The Wilder Life Read online

  If I were one of these little girls, would I willfully ignore any of it, or would I take it all in and tell the Laura in my mind about it? That’s a Sinclair station, Laura, and it’s for cars. Do you know what cars are? What were they seeing?

  Watching the girls with their families made me think about something else, too. I knew my decision to make this trip was in some small way informed by the fact that Chris and I had decided not to have kids. In other words, I knew if I wanted to see these places, I’d have to go for myself; I wouldn’t ever be sharing the experience with a daughter, the way Little House fans often do. A friend of mine who similarly lacks the childbearing instinct once said, “I don’t want kids because I don’t want kids,” and it’s always made perfect sense to me. I’ve never really regretted being childless, but it started to feel different after my mother died, in a way I couldn’t describe.

  But here in Walnut Grove I knew what it was: I felt invisible sometimes. Not ignored, but anomalous and ghostly. I wasn’t the girl anymore, and I wasn’t the ma.

  I was grateful Chris had come along. I’d worried that he would be bored, like those TV boyfriends who sit outside department-store dressing rooms, and that it would dampen my prairie-wandering spirit. But he was my anchor. If it wasn’t for him, I was sure, I’d still be back at Plum Creek, or in one of the sod houses taking inventory. I’d kept picking up those stupid flatirons (both the sod house and the museum had signs that encouraged visitors to do so, to try it or feel it) and I never knew what to make of the foreign heaviness in my hand. Sometimes it almost felt like there was a trick to it, that if I held this thing long enough I’d somehow be more human than I was now, here with my head full of someone else’s life.

  The pace in town had suddenly picked up now that the pageant weekend was well under way. The covered wagon outside the museum, permanently bolted to the ground, was constantly crawling with kids, whose feet thumped up and down the length of the wagon bed so much it sounded like it had been hitched to a team of panicked Clydesdales.

  Already the Walnut Grove city park was starting to fill up with young Lauras. The Laura-Nellie Look Alike competitions wouldn’t take place until the afternoon—by then we’d be on the road to De Smet—but the contest registration table had just been set up, and a line of girls and parents had formed. According to the sign near the table, it cost five dollars to enter the contest, and contestants had to be between eight and twelve. (It did not specify girls, a loophole that Meribah’s third-grade classmate probably could have exploited if he’d wished.)

  Today was the Walnut Grove family festival, where the park, a green and shady square block just west of the center of town, hosted a rummage sale, food tents, and live music. The Hmong Cultural Center had its own table, as did a woman who ran a makeshift salon offering French-braided Laura pigtails. I bought yet another sunbonnet, and at the rummage sale picked up a commemorative plate depicting Doc Baker from the TV show. Now I was watching the contest registration.

  I looked around for the two girls we’d met yesterday, the ones who’d improvised their costumes, but I didn’t see them. All the girls waiting in line so far were in full Laura drag.

  “I think the competition is going to be stiff,” I told Chris. But maybe winning the contest was only a secondary objective. More than anything, the contest gave girls an excuse to dress up like Laura Ingalls or Nellie Oleson for a day. They’d be judged in part on their knowledge of the characters, but what’s a little trivia when there were long pretty dresses to be donned?

  The essential Laura look, of course, consists only of pigtail braids, a sunbonnet—preferably hanging down the back—and some sort of prairie dress. Everything else is extra credit: pinafores or aprons, hair ribbons (personally, I would award bonus points to any Laura whose braids sported blue ribbons in homage to that scene when Ma gets her tedious Laura/pink, Mary/blue color coding all mixed up for once), lunch pails or other accessories, and shoes.

  Ah yes, the shoes. It was one thing to sew or buy a reasonably convincing prairie dress, quite another to get the footwear right. Most girls weren’t doing much better than my clunky-shoed friend from the day before: only a couple girls had the highbuttoned boots; perhaps they were the more competitive Laura contenders. A few wore Mary Janes, which had a certain quaintness that sort of worked. But most of the girls just wore sandals or gym shoes under their dresses.

