The Wilder Life Page 24

  “And did you see the folks at that bunkhouse?” Chris asked. The bunkhouse was uphill from us and it was the fanciest lodging available at Ingalls Homestead, a tiny clapboard house with air-conditioning and a microwave. It was hard to imagine that the family staying there was much attracted to the modern amenities, though, since all four of the girls were wearing long calico dresses, and so was their mother. They’d come out of the little house one by one and we watched them head over to the visitor’s center. Their faces were glowing, as if they’d been rolling barrel hoops with sticks all day. But it hardly seemed strange anymore to see people in period dress. Over at one of the tent sites, a woman wore a long dress and a flower-trimmed porkpie hat as she stood tending a grill—looking, I thought, very much like Laura might have looked when she and Almanzo and Rose camped along their journey to Missouri in 1894.

  There was even wildlife in our midst: slinky ground squirrels that scurried over the grass; their holes were everywhere. The stillness we’d felt before had given way somehow, and now the whole landscape seemed impossibly animated, with all the scurrying and the rippling of the fields in the breeze.

  Chris wanted to sleep for a little bit, so I took a walk by myself.

  It was late afternoon, and the high July sun had only just ceased to be relentless. It would still be a few hours until sundown and the De Smet pageant. I walked until I reached a large swath of thin green stalks that grew dense and tall; the top of it rippled in the wind, and the rest of it teemed with the noise of birds and crickets and locusts and countless other rural creatures whom I only knew by name—chiggers, peepers, creepers, whatever they were. This had to be the slough, that mysterious natural expanse whose nature I couldn’t quite understand when I first read the Little House books—was it a lake, a field, a bog? If you were lost in it, would you drown? Of course I knew now that a slough was a kind of wetland. As I peered into the green depths, I marveled at how much this resembled the slough of my childhood imagination.

  I walked along the edge of it for a while until I reached a sign that stood in front of it. That’s when I learned that this whole time I’d been gazing at an oat field.

  Oh. Never mind. I supposed that just because I was in Prairie Storybook Land it didn’t mean I could instantly recognize everything. The oats grew alongside fields of wheat and corn—thirty acres all together, to show visitors how much cropland was required on homestead claims. (I had better luck identifying the corn and wheat.)

  The afternoon shadows were growing longer. The visitors were beginning to thin out, and the brown cow and its calf were being led across the field to the livestock barn for the night. I wandered over to the corner of the homestead land where a grove of cottonwood trees had grown from the seedlings Pa had planted. They were huge now. I couldn’t believe this place.

  Even though we were making several stops on this trip, and had two more places yet to visit, I’d been thinking of this place as the true destination of our travel. After all, it was the place of fulfilled destiny, the place that I’d hoped Laura and her family would find from the moment they abandoned their lonely cabin in Kansas, which opened in me a deep need to see them find another little house on another prairie. More than anything, that’s what stayed with me about the books, that they made it out here. Never mind the Long Winter or anything else that followed: they were here, the here of completion, the embodiment of Laura’s Now. Everything I’d been doing for the past year, all the reading and cooking and traveling, I realized, was really about getting here, out to the farthest reaches of the big long dream that was the Little House series.

  Back at the wagon, Chris was at the picnic table reading By the Shores of Silver Lake. I sat down beside him.

  “Look at this,” he said, showing me the book. He had just begun chapter 8, and we looked at the illustration on the facing page: it showed Laura standing on a little rise of ground looking out over the railroad camp and the land beyond it, all the gentle swells of treeless prairie that reached back into the horizon under the banner of sky. Then he lowered the book. From the hill we were on we had the same vantage point.

  “I just looked up,” Chris said, “and there it was.”

  It looked like the same place. It was the same place.

  While Chris read I watched the covered wagons, tiny in the distance, travel steadily back and forth in their tracks across the prairie. There were two of them making the trip to the schoolhouse and back. They’d wait by the little white school building, and a few times every hour, the bell of the schoolhouse would ring, its wispy peals punctuating the calm. Somehow it never got old. Then the wagon would make its way back while another one headed slowly toward the schoolhouse to repeat the pattern. I could’ve watched all day.

