The Wilder Life Read online

  But at least there are pancakes. Because, yes, Farmer Boy is not without its supreme pleasures, some of the best moments in the series. There’s a coveted colt, a visit from the tinsmith, ice blocks, a pet suckling pig, and spreads of food so fabulous they eclipse even the sugaring-dance feast in Little House in the Big Woods. Honestly, without Farmer Boy in the series, The Little House Cookbook would be a much grimmer compendium, consisting only of Ingalls family frontier fare like bean broth and johnnycake instead of Mother Wilder’s stuffed goose and pumpkin pie. So I will not begrudge anyone their love for young Almanzo and his virtuous but cushy life. I just wasn’t sure if I wanted to experience Farmer Boy beyond the apples ’n’ onions recipe. (Which, by the way, is incredible.)

  So when I told Sandra that I didn’t think I’d be going out to see the Farmer Boy house, I could tell she was on the other side of the schism, a real Almanzonian. But then she pointed out that the Wilder farmhouse was the only house mentioned in the Little House books that was still on its original foundation, which sounded pretty impressive. Would it be more full of ghosts, for instance, if there really was such a thing as ghosts?

  “Trust me, the place is really SPECIAL,” Sandra told me over the phone, with something of a don’t-say-I-didn’t-warn-you emphasis on the word special. And then I knew that if I didn’t go I’d always wonder.

  Fine, then, I would go to see the dadblanged Farmer Boy house. I decided as long as I was in New York I’d make a detour upstate. Chris couldn’t go with me this time, so I asked one of my oldest friends, Michael, whom I’d be seeing in New York City, to come along. We’d taken road trips together before: in college we’d gone to Washington, D.C., for a Pride march; more recently we’d gone to Iowa City together, spending the whole drive from Chicago comparing our worst ex-boyfriends. Now he was willing to fly from LaGuardia airport to Burlington, Vermont, with me, and drive two hours through the Adirondacks in a rented car just to see some place where a kid with a funny name once picked potatoes.

  Michael had never read the Little House books, so he had only a vague sense of our destination.

  “So this is the house of the guy that Melissa Gilbert marries on the TV show?” Michael asked. “Almanzo, right?” He pronounced it “Al-MON-zo,” the way most people do, since that’s how they said it on the NBC show.

  Yes, I told him. “But actually, it’s pronounced ‘Al-MAN-zo.’ ”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because that’s how Laura said it.” I was so excited to get to tell someone about this. “There’s this one recording of her speaking voice, and she says Almanzo with the flat a, but when she says Iowa she pronounces it ‘Ioway.’”

  “Oh my God, you know so much about this now,” Michael said.

  “I know!” Over the course of the drive, I let all the Laura knowledge I’d collected over the past year unspool while he listened. I told him about the real Ingalls family who’d kept moving to the wrong places and the fictional family who’d always just followed the sunset and their destiny, and the traces where they’d both been, all these hollows in the ground and these remade little houses. I explained who Rose had been and how she was both a part of the Little House books and a world unto herself. I talked about the storm in Kansas and the lightning in South Dakota and the frozen lake in Wisconsin, and how for weeks after our visit I’d look up the local news around Pepin to see if the ice had finally broken.

  Michael was a good listener. You could do a lot worse than drive through the Vermont countryside near the end of summer with your best friend of twenty years, telling him about these people, these places that you were starting to know by heart.

  Back at home Chris was reading Farmer Boy. (It’s officially the third book in the series, but I tend to think you can read it out of order, since it’s a stand-alone story.) He said he wanted to have some idea of what I’d be seeing on my trip. One night when I was still in New York City I called home to Chicago.

  “I don’t get why you don’t like Farmer Boy,” he said on the phone. “This book rules. This kid has the best life ever. There’s a doughnut jar in the kitchen.”

  “The doughnut jar really is cool,” I admitted.

  “ ‘In his right hand he held a doughnut, and in his left hand two cookies,’” Chris said. I knew he was reading from the book. “‘He took a bite of doughnut AND THEN a bite of cookie.’ ” He was quoting the birthday scene, where Almanzo gets to stay home from school and go sledding and wander through the kitchen double-fisting baked goods. “That is some bad-ass action right there,” Chris said.

  “Whatever,” I said. “You haven’t gotten to the part where it says he can’t wait until the Fourth of July celebration when there will be speeches. What nine-year-old boy looks forward to SPEECHES?”

  The day after that Chris had finished the book. “I think I know why you don’t like this book,” he said on our next phone call. “It’s because everything always works out for these people, Almanzo and his family.”

  “Maybe,” I said. But, I pointed out, there was always a sense in the other books that the Ingalls family, the storybook one at least, ends up okay.

  “No, no. In Farmer Boy they always win. Their horses are the best horses in the state. The mother makes the best butter anywhere. Everything they do is the most amazing successful thing ever in the history of anything.” He was right: the Wilders excelled at bully defeating and pumpkin growing; they always escaped every peril, whether it was frost in the cornfield or robbers who lurked outside the farmhouse (who were chased away by a stray dog that of course knew to side with the Wilders). Even when things went wrong they somehow wound up turning miraculously right, like when Almanzo threw the brush of stove-blacking at his sister and it hit the parlor wall and left a big blotch, and his sister just came up with some brilliant solution to fix it so he never got in trouble. Full of win, that Almanzo kid.

  Sure, the book constantly espoused life virtues and diligent chore doing, as if to imply that the Wilder family’s charmed life was purely a matter of hard work and perseverance. I was never convinced, especially after seeing the fortunes of perfectly decent folk like the Ingallses repeatedly go up in smoke and clouds of grasshoppers.

  “Yeah, everything just sort of happens magically for them in Farmer Boy,” I said. “So annoying.”

  The Wilder farm was the most impressively historical-looking place of all the Little House sites I’d seen: a circa 1850s farmhouse painted a deep red with white trim; it stood in a shady grove with an array of barns and stables alongside it. It looked like just the kind of place you’d visit on a fourth-grade field trip, where you’d learn how a spinning wheel worked and get a little handful of carded sheep’s wool to take home.

  It also looked very much like the place described in the book, which is pretty remarkable considering Laura’s knowledge was secondhand. She had never been there; in fact, no one in the Wilder family had returned after they’d moved to Minnesota. Only Rose had visited here once, in 1932, when her mother was working on the manuscript for Farmer Boy. The book was Laura’s second children’s book effort (though it’s now listed third in the series order); she had started writing it a few months after that trip to De Smet in the Buick. She hadn’t fully conceived of the Little House series at this point; certain territories of her life and family history had yet to be visited.

  By all accounts she’d intended Farmer Boy to be a companion to Little House in the Big Woods: another detail-rich account of an earlier time, another now for Depression-era readers. This time she’d based it on her husband’s recollections, which must have been vivid, even though he was reportedly a man of few words. There’s evidence that Rose considered writing a biography of Almanzo, to be titled A Son of the Soil, but it’s believed that he was so reticent in interviews she abandoned the project. Or perhaps it was because he lacked the optimism that Rose had likely hoped to convey. “My life has been mostly disappointments,” he wrote in a letter to her in 1937. But Laura would go back to the beginn
ing in Farmer Boy, just as she had when writing about the house in the Big Woods that was so cozy you wanted them to stay there forever.

  Inside the Wilder farmhouse we could see what a comfortable life young Almanzo and his family had lived. The place was smallish by twentieth-century standards, but in the 1800s it would have been practically a McMansion, with its big, bright rooms with woolen carpets and stately furniture. All at once I remembered the thrill I used to get whenever I rediscovered this book and read it again, because while the book is never explicit about the Wilders’ economic status, it’s nonetheless clear: they were rich! They had a parlor and a dining room and, be still my beating heart, three barns. They’d been faithfully reconstructed here and I pointed them out to Michael.

  “I know one barn’s for the horses,” I said, remembering. “And then they had oxen. And sheep. And pigs. Or at least Almanzo had one, and he fed it candy.” The more I remembered of the book, the more useless I became in regard to actual facts. “They had, like, hundreds of animals.”

  “Really?” Michael asked.

  “Well, I don’t know. It seems like it, though.”

  We saw it all: the parlor with its fancy wallpaper, the kitchen, the upstairs bedrooms, then out to the barn complex where we learned more about nineteenth-century farm technology than we ever thought possible. I had to admit that it was one of the best house tours I’d been on throughout all my Little House travels, with the world of the past faithfully reconstructed and nary a soft sculpture doll to break the illusion.

  Except that when we were in the kitchen, I’d whispered to Michael, “There’s no doughnut jar!” No sugar barrel, either, to represent the one the Wilder children had consumed while their parents were on a trip (according to the book, the four kids had emptied that sucker out in less than a week).

  “That was nice, but I wish there’d been pancakes,” I told Michael when the tour was over.

  “Um, it’s a museum,” he said. “What do you mean?”

  I meant pancakes, ten—TEN—stacks of them on a platter on the stove, just like in chapter 8! I meant a gigantic spread of chicken pie and roast pork that Almanzo, according to the book, could “taste in every corner of his mouth.” (Next time you eat something, try to simulate this effect. IT IS NOT EASY.) I meant that this was a lovely house, but it couldn’t really, truly be the Farmer Boy house unless all that insane food was there in some way, and I told Michael this.

  “You mean they should serve pancakes here?” he said.

  “No,” I said, because of course that was ridiculous. But what, then? I racked my brain. “I guess I mean they should make us think of pancakes.” That was what was important: not the pancakes themselves but the idea of pancakes. Like a Wallace Stevens poem but in reverse, and with pancakes.

  And just then I remembered something I’d read in the introduction of The Little House Cookbook. There Barbara Walker pointed out that Laura, after a childhood filled with near-starvation experiences like the one in The Long Winter, wrote Farmer Boy not just as her husband’s story, but as, Walker writes, “her own fantasy of blissful youth, surrounded on all sides by food.” In other words, a whole book of wishful thinking.

  With all its over-the-top dinner scenes and constant allusions to the Wilder family’s good fortune, literal and otherwise, Farmer Boy wasn’t really the smug when-I-was-your-age sermon I’d originally made it out to be, but more a wistful dream conjured up by a woman who’d spent much of her life enduring deprivation. It was a love letter to the original promise of success and prosperity that had so eluded her husband in his adulthood, when, like countless other settlers, he’d found out the hard way that the farming methods from back East were no match for the dry land of Dakota Territory.

  Suddenly it all made sense—Farmer Boy was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s own Laura World, an ideal realm she’d imagined, a homesickness for this place she’d never been or seen. On my trip west I’d been trying to get to the furthest reaches of a world I thought I knew. Without even expecting it, I’d found the most secret and remote part of it here. I knew it wasn’t the house itself, here in this almost impossibly green and lush countryside; it was more that this house marked the spot in the other world, designated the place where this amazing Farmer Boy, the Child Who Always Had Enough, lