The Wilder Life Read online

  So I tried to twist my hay, wanted to twist it as tight as I could. I’d seen haysticks hung on the walls at the Oxbow, the one family restaurant in town, and they’d been twisted tight and shiny as pigtail braids; the one the girl made frankly looked more like a tidy tumbleweed. But then, I couldn’t get mine to look any better: the hay crumbled if you twisted it too hard. “It’s awfully loose,” I said. “Shouldn’t it be denser so it can last while it burns?” I asked the girl. The thunderstorm had eroded what little pioneer credibility I’d imagined for myself, but it still seemed important that I understand haystick thermodynamics as much as possible.

  She shrugged again. “That’s just how the hay is this time of year, I guess. But you can take this one and try burning it on your campfire and see what happens.” She handed the one she’d made to me. (It was still better than mine.)

  “Thank you,” I said, taking it reverently. It was almost big enough to cradle like an infant. It was a scraggly bundle of dried grass, but like dried grass, it also smelled clean and barnlike and nice. I held it gently.

  “You’re not really going to burn your prairie baby, are you?” Chris whispered as we walked back to our wagon.

  “No way,” I told him.

  Chris was letting the car idle down Second Street.

  “Why are you slowing down?” I asked him. We’d picked up a paper map of De Smet that showed sixteen different historical points of interest. I looked over at an old frame house. “Is that where the schoolhouse used to be? What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing,” Chris said. “I’m driving this slow because the speed limit in this town is fifteen miles per hour. I can’t believe it.”

  “Maybe it’s so we can get a feel for what it was like to ride around in a buggy,” I said.

  We’d just turned in our wagon key at Ingalls Homestead, since we’d had the wagon for only one night. We decided to set up our tent later, after we’d seen the attractions in town. Now we were approaching the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society, which operated a gift shop and tour operation out of a Victorian house on a side street in De Smet. Next to it stood a completely unassuming little white clapboard house, though I’d seen it in photos and knew exactly what it was.

  “There’s the surveyors’ house!” I said as Chris parked the car.

  “That’s the surveyors’ house?” Chris said incredulously, since like everything else from the Little House books, it was smaller than we’d thought.

  I was glad Chris was reading By the Shores of Silver Lake, because it’s really hard to explain to people who don’t know the books why the surveyors’ house is such a big deal. It shows up in Silver Lake a few chapters in, when Laura and her family, having recently arrived in Dakota Territory, are staying at the railroad camp in a cramped shanty with a dirt floor. One day Laura looks out and notices, among the assemblage of temporary shanties and bunkhouses, a lone house—a real house on the shore of Silver Lake. “I wonder what that house can be and who lives there,” Laura says to herself.

  I remember having to wait two whole chapters to find out that the big fancy house was for the railroad surveyors and all their tools, which of course was a letdown, since nothing’s more boring than surveying tools. But then, just as the Ingallses are considering the depressing prospect of going back east for the winter, Pa announces that the family can spend it living in the surveyors’ house. Which has to be the best house-sitting gig ever, and all Pa has to do is make sure nobody steals the surveying tools (like that’s hard); the place is stocked to the gills with provisions, and later the family even makes extra money by running the place as an impromptu hotel during the spring land rush.

  One of my favorite scenes in the whole series was when Laura enters the house at last: she gets to run ahead of the wagon and be the first to go inside and see the house in all its glass-windowed, multiroom glory. She opens all the doors (so many doors!), discovers the six-lidded stove, and steps into the pantry storeroom filled with heretofore unheard-of delights like canned peaches, soda crackers, and a whole barrel full of salt pork. Silver Lake made the house sound like a yawningly huge place, the largest house Laura had ever lived in. From what I could tell as a kid, living in the surveyors’ house was like getting to live in the house from The Brady Bunch: certainly not an extravagantly wealthy existence but a hell of an improvement on the everyday one.

  Silver Lake had been mostly drained in the 1920s, and eventually the surveyors’ house was moved from its original spot by the lake into town, where the Memorial Society now runs it as a museum. By modern standards the house is about the size of a three-car garage, albeit one with an attic. But that hardly mattered to me—what mattered more was that it’s the only Ingalls home mentioned in the Little House books still standing.

  It’s sort of bittersweet that of all the places where the Ingalls family lived over the course of the entire Little House saga, the only one to survive wasn’t one of the little houses that Pa built, but a place where they’d had a borrowed bit of comfort, lived a life that wasn’t quite their own. But I still wanted to see it, to see the dream that they’d lived briefly. I thought again about the little perception game I’d play when I was younger, when I’d come home from school on latchkey afternoons and imagine that I was Laura going to the surveyors’ house alone for the first time, walking into each empty room and seeing a version of my life that was somehow better.

  Now inside the surveyors’ house for real, we knew where all the doors led. I think everyone in our tour group did: the bedroom, the stairs, the pantry, the lean-to. There was even a whatnot like the one the family had made in Silver Lake, the fancy-trimmed knickknack shelf that had brought a touch of Victorian fussiness to Dakota life. The time we spent in the house felt too short, but what was there to look at besides the stove, the few bits of furniture, the whiteboard walls? It was the paradox of all the little houses I’d visited, but especially of this one. You could see at a glance that the pantry was nearly empty, but one by one we all still went to the doorway and peered in.