  For the De Smet pageant, a performance of The Long Winter, we brought our camping chairs and sat near the back of the crowd. We didn’t feel the need to be up close, since it was our second pageant in as many nights. It was being held in an open field just across the road from Ingalls Homestead; its set was a cluster of low-slung little buildings, almost like boxcars. We were far enough from the stage to see how the prairie dwarfed it. But of course this was the kind of country where you really had to take a step back to see everything: everything lent itself to these distances. The sun was setting to our right, the sky epic, the darkness deepening as the crowd settled in.

  “I get the feeling that the De Smet pageant doesn’t have as much to prove as the Walnut Grove one,” Chris would say after the show.

  “I know what you mean,” I said. It was a simpler production, with its faithful, straightforward rendition of the book. Maybe it seemed a little odd to stage The Long Winter in the middle of July, but the lack of snow was explained by a cute little note in the program about “the fickle prairie weather.” I’d read later that the pageant tradition had actually started with The Long Winter, which had been adapted for a Hallmark Playhouse radio production in 1950; a few years later the town had gotten permission to perform the script on its own. Now every few summers the De Smet pageant switches to These Happy Golden Years or one of the other books set in town, but keeps returning to The Long Winter— which, after all, is as much about the town’s survival as the Ingalls family’s—and lets the story speak for itself.

  The prairie grew chilly as we watched the familiar scenes: the family enduring the October blizzard, Ma grinding wheat for bread, the Wilder brothers in their feed store making pancakes, with Almanzo’s brother Royal tilting his chair back just like in the Garth Williams illustration. From our far-off spot the little lit-up rooms of the set looked like pictures, or rooms in a dollhouse. Sometimes I’d look over in the distance beyond the set to Ingalls Homestead; I could almost see where the little replica shanty stood in the dark. I tried to imagine what it would be like in winter, with snow up to the eaves of all the houses, and wondered what that would be like from the inside.

  The sky had been starless for most of the show, but we hadn’t thought of rain until we felt a few scattered drops as we walked back to our car.

  There were no lights in our sleeping wagon. We had our flashlights and a fluorescent camping lantern that I’d set on the little table that slid out from beneath our bunk, but it was too low to cast much light in the cavelike space. Chris nodded up at the curved top of the wagon.

  “It’s like being in a giant mailbox,” he said.

  “Or a barrel,” I pointed out. “Or, I don’t know, a churn?” I was trying to think of appropriately nineteenth-century things that being in this covered wagon could be like, if it wasn’t quite like being in a covered wagon. Not that I wasn’t excited.

  “It’s better than a tent,” Chris said, as a smattering of rain hit the roof. It had yet to rain in earnest, but the little bursts of precipitation came regularly enough that there was no use building a campfire outside. We tried reading by the light of the lantern for a few minutes. Finally we decided to go to bed early.

  “I think this is what people did in the old days anyway,
” I said.

  “Slept in giant barrels?” he said.

  “No! Went to bed early.” I laughed. “Because there wasn’t enough light to do anything else.”

  Our bunk felt a little cramped, but then again it didn’t seem right for the bed to be too comfortable, either. There was a tiny louvered window above our bunk at the front end of the wagon. It faced the parking lot and the road, but it was too dark to see anything. Across the road, a ways off in a neighboring field, was some kind of utility tower; the little red light at its top blinked gently.

  I wondered if the sheepherders who slept in wagons like these ever felt claustrophobic. I turned over to sleep and fought the canned-in feeling by thinking about the world that lay outside—the wide-open prairie, the fields and their eddying surfaces, the enormous sky.

  A burst of rain against the roof woke me up. It was louder than it had been earlier. And it had another sound to it, a more acute clamor. Hail? I thought of the hailstorm that had ruined Laura and Almanzo’s wheat crops in The First Four Years. Oh, no, I thought.

  I sat up in bed to try to see out the window. Chris woke up just then.

  “I think it might be a hailstorm,” I told him.

  “Whoa,” he said. “What about the crops?”

  I loved him for saying that.

  I couldn’t see anything through the bunk window; it was too dark. I wondered if it really was hail, and if so, how big were the hailstones.