  “I’m already judging the contest based on feet,” I said. “Look, that kid has Birkenstocks.”

  “How do you know some of the girls aren’t going to take off their shoes and go barefoot when they go onstage?” Chris asked.

  “Oh, good strategy.” Barefoot would be the most authentic Laura touch of all. And the most ironic, I pointed out, since Laura had felt so ill-equipped when she showed up on her first day of school and saw that the other Walnut Grove schoolgirls had decent shoes and dresses.

  “You’re really thinking about this too much,” Chris said.

  We’d spotted only a couple of entrants for the Nellie contest around the park. They appeared to be very good Nellies, though, with their hair done up in blond curls and wearing ruffled dresses: one girl in pink, the other yellow. I couldn’t tell if the dresses were historically accurate, but then again, I suspect the only thing that has to be authentic about impersonating Nellie Oleson is the attitude. I asked the woman at the registration table if she thought there’d be more Nellies showing up later—there still were a few hours before the contest, after all, and it would be rather Nellieish to show up at the last minute and upstage everyone.

  “You know, there just aren’t a lot of Nellies,” the woman told me. She said the Laura contestants always outnumbered the Nellie ones, sometimes by as much as six to one. “Most girls just want to be Laura.” I supposed any kid who read and loved the Little House books enough to come to Walnut Grove would most likely feel an affinity for Laura. I could see how perhaps it took a special kind of girl to want to be a Nellie, someone who was willing to cross over to the dark and frilly side.

  I had given up hope that my girls would show up, the two we’d met the day before. Maybe they’d lost their nerve, and you couldn’t count on Grandpa Big Beard to get the time right.

  We were crossing the park for the last time on our way to the car when I finally saw them—the girls, their uncle, and Grandpa Big Beard, waiting in line to sign up for the Laura contest. They wore the same clothes they’d been wearing the day before—the older girl in the crooked skirt and white blouse, the younger with her brown-tiered skirt and black rhinestone T-shirt. Now, though, they both had brand-new sunbonnets, in red and pink. I pointed the girls out to Chris.

  “We could stay another couple of hours to see the contest,” Chris said. “You could tell them to take off their shoes.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. I didn’t want to see who’d win or not win. The girls had new sunbonnets and that was enough for me. The older girl had the pink one and she wore it hanging down her back. It was bright enough that I could still see it from the car across the street as we turned the corner to get back to Route 14.

  9.

  Anywhere East or South

  HOW DO YOU DESCRIBE a place like Ingalls Homestead? I hesitate to call it a Laura Ingalls Wilder theme park, but that’s a pretty good approximation of what it is. It’s situated on the open prairie just a couple of miles from the town of De Smet, just like the original Ingalls homestead shanty is in the books. Just like—but of course I had to keep reminding myself that Ingalls Homestead was on the original land the Ingalls family had bought. Now the 160-acre plot has nearly a dozen buildings and exhibits, including an 1880s schoolhouse, a real 1870s shanty, a replica dugout (the fourth we’d see on this trip), a lookout tower, a welcome center with a gift shop, and a camping area. It has its own slough. And a horse barn with miniature ponies. And covered wagon rides! When you’re at Ingalls Homestead, you can be simply walking around, admiring the prairie view, and a friendly fellow with a straw hat and suspenders wil
l just come up to you and say, “Have you taken a covered wagon ride yet? Would you like one?” Of course you would! And, of course, we did.

  It was early afternoon by the time we’d arrived in De Smet after driving the two hours from Walnut Grove. The land in South Dakota was flat, as we’d expected, but also the sky had grown or seemed to press down more. We couldn’t tell at what point along the two-lane highway this change had taken place.

  “Laura couldn’t say how, but this prairie was different,” it says in By the Shores of Silver Lake, as she rides with her family in an open wagon toward the place where the town of De Smet would eventually be built. Pa senses it, too, but is similarly unable to put his finger on what it is. The book finally describes it as “an enormous stillness that made you feel still,” a strange sentence but a true one, as we found. Somehow all the usual noise sounded distant: the car radio and the air-conditioning and the engine on cruise control, all of it oddly faint under that sky.