  Wait, there was one place that Pa had built that was still standing, and it was the house on Third Street. It was the last stop on the Memorial Society tour, after we’d gone through two schoolhouses, including one where Laura and Carrie had attended school. The Third Street house was built by Pa in 1887, and it was where the Ingalls family had lived after they’d moved off the homestead. Pa had won his bet with the government and fulfilled the homesteading requirements, but he’d given up on farming and eventually sold the homestead land, turning instead to work in town as a carpenter, a storekeeper, and even an insurance salesman.

  The De Smet house wasn’t in the Little House books, though in On the Way Home Rose had mentioned it as her grandparents’ house. It was bigger than the surveyors’ house, an ordinary but genteel two-story frame house with tall windows. It was the best house Pa had built, and his last one. The street it was on was shady with tall old trees. The house had sort of a stunted air around it in comparison with the signs of life in all the other houses on the block, with their lawn ornaments and garage driveways.

  The guide, a college-aged girl in a prairie dress, led us into the wallpapered front parlor and told us about how Carrie and Mary and Grace had all lived in the house at various times in their adulthood. We saw cloudy photos of Carrie and Grace with their husbands; they’d moved elsewhere in South Dakota and hadn’t had children. If you didn’t already know that the Charles Ingalls family hadn’t any descendants other than Rose Wilder Lane, you’d find out here.

  As a kid, I would have loved seeing the Victorian parlor furniture and knowing that Ma and the girls were at last living in the kind of civilized comfort that her china shepherdess implied, but now it felt more poignant, knowing that much of the family quietly faded away here. We learned that after Pa died in 1902, Ma had rented out the rooms upstairs, and in the front hallway was an old wall telephone that Ma hadn’t much liked to use but Mary had taken to well. Hearing about these later chapters in
the Ingalls family chronicle, the marriages and quiet dotages and deaths, made them all seem like distant elderly relatives. We went upstairs and looked into their dim bedrooms, carefully arranged with combs and trinkets that had belonged to them.

  “So now you know what happened to everyone else,” I told Chris when the tour ended. “They all died.”

  “Well, of course people die,” he said. “It’s history, right?”

  “I guess,” I said. “Maybe I like Ingalls Homestead a little better. To hell with history!” I was joking, but it was also true: I had to admit that I liked Ingalls Homestead because nobody got old and died there, and wheat survived hailstorms, and land claims weren’t abandoned after years of drought. Pa may have given up the homestead, but the spirit of free-land perseverance lived on at Ingalls Homestead: you could always TRY AGAIN there, or at least pretend to. I felt guilty. I knew that just like in the books, my Laura World thrived on the true stuff as much as the fiction, but here I was, a sucker for the awesome prairie fairy tale that was Ingalls Homestead.

  Chris checked his watch. It was early afternoon. “So you’re ready to head back there and play Laura, then?”

  “Not yet,” I said. Because that was true, too.

  We drove a few miles south of town to see the twin lakes where Laura and Almanzo went on buggy rides during their courtship. Then we drove a mile north of town to see the field where they’d had their doomed homestead claim in The First Four Years. We’d bought sandwiches at the Subway on the highway strip and were looking for a place to have a picnic, but I was feeling restless and found myself telling Chris to just keep driving.

  First we went slowly along the narrow road that divided Lake Henry and Lake Thompson. More than once, in These Happy Golden Years, the couple travels this same road, and in one scene Laura looks out at the lakes and imagines how they must have been in the days when the prairie was wilder, teeming with antelope and buffalo and wolves and herons and swans. The lakes’ surfaces picked up the perfect blue of the sky and rippled as serenely as the water on the book’s cover.

  After turning back north, we finally pulled off the road by the historical marker that designated the low empty hill behind it as Rose Wilder Lane’s birthplace, the site where the Wilder claim shanty had stood. We sat in the car and ate our sandwiches, staring west at the scrubby cow pasture where Laura and Almanzo had lived their luckless existence. But it was also beautiful. There were no trees here. It looked the way the country must have looked when the railroad first came through. Ever since yesterday, when we’d watched the pageant, I had the feeling that there were two worlds here, one layered upon the other, and that everyone who came here was always trying to see through one prairie to the other.

  There’s a moment like this in the books, for me at least: In By the Shores of Silver Lake, the Ingalls family is outside the shanty watching Pa plant some cottonwood seedlings that he brought from Lake Henry. The happy occasion turns terrifying when they realize that Grace, who is just a toddler, has wandered out of sight, and a panicked search ensues. Pa and Ma rush to the treacherous Big Slough to look for her in the tall grass, and Laura runs to the south on the flat, shadowless prairie, trying to think where Grace could have gone.

