The Wilder Life Read online

  The whole street block was terrifically ghostly: only a few buildings left, one an empty building where a café had been. Next to the museum was the only other establishment, a bar called Barney’s.

  If you think it’s a little unwholesome to have a watering hole smack next to a Laura Ingalls Wilder museum, you don’t know Burr Oak. “A certain grittiness, even seediness, characterized the episodes Wilder remembered from her life in Burr Oak,” says Pamela Smith Hill in her book. There had been a barroom in the hotel and a saloon next door (though not in the same place as the current bar), which the elder Ingallses had found so dismaying that after it caught fire one night, Pa admitted that if it could’ve burned to the ground without taking the rest of the town with it, he wouldn’t have helped out with the bucket brigade. In Pioneer Girl Laura reported that there were bullet holes in the door of the hotel barroom where the previous owner had shot at his wife in a drunken fit, and that in the saloon the hired girl’s boyfriend went on a drinking binge so severe that when he lit a cigar the fumes on his breath ignited and he was killed instantly. (Who knew that was even possible?) Even though the incident was over 130 years ago, I liked to think that maybe they were still talking about it at Barney’s.

  From the tour you could tell this was a different Laura World. There wasn’t quite the same prairie-dress-clad seriousness that had characterized the attractions we’d seen elsewhere. If her T-shirt was any indication, our teenage tour guide was named Monica and she’d just attended volleyball camp. She knew her tour speech well, reciting the history of the Ingalls family’s years in Iowa, and was most enthusiastic at the end of it: “And then Pa skipped town in the middle of the night!”

  Monica led the two of us around the rooms of the hotel, bounding up and down the stairs with a summer-job insouciance, which didn’t seem out of place, considering that the whole museum was dedicated to a girl who’d had to work there over a hundred years ago. She pointed out the chamber pots that Laura would have had to empty in the bedrooms, the dining room where she and Mary would have waited on guests eating breakfast, and the kitchen where the girls washed dishes. Nothing in the Little House books ever indicated that the family would have been familiar with a place like this. In By the Shores of Silver Lake, Ma and the girls have dinner at a hotel by the train station in Tracy, and Laura drinks in the details as if she were visiting Mars. And in Little Town on the Prairie, when the question of Laura working in town comes up, Ma really clutches her pearls over the thought of her daughter taking a hotel job.

  The irony of the Masters Hotel is that it looks awfully nice, much bigger than the surveyors’ house, and more refined, with wallpapered rooms and “boughten” furniture. The upstairs bedrooms had cozy sloping eaves, patchwork quilts on the beds, and dressers adorned with doilies and porcelain pitchers and washbasins. Aside from the cramped rooms, the place looked to me like it could be a pretty cute bed-and-breakfast. It was only when Chris and I listened to the tour narrative that we realized how grim things had been. Monica told us that twenty-five to thirty people stayed at the hotel every night.

  “All at the same time?” I asked. There were four tiny bedrooms, each with one bed. I’d neglected to remember reading that if you were a nineteenth-century hotel customer (and not a rich one), your twenty-five cents a night (the equivalent of sixty dollars, Monica told us) paid not for a room but for the privilege of sleeping crosswise on a bed, or whatever cot or floor space was available, plus meals. I noticed the rooms didn’t have doors, because why bother? With sleeping people piled everywhere, a typical night here must have looked like the aftermath of a frat house kegger. I realized that the social prohibitions against women traveling alone weren’t just an uptight custom. Oh, the beautiful heart of days gone by, how crudely it could palpitate.

  We saw the tiny room on the lowest floor where the entire Ingalls family lived for a time. “All of them?” I asked, even though it was about the same size as the dugout in Walnut Grove. But I wasn’t having to reconcile a room in my mind from the books with the ones here. There were no cozy scenes of Little House comfort to contend with. But all the same I kept conjuring up sweet images of Ma cooking in the kitchen, even though she’d had to do it for up to twenty people, three meals a day, every day.