  “Who are you messaging?” Chris asked me. He’d looked over from the driver’s seat and seen that I’d taken my phone out and was looking at the blank screen for sending text messages.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I had simply acted on an impulse. “Maybe Jami?” I thought about it. “I just want to send a message to someone.” It felt like we could disappear out here. You could drive ten miles per hour faster once you crossed the state line and entered South Dakota, but despite the increased speed limit, I could feel, yes, the stillness. We pushed through it all afternoon.

  De Smet was a bigger town than Walnut Grove, with a modern business strip along Highway 14 that had a couple of motels and convenience stores. But even on a pageant day, the quiet persisted. We stopped the car and parked along Calumet Avenue, the original main street that had risen from the prairie mud in 1880.

  The wooden buildings from that time had been replaced just a few years later by brick buildings, the kind with the tall Victorian windows. At one point there’d been an opera house along this street, and later, an auditorium where dances were held and Lawrence Welk’s orchestra had played. These days, what drew visitors to Calumet Avenue was the Loftus’ store, the general store that had been mentioned in the books, still on the very same site. It had become a gift shop that sold merchandise labeled LITTLE TOWN ON THE PRAIRIE and little burlap sacks of seed wheat to commemorate The Long Winter. (You’ll remember in the book that Mr. Loftus had put up the money for Almanzo and Cap Garland to buy a remote homesteader’s wheat supply and then caused an uproar by trying to sell it to hungry townspeople at a profit. If the price of the souvenir wheat was any indication, clearly the days of markup outrage were long over.)

  You could also see the corner where Pa’s building had stood: a brick building with a law office was there now. Much of the block was given over to businesses that were closed on a Saturday. The street had the same stoic calm as its old photos.

  Just across Second Street was a coffeehouse, also closed for the afternoon, but a sign that boasted Wireless Internet hung outside, and there was a bench by the door.

  “Hang on,” I told Chris. My twenty-first-century twitches were getting the better of me. I sat down and pulled out my laptop. “I don’t know why I’m even checking right now,” I said sheepishly. But sure enough, the coffeehouse had an open network. “The Wi-Fi at the motel was pretty weak this morning,” I said to Chris, by way of an excuse. But here I was, just across the street from the very place where the Ingalls family had endured the hard winter and twisted hay into sticks, checking my e-mail. Right over there, Pa had shaken his cold-stiffened clenched fist and raged at the keening wind! He had shaken it, in fact, to the northwest, in the very direction where I was sitting with my white MacBook. This is so not right, I thought.

  I was less conflicted by the time we got to the visitor’s center at Ingalls Homestead, where we sent Chris’s mom a virtual postcard from a little kiosk across from the front desk. The center is like a well-built barn, spacious and rustic yet air-conditioned. Ingalls Homestead has been open since 1997, but it still has all the exuberance of a new enterprise; it feels like what I imagine being in De Smet in its early years was like. Even the bathroom stalls at Ingalls Homestead were built with planks of golden lumber that looked fresh and sturdy.

  The woman at the front desk gave us the key to the “covered wagon” where we were staying for our first night and explained that our camping fee included admission to all the exhibits for the duration of our stay. She handed us a brochure with a map and marked the visitor’s center with an X. I read the building description: “Enter the prairie through the back door,” it said. So we did.

  There are few, if any, sidewalks or walkways at Ingalls Homestead. People simply walk across the expanse of mown prairie, wandering in all directions. We moved dutifully through a row of buildings at first, the small museum and the dugout and the shanty, but before long we gave in to the urge to just drift across the open field. There was a little hay-roof barn that sat all by itself against a gentle slope, and when we went inside, a brown-and-white cow peered up at us from her pen. She lounged in the straw with her calf, and her hide looked so silky that I wanted to climb into the pen and spoon against her side.