  It’s one of the most dramatic scenes in the series, and the point of view, as always, is in the third-person limited: “Laura felt cold and sick,” it says. “If she were little and playing all by herself, Laura thought, she wouldn’t go into the dark Big Slough.” It’s a thought-space that Little House readers know well, where we are both in and out of Laura’s head. But then, for just a few lines, as Laura runs and calls out for her sister, there’s a strange shift when her thoughts come out as they never have before in the series—in the first person, a little flash of interior narrative:She ran on and on. Grace must have gone this way. Maybe she chased a butterfly. She didn’t go into Big Slough! She didn’t climb the hill, she wasn’t there. Oh baby sister, I couldn’t see you anywhere east or south on this hateful prairie. “Grace!”

  I never fail to be disoriented whenever I come across this little passage: I lose track of who the she is and can’t discern if this new I is speaking out of urgency or memory. It seems both accidental—an error in style—and purposeful, a meaningful blip. Briefly, it always seems to me, the worlds overlap in this spot, a place as strange and anomalous as the deep, violet-filled hollow where Laura finds her sister a few moments later. I wanted the world to be like that, for all its layers to be visible.

  From the parked car we stared out at this little hill where nothing was and where someone was born. Then we got out and stood along the wire fence because I couldn’t get close enough and I couldn’t quite be still.

  It was still too hot and bright out to set up our tent for our second night at Ingalls Homestead. We would do it when the afternoon sun got a little lower in the sky, I decided, when we could sit in our lawn chairs and look out over the prairie again. In the meantime we went by the cemetery where Ma and Pa and Mary and Carrie and Grace were buried; we saw the train depot; we looked at nearly everything on the map we were given. I wanted to see everything we could, then go back to Ingalls Homestead for the night, sleep in contentment, wake up to a brilliant prairie dawn.

  I kept checking the weather. When we drove, I searched the car radio tuner for the local forecast.

  “It looks a lot less cloudy now,” Chris said. “Like it’s clearing up.”

  “I don’t want to take any chances,” I told him. “Let’s just make sure there won’t be any more storms like last night.”

  When we stopped for coffee at the Oxbow, I took out my laptop and started looking up De Smet on various weather websites. “If there’s any chance of rain, I don’t know if we should stay,” I said. “I mean, if we had to, we could get on the road this afternoon and just find a motel in Minnesota or something.” It was true that we had an arduous drive scheduled the next day. Hours and hours, along that stifling stretch of I-90, to our last two stops in Minnesota and Iowa. “If we had to go this afternoon, we could break up that long drive.”

  Chris nodded. “Whatever you want to do,” he said.

  “Well, it’s not what I want,” I said. “It would be only if the weather was going to be bad again tonight.”

  Weather.com said only “partly cloudy.” So did the webpage for the Sioux Falls news station. “Chance of precipitation: less than 10 percent,” read the forecast on a third page, with a peaceful-looking icon of a moon and a handful of little clouds. It would be a fine night: no rain, temperatures in the low seventies. I let out a deep breath and looked up at Chris.

  “So what’s the verdict?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, even though, suddenly, I did. “I think we have to go,” I said. “It’s not going to rain. But still. Maybe we should go.”

  “You mean, leave today?” He looked confused.

  “Yes,” I said, though I was feeling an odd weight slink down my spine. Something like dread but also like relief. I had to say it again. “Let’s just go.”

  Yes, we left De Smet a day early.

  Maybe I was set on leaving before I fully realized it. All we had to do was put up the tent (more than once Chris had reminded me), and all day I’d kept putting it off, kept waiting for it all to feel right. It had, at first: those first few hours at Ingalls Homestead the day before, the way the world of the books was so wonderfully wrought that for a little while I could imagine it was my own.

  And then it all started to feel less certain. Nothing had changed; there hadn’t been any disappointments. And yet behind all my expectations there was a restlessness that I hadn’t accounted for at all. It kept insisting that something wasn’t right. What was wrong? And just then I knew exactly what it was: what was wrong was that I was not Laura.

  I actually laughed out loud a little bit in the restaurant when I had that thought. I was not Laura Ingalls Wilder! And this was not my town, with its fifteen-miles-per-hour speed limit, and its highway display of memorial cr
osses for the unborn babies of South Dakota. I did not like the heat or the stillness. I did not really like the Oxbow restaurant, which for lack of other options in town we’d visited three times already, and two of those times something had gone so profoundly wrong with their regular service that they’d steered us to their sad, sad buffet instead. And I’d wanted so badly to love the place, with its décor of beribboned haysticks and old town photos, that I did not like my feelings, which were beginning to extend to other things, radiating outward like rings on the surface of Silver Lake. Which somehow I did not even want to see, even though I’d been told that if you drove behind the cement plant you could, since all the rain this summer had filled it up again.

  Reader, I did not mention all this before now because what kind of asshole would have bad thoughts about the Little Town on the Prairie? Would not want to see Silver Lake, even though it had magically reappeared like some watery Brigadoon? I was that kind of asshole, apparently. In the moment I decided to go, though, I had suddenly realized that I did not have to like it here: this was not where I had been born; my childhood was not here, even though I’d felt I’d gotten glimpses of the Laura World I remembered.