  “In The First Four Years it said the hailstones were as big as hen’s eggs,” I told Chris.

  “So that’s how people described hail size before golf became popular,” he said. “I guess I always wondered.”

  “Now you know,” I said. I had climbed down from our bunk and was trying to see out the window panel in the wagon’s door. I thought better about stepping outside to look, since Ole Larson, Laura and Almanzo’s neighbor, had done that in the book and been promptly conked out by a hailstone to the head. From the sound of the hail outside, that wasn’t too likely to happen, but this would be a hell of a time to tempt irony, wouldn’t it?

  I opened the door just for a moment; I could make out tiny bits of hail on the wooden steps. Just when I wished it wasn’t so dark, the sky lit up and a jag of lightning shot out over the horizon.

  “Whoa!” I shut the door. “Never mind.” I climbed back into the bunk and listened to the rain until I dozed off again.

  Sometime later the lightning flicked me awake again. I opened my eyes and the windows flashed.

  “Are you awake?” Chris said.

  I opened my mouth to answer and a thunderclap split everything open. It sounded like a gigantic shiny axe that would kill us all.

  “Oh, shit!” I gasped.

  It was raining even harder now, slapping against the sides and roof of the wagon with the rhythm of the wind. We both sat up in the bunk. We peered out the window and could see headlights in the parking lot. “Someone’s leaving,” Chris said. “I wouldn’t stay out in a tent in this weather, either.” We could just barely hear the engine start up over the rain, and we watched the lights disappear through the downpour.

  I thought about all of these kids out here, who knows how many little girls with their families braving the lightning and rain in their tents and RVs and wagons like ours. My God, how were they faring? They had to be either frightened out of their minds or having the time of their lives. Or both, I thought, since when you’re a kid, it’s possible to be both. I remembered that much.

  “What time is it?”

  Chris checked his watch. “About one thirty.”

  We were glad we weren’t in a tent in all this wind and lightning, but was it that much better to be here, in what was essentially a wooden box stuck in an open field above an electrical outlet? We couldn’t think about that.

  “We went through some thunderstorms like this when my family went camping as a kid,” I told Chris. We were trying to distract ourselves with conversation.

  “Me, too,” Chris said, though I could tell he was staring up at the roof at the thick metal bolts that were screwed into the wooden frame. Up here in the bunk, our feet were almost always touching one. I knew he was thinking, like I was, that if lightning hit the wagon those things would turn into little joy buzzers of death.

  Another clap of thunder set off a car alarm in the parking lot. (Nothing in The First Four Years prepared us for that.)

  “On the map it said the campground shower building is also a storm shelter,” I said, remembering.

  “Do you think we’re supposed to go there?” Chris asked.

  Just then the lightning and thunder hit together. CRAACCCK! Out the window, a molten crack of light seared down the sky. Down to something somewhere across the road.

  “Oh my God, I saw that!” I was trembling. “It hit somewhere right nearby. Did you see that?”

  “We’re going to die,” Chris said. “Just like Amassa Tower and his wife.” He was remembering the story of the Walnut Grove church deacon who was struck by lightning on the prairie.

  “His wife went insane,” I reminded him.

  “We’re going to die and go insane,” Chris said.

  It was one of the worst thunderstorms either one of us had ever experienced, we’d decided. “Except for that one last year,” Chris said. Once, a late-night storm back home had produced a thunderclap so massive and sudden that it caused us both to wake up shrieking and grabbing at each other like crazy folk. We’d been so shaken that we turned on the bedroom TV and spent the next two hours drinking scotch and watching infomercials in the wee hours of the morning. But when you’ve decided to take a Laura Ingalls Wilder journey out into the middle of the Dakota prairie, you’d rather not admit that you miss infomercials, even when there are times (such as two a.m., in a covered wagon, with no scotch to be had) that you do.

  We looked out again, but outside there was nothing: no headlights, no alarms. I couldn’t see the little red light on the tower in the distance. Everything was just storm.

