the bus I could see down the block to the restaurant, and I watched for the two girls, hoping that their uncle and grandfather hadn’t forgotten about the tour. I was relieved when at last they all came up the street. They were almost the last people on the bus.

  On the tour we saw where a lot of things had once stood: the schoolhouse, the church, the house where Laura’s teacher had lived. “That’s probably not the original house,” the young woman guide kept saying of the places we passed. The irony of Walnut Grove as a pilgrimage destination is that for a place that so strongly evoked “town” in On the Banks of Plum Creek, almost nothing of the town that Laura knew has survived, and the only physical trace left is the dugout, the countriest of country things, which had been left behind in the wake of progress.

  We did see the church bell that Pa had helped pay for, though the Congregational church that Reverend Alden had built was long gone. The bell now hung in the belfry of a squat, modern brick Lutheran church, and the bus stopped in front while the guide ran inside to ring it. We all bent forward in our seats to try and peer up at the belfry as the bell clanged away, at least a dozen medium-bodied peals.

  It turned out the tour also stopped at Plum Creek, so we wound up there a second time. It was late afternoon, and now the place was more crowded; everyone paced up and down the paths and milled around the dugout site.

  We saw a large family where more than half the members were in prairie garb—two women, a couple little girls, and a boy in a white shirt and suspenders. A teenage girl in jeans and a tank top slouched alongside them. I was hoping that I could just walk up to one of these sunbonneted women and talk to them, that when they responded they would be speaking back from the place they were trying to get to by dressing like that and I would learn something along the way. But all I could manage when two of the women passed close to me on the path along the creek was “Hello.”

  “Hello!” the two women called back. One woman’s eyes met mine for a moment. A little too long of a moment, it seemed; too long for either of us to begin a conversation naturally. I nodded at the women and let them go.

  There were even more people in the creek—whole families gathered at the banks in organized wading expeditions. Parents shouted directions: Roll your pants up more, Tyler. Now get your shoes back on. We’re heading back to the car.

  As we walked along the creek again, we saw the older of the two girls we’d just met. “Did you get to go in the creek?” I asked her.

  “Yeah,” she said. She smiled shyly. She seemed more selfconscious out here in the sunlight and grass, and her big clunky shoes looked uncomfortable now. She must have hated to put them on again. She shrugged at me and hurried off to catch up with her family.

  At the pageant that night we found our seats in the rows of folding chairs. The stage set was a replica of everything we’d seen that day: a row of mock storefronts simulating Walnut Grove; a dugout on the stage-right side, complete with a soft halo of prairie grass hovering above it; and even an artificial garden pond to represent Plum Creek.

  The Walnut Grove Wilder Pageant is titled “Fragments of a Dream,” and according to the program guide it was first performed in the auditorium of the Walnut Grove school in 1978. The original script had been from Ma’s point of view, but over the years it had been revised with more of an emphasis on the town and the founding residents. There were nearly fifty roles in the pageant, including more than a dozen walk-on roles for kids, and nearly half the cast list was comprised of Bedals, Kennedys, and Nelsons, families the Ingallses had known. (The Owens were still called the Olesons, though, most likely because their fictionalized counterparts were so well known from the TV show.)

  The really great thing about the program booklet was that instead of running cast member bios it included brief histories of these founding families, some of whom had had their own share of pioneer misery: “Lafayette Bedal was killed in a sawmill accident in Aiken, Minnesota,” read one of them. Another described how Amassa Tower, a church deacon, was killed by lightning on the prairie; his wife, who’d been Laura’s Sunday school teacher, drowned in a well during an attack of insanity. I pointed that part out to Chris.

  “Is that going to be in the pageant?” he asked in amazement. Probably not, I told him.

  The rows were filling up and people were setting up lawn chairs on the grassy hill behind us. We had come a little too early, and after the long day the folding chairs were already uncomfortable. I began to wish we were back at the motel watching TV. I remembered Meribah Knight telling me she hadn’t much liked the pageants on the trip she’d taken. “I already had a version of the book in my head and it wasn’t anything like the stuff onstage,” she said. “Everyone was just sort of shouting their lines.” I could definitely understand how it might be that way. I began to wonder why anyone even went to these things.

  The lights on the stage changed and the music started. A row or two in front of me, two teenage girls pulled their sunbonnets up on their heads in a gesture that seemed silly and cute and reverent all at once.

  The stage was empty, but then just beyond the set, on the hill that rose gently behind the row of mock storefronts, was a covered wagon. You could just see the top of it as it went along down the hill, but its shape was unmistakable. There was a slight stir in the crowd as we watched it make its way slowly. Somehow the sight of it seized me and my eyes welled up. I’m not sure if I can completely recall what I was thinking, but it was something like, Oh my God, the lonely little wagon. Whatever: it was beautiful and then it disappeared behind the set.

  The rest of the pageant was impressive, with live animals, pyrotechnics, and other special effects. The covered wagon and other horse-drawn vehicles crossed the stage several times, and huge, elaborate sections of the set pulled out on rails and unfolded with remarkable efficiency. Meribah was right in that the action on the stage didn’t much resemble the books: the cast was so vast that I could barely pick out Laura among the girls in calico dresses. Clearly the outdoor stage was better suited for a role like Nellie Oleson, and the girl who played her flounced and screeched with nearly professional skill.

  And of course, there was spectacle. One of the high points was the church-building scene, where the men of Walnut Grove pulled on ropes until the clapboard tower and belfry of Reverend Alden’s church stood upright; then one of them scaled the tower to place a cross on the very top. The church in the real Walnut Grove had been torn down more than fifty years ago, but for six nights every summer the pageant cast valiantly brought a version of it back to life.

  In fact, the pageant itself felt a bit like church—in a good way, full of ritual and stories. The fact that it was called “Fragments of a Dream” had sounded a little goofy at first, but perhaps it wasn’t, not when you thought about the kind of dream it could have been: more than a century ago people came out here imagining a better future, only to see their prospects fall to pieces as a result of grasshoppers and fires, blizzards and depression; sometimes they got struck by lightning, mangled in sawmills, drowned in wells. The early history of the town was a dream that found its way into snippets of fiction, and then a TV show further rearranged all the bits and blew them into oblivion. In a way—in lots of symbolic ways, really—the town had been dismantled over and over again. This production, with its intricate sets that folded out, one little house turning into another, was a
fervent affirmation of survival. The show was for everyone who had come to Walnut Grove wondering what was left. It was something like Lorenzo’s dance party, only more fully realized, of course: it was faith that whatever was lost could simply be called back or restored or resurrected.

  The amphitheater lights came up. By then it was nearly midnight. We joined the line of cars that crawled up the hill to the road, and we followed taillights in the dark all the way back to Tracy.

  After my funny delusions back in Pepin, it was a kick to be in a town where the people really were talking about Laura Ingalls Wilder. Well, at least the families eating in Nellie’s diner on the Saturday morning of a pageant weekend probably were—families with little girls, including one girl whose blond biracial hair allowed her to sport a pretty stunning crop of Nellie Oleson–style ringlets.

  While Chris went up and paid the bill, I noticed how quiet a lot of the girls were. They seemed to slump a bit under the load of expectations a place like Walnut Grove carried, where everything was supposed to be fun and important at the same time. This wasn’t like going to American Girl Place, an experience meticulously engineered by retail experts. In a place like this you saw everything, the things that hadn’t changed and the things that had, the prairie grass and the gas station. And even as you tried to sense the spiritual presence of young Laura Ingalls at Plum Creek, you could see her image everywhere: on the town mural and various hand-painted signs, the bobblehead dolls and coloring books in the museum store, depictions that ranged from attractive to awkward to unrecognizably lumpy.