  Beyond the hay-roof barn was the place called “Ma’s Little House,” the reconstruction of the claim shanty that Pa had built in 1880—which, in the books, is at the end of By the Shores of Silver Lake. The replica had been built on the very location and to the same dimensions as the original shanty (which had disappeared sometime after Pa sold the land in 1892): a little board-and-batten house, handsomely weathered gray and determinedly cheery, with a tiny front porch.

  The door was wide open, and inside it was surprisingly airy and light. Most of the other dugouts and houses we’d seen on this trip had been pretty musty, but here there was a breeze through the kitchen, which had a stove, a table, and a nice woman in a prairie dress who said, “Welcome to Ma’s Little House! Would you like to know more about homesteading in the 1880s?”

  I’d already read most of what she had to tell me, but how could we refuse?

  There was a room just past the kitchen that I recognized instantly as the part of the house Pa had built for Mary’s parlor organ, which stood by the back door. Or rather, the battered antique organ that stood in for the real thing. Although nothing here had ever belonged to the Ingallses, it hardly mattered. We were free to touch anything: to play the parlor organ, try the sewing machine, scrub laundry on a washboard in a tin tub that stood just outside the back door, then hang it to dry on the clothesline by the vegetable garden. You could pet the gray kittens curled up on the patchwork quilts in the bedrooms (I’d spotted another one darting around the front porch) or pump water from the well.

  “Is there anything you want to try?” Chris asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure.” Somehow I was wary of doing the hands-on things, though I’d churned butter and ground seed wheat at home. I felt superstitious and weird at the thought of doing anything beyond just looking. It would be like touching a spinning wheel in a fairy tale. I’d either break a spell or invoke a new one.

  All the same, we found ourselves on a wagon ride, which traveled along wheel ruts in the grass. It was full of visitors like ourselves, and the sides were open so that we could see the prairie all around. Our driver was the kind of young man you might call “strapping,” and when a girl sitting near the front of the wagon asked if the horses had names, he said they were called Skip and Barnum.

  “They’re named after Almanzo’s horses,” I whispered to Chris.

  The wagon took us to a genuine one-room schoolhouse that stood at the far corner of the homestead, and once inside we sat in wooden desks while a genuine retired local schoolteacher told us about the history of rural schools like this one. She pointed out how the legs of some of the desks had little messages of encouragement in molded letters in the metalwork. TRY AGAIN, said the desk next to mine. Then she let us pull the rope to ring the bell in the lit
tle belfry as we filed back out into the sunlight.

  I was quickly becoming a model student here at Ingalls Homestead. On the wagon ride back, the driver quizzed our group about the requirements of the Homestead Act. “Anyone know how long you had to live on a claim to own it?” he asked.

  “Five years!” I piped up.

  At the activity center near the horse barn, a teenage staff member showed me how to feed dried corncobs into a hand-cranked corn sheller and wrap a scrap of calico around the stripped cob to make a little doll.

  “And do you know what the name of Laura’s corncob doll was?” she asked.

  “Susan,” I said proudly.

  The wheels of our covered wagon were partly buried in the ground, as if the imaginary settlers who drove it had simply decided to stay in the place where they’d gotten stuck. Beneath the wagon bed, in the spot where Jack the bulldog would’ve walked, there was an electrical hookup, and in back a short set of steps led up to a padlocked door. We opened it with our key. Inside was an efficient little compartment with benches and a bunk tucked in the back; the roof was fiberglass over a wood frame. The four sleeping wagons at Ingalls Homestead were modeled after the hardtopped sheepherders’ wagons used in Montana and Idaho: as far as luxury went, they were considerably less posh than the pop-up trailer my family had owned when I was a kid, but probably a heck of a lot cushier than the Ingallses’ covered wagon.

  We carried our sleeping bags and pillows from the car and stowed them in the bunk, then sat at the picnic table outside. Around us was the camping area, a gentle slope dotted with the wagons and a few tents. Up by the parking lot was a hookup area for camping trailers and RVs. Our camping neighbors were mostly families with children.

  “There’s a kid in a prairie dress at that campsite,” I pointed out to Chris. “And I saw another one over by that blue tent.”