  At dawn when I woke up it was gray outside; there was soft thunder but no rain. I walked through the wet grass to the bathroom building, keeping my eye on the mass of dark storm clouds that hung in the sky beyond the visitor’s center. So much for the glowing prairie dawn I’d hoped to experience. It was around five in the morning, but I wasn’t the only one up: some people were breaking camp, or hanging things to dry along the rail fence by the parking lot. I encountered a woman in the bathroom who confirmed that lightning had struck nearby during the storm. She also seemed pretty unfazed that her family’s tent had partially collapsed in the night.

  “Oh, we were fine in our sleeping bags,” she said, as she brushed her wet hair. “They were only really wet on the outside.”

  I was a little jealous that Chris and I had stayed so safe and dry and that our own tale of Dakota gumption wouldn’t be nearly as impressive as hers. And it occurred to me that ever since the first burst of hail last night, I’d been forming the story of the storm in my mind, what we would tell people when we got home, how we totally thought we were going to die just like the hapless pioneers we read about in pageant programs. I wouldn’t mention how, deep down, we knew we wouldn’t die but thought it anyway because we’re wimps.

  On my walk back to the wagon, I saw a family striking camp: a mom and her three kids were working desperately to shake out the water from their tent and fold it at the same time.

  “Do you see the sky?” I heard the mom snap. “Let’s get a move on. Now.”

  I was sure that for these kids this disastrous camping episode had only enhanced their Laura World experience, the way I’d heard back at Walnut Grove that sometimes children aspired to get their own leeches in Plum Creek.

  Had it been that way for us last night? I could see ourselves telling friends about how we’d lived life to the fullest on our Little House vacation, where we’d paid fifty bucks to sleep in a covered wagon and gotten our very own prairie calamity for free. And after all, the whole point of going o
n a Little House Big Adventure was that the simple life, the exposure to the elements, and the inspiring example of the Ingalls family would make you realize what was important to you, right? Except that maybe we discovered that what was really important was having a TV where we could watch the ShamWow! guy. We could claim to have felt the trepidation and awe that the Ingallses and the Wilders must have felt in their little houses, but all I knew was that last night we’d been too rattled to feel like anyone but ourselves.

  The first thing Chris said when he woke up was, “We have to go check on the wheat!”

  “I know!” I said. We got dressed and hurried out across the grass. Worrying about the wheat had been our one true Little House thought during the whole storm.

  To our relief the field was completely intact: still golden, the stalks swaying just as beautifully as they had the day before. “I guess the hailstones weren’t big enough to flatten it,” Chris said.

  “It’s nice to see that someone can actually grow some wheat out here,” I pointed out. To read the Little House books, you wondered if anyone ever managed to harvest a successful crop, since it seemed the minute the wheat grew ripe enough, something horrible always happened.

  The Ingalls Homestead attractions had just opened up for the day. The activities building was still empty except for the two high school kids who worked there.

  “Would you like to make a corncob doll?” a girl standing by the shelling machine called over to me.

  “Actually, could you show us how to twist a haystick?” I asked her. There wasn’t anyone over at the hay station, and making my own haystick—the little improvised bundles that Pa and other prairie settlers burned for fuel during the Long Winter when the coal and firewood ran out—was one of the few hands-on things I wanted to try.

  She shrugged. “Sure.” She came over and grabbed a long shock of hay from a big bin, twisted it until it doubled in on itself, and then tucked the ends in. She handed a bundle to me to try. I’d wanted to do it ever since the winter, when my Internet searches started picking up news items about various Laura Ingalls Wilder–related educational talks: they were at public libraries, park districts, community colleges, always somewhere in another state where I couldn’t attend, and almost invariably, they involved haystick-twisting demonstrations. There was something deeply appealing about it. After all, we’d all just watched the economy’s strange, sickening lurch that past fall—we’d seen the news, stared in shock at our own 401k statements with their freakish, dismal numbers, and while we knew what they meant, we couldn’t touch them, could barely comprehend them. So I couldn’t help but think that twisting haysticks must be damned good therapy, that it would let you feel the hardship, knowing that this thing that you held in your chapped hands made a difference, even as it was destined to burn away and vanish, just like a chunk of retirement savings! Hay twisting was literally a productive wringing of hands.