  The museum also seemed a tad confused about how visitors ought to visualize the Ingalls family. Because when we went into the parlor, there they were, in life-sized doll form, seated on the high-backed chairs and divan.

  “What the . . .” Chris said under his breath.

  “These are soft sculptures of the Ingalls family,” Monica told us. She explained they’d been made by a local artist and dressed in historically accurate clothing. Their heads were stuffed fabric, with the features scrunched and stitched into place, and their hair appeared to be real, or wigs, or something. Monica introduced a couple of them. “This is Pa,” she said, stepping over to the bearded one limply holding a fiddle. Ma had Grace (a sort of baby-shaped pillow) on her lap, and Mary was the blond one in the rocking chair. Monica motioned to the last two dolls, who both wore prairie dresses and were propped sort of awkwardly on the divan. “You know which one is Laura?” she asked us.

  No, I thought, because they’re freaking soft sculptures. I pointed to the one with the sunbonnet and pigtails.

  “No, that’s Carrie,” she said. “Laura is holding her rag doll, Charlotte. See?”

  My brain protested: Do not look directly at Soft Sculpture Laura!

  From what I let myself see, though, I could tell that in their demented way they really did look a bit like the Ingallses, inasmuch as one could look at an old photo and render it in pillow form. And who was I to take issue with how someone else imagined the Ingalls family? They were propped up in their seats, their heads tilted back a little as if they were daydreaming.

  The tour ended in back of the house, where Monica pointed out a little herb garden by the kitchen door like one Ma would have kept. The house was built into a little hill that sloped down to a grassy yard with a tiny creek, the same one that had flowed in Laura’s time, looking very much like the kind of place where I would’ve played Laura as a kid. Things felt familiar here, but not at all the way the other places we’d seen had been familiar.

  We had lunch in the dim bar coolness of Barney’s, with the sounds of the TV behind us and the bright ghost-town street out the window in front of us. There was a slowness now instead of a stillness, and for the first time in days I felt sure of where I was, in the sense that it was real, and also in the sense that it was just where I wanted to be. I pointed this out to Chris.

  “Well,” he said. “We are in a bar in Iowa that serves pork tenderloin sandwiches.”

  He was right. Who wouldn’t want to be here?

  One more place to look: the Burr Oak cemetery. It was just a few blocks from the museum, next to a small abandoned church, and with well over a hundred headstones, dozens of them old and weathered.

  Nobody related to the Ingallses was buried here, but it was a place that Laura associated with some of her better memories of Burr Oak. In Pioneer Girl she writes of walking there with a school friend on Saturday afternoons. She thought “the old graveyard” was a beautiful place and not at all sad; she described it as a place with tall dark evergreens. Of course, I’d loved the idea that Laura Ingalls Wilder had a little bit of a goth streak, but it was also her description of the place that made me want to see it.

  The big evergreens were gone: it was bright and open, and Chris and I went around in the sun looking at all the old gravestones, the ones that were white and rain-softened, their embellishments slowly melting away. There was a big stone for a man who had been killed at Little Big Horn, and a great many headstones for children. I noticed how many of the inscriptions measured lifetimes not just in years but in months and days. All these people and all their days. At first I looked for graves with dates earlier than 1877, so that I could see the same stones that Laura had. But after a while I just wandered. It was nice not to be
looking for anyone anymore.

  The Super 8 motel had a sign that said VELKOMMEN TIL DECORAH. After Burr Oak we’d driven another twelve miles to Decorah, Iowa, a small city born from the same land rush that had put Burr Oak on the map, and largely settled by Norwegians. Somehow, on this final afternoon of our trip, things had slowly grown enchanted again, starting with the cemetery and continuing as we found the motel with its charming sign and drove around Decorah. It was almost dusk, and with the shade from the steep hillsides everything was half in deep shadow and half dazzling, the windows on the streets blazing with reflected light.

  At the edge of the business district we saw a bookstore in an old brick house and we stopped and went inside. The store was a warren of little rooms with armchairs; the place served coffee and played soothing music. Invariably in places like this I stumble around feeling happy, but with my mind mostly blank. Thus I found myself staring at a shelf marked Local Interest, and then at the spine of a book called A Little House Traveler.

  I don’t know why I bought the book; I didn’t need it. It was billed as a compilation of “writings from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s journey across America,” and it contained books I already owned, On the Way Home and West from Home. Those two books had been the uneven road beyond the Little House books that as a child I’d tried to follow, only to find myself lost amidst those dry diary entries about Nebraska agriculture and letters that spoke in a voice I didn’t know. In the last year I’d reread both books and found them more interesting this time but still unsatisfying. So I bought A Little House Traveler out of a faint sense of obligation, of wanting to buy a book in this nice store, and of thinking it was pretty cute that this book about Laura Ingalls Wilder traveling should appear to me on the last night of my Laura Ingalls Wilder travels.

  Our motel room smelled smoky, and from my Burr Oak reckonings it cost something like five hundred frontier dollars, but we opened the windows wide and let the cool air in. Chris opened his laptop and I lounged on the wonderfully awful bedspread and flipped through A Little House Traveler.

  It turned out there was a third section in the book I hadn’t known about. It was called The Road Back, and it was another travel diary of Laura’s, which she had written in 1931 on a visit back to South Dakota from Missouri. She’d traveled with Almanzo and their dog, Nero, in a 1923 Buick nicknamed Isabelle, on a summer trip to see Grace and Carrie, now her only living sisters. Laura was sixty-four; she had recently worked with her daughter, Rose, to write what would become Little House in the Big Woods, and in the next year it would be published. Since the move to Missouri, she’d only been back to De Smet once, nearly thirty years earlier, when her father had died. Like her On the Way Home diary, this one was mostly for practical purposes: she recorded expenses and miles driven and described meals and the roadside cabins where they spent the night. But these pages felt more familiar, even though I’d never read them before.

  “So here we are in South Dakota,” she wrote, as they crossed the border, and a line or two down added, “So far we don’t like South Dakota.”

  A day later they reached Manchester, the little town just past De Smet where Grace lived with her husband, Nate. And then a day after that Laura wrote, “Grace seems like a stranger, only now and then something familiar about her face. I suppose it is the same with me.”

  Something clicked open in me when I read that, and I read on. That same day she’d gone into De Smet and visited places that I knew had been on Calumet Avenue. Her account is often cranky: “Ran around town awhile then sat at music store waiting for Manly and Nate to show up. Stupid, tiresome, hot. I got tired of it and went by myself up the street.” She writes of driving out to the place where Pa’s homestead used to be, the road “nearly in the place where Carrie and I walked to school and Manly used to drive Barnum and Skip,” and then back through town out to the land she and Almanzo had owned, which, she noted, was simply fields now, all the buildings on it gone. They must have sat in their car and looked out at the empty hill just as we had the day before.

  The diary was simple and the events it described were unexciting, but I found it strangely uplifting because it reminded me so much of what I’d just experienced. Throughout her visit she complains of the hot winds, of feeling ill; she is disappointed and joyful and irritated and wistful. “It all makes me miss those who are gone,” she writes. “Pa and Ma and Mary and the Boasts.”

  I know, I thought. I’d always been a little at odds with this woman, this Bessie or Mrs. Wilder or whatever she was really called, who was not quite Laura and not quite not her, but I felt like I finally knew the story that continued, that I’d been where it had gone.

  Now it was almost dark and we went to dinner, some place that was tucked into the hill behind the motel, close enough that we could walk. As we went we counted out loud, doing an inventory of all that we’d seen: six parlor organs, five dugouts (including replica, ruins of, and stage set), eight covered wagons, including the one where we’d stayed; countless girls in sunbonnets, at least fifty people in nineteenth-century dress onstage and almost as many offstage, Chris pointed out, if you counted the girls at the Laura and Nellie contests. Five chamber pots, three washboards. Three times we’d read or heard about the origin for the phrase “sleep tight,” two of them erroneously attributing it to tightening the ropes on a bed frame. Three cows, two china shepherdesses, six RVs. Ten to twelve disturbing artistic renderings of various members of the Ingalls family, not counting the Laura dolls, of which we’d seen about six, including the bobblehead figure I’d bought in Walnut Grove. Seven flatirons, three whatnots, eight decorative haysticks, five teenage tour guides. Maybe a dozen iron cookstoves. Two signs that advertised both Laura Ingalls Wilder and Miller beer. At least six horses. Two girls who weren’t really dressed like Laura at all. We could go on.

  By one of the back doors of the Super 8, back where the owner or manager must have lived, there was a small garden like the one we’d seen earlier that day, with carefully tended sage and basil plants. It made me think of an Elizabeth Bishop poem, the one about the filling station with the improbable doily and plant in its waiting room. Somebody lives here, the line went, and it was true, true and in the present tense.

  It didn’t feel like the last night of anything anymore, just that the world went on and would follow us home.

  11.

  Be It Enacted

  LESS THAN TWO WEEKS LATER I was in New York City, seeing friends. More than once I thought about this as I’d go up the stairs from the subway into the sunlight, not quite believing that I’d just been out on the prairie and now I was here. I’ve visited New York at least once a year for a while now, but this time the city’s age, all its great, worn, beautiful, burnished parts, was more visible to me in a way it hadn’t been since my first trip here. I liked being somewhere so vast and old.

  One night when I met a friend for dinner in Greenwich Village I got off the subway a stop early so I could walk by a building on Jones Street where, according to The Little House Guidebook, Rose Wilder Lane had once lived in 1919. (She was a working writer in her thirties by this point, close to my age but still adventurous enough to spend a winter living so profoundly on the cheap that she’d slept under newspapers on a set of bedsprings on the floor. The place had been unheated and she warmed her hands under her arms as she sat at her typewriter during the day. She’d written about the experience years afterward in a letter to a friend and made it all sound like a blast.) Later I rode a battered elevator in an old factory in Brooklyn up to my friend Jami’s apartment, where we pulled chairs along the concrete floor over to the great big windows and gazed out over the East River and the skyline at night.

  Ever since I’d come back from the trip west, I’d been having moments where I’d tell myself to look around, to look at this, as if I’d needed to be apprised of my own life. It reminded me of what I used to do when I was little, when Laura was in my head. Now, though, it was just me, and that was all right.

  “You�
�re not seeing the Farmer Boy house?” Sandra Hume had said back when I’d talked to her in the spring. It was hard to tell over the phone, but I think she’d actually said it in horror. I didn’t think it was a big deal whether or not I saw the place where the book was set and where Almanzo Wilder had been a boy. Like all the other book locales, there was an official homesite museum there now, but since it was of miles east from all the other Little House destinations—as far upstate in New York as you could get, really, up near the border of Quebec—visiting it would require a trip all its own, a trip I’d kept leaving out of my plans.

  Because, and I’ll confess right now, I wasn’t a big fan of Farmer Boy. That was really the reason why I hadn’t made it to upstate New York.

  I mean I liked Farmer Boy just fine, but I’d never read it as many times as the Laura books. Often I forgot about it. It hadn’t captured my imagination the way the rest of the series had. As far as I was concerned, Farmer Boy wasn’t really in Laura World. I didn’t identify with young Almanzo the way I did with Laura, perhaps in part because he was a boy, and also because I thought his family was a little too perfect. While I’d enjoyed the book, it felt secondary, like (forgive my nine-year-old mind) a spin-off of one of my favorite TV shows. I know some Little House fans will be extremely dismayed by this comparison to Joanie Loves Chachi, because Farmer Boy is one of the most beloved books in the series. It’s also the most schismatic book, since plenty of people, myself included, consider it the one book in the series that you could skip if you had to.

  I’ve always felt that the book starts off well enough, with that terrific early scene where the mild-mannered schoolteacher defeats the bully with a borrowed whip. After that, though, things get a bit dull, and the book plods along with its hardworking values, and character-building chores, and Father’s two-page-long speeches about the value of a half-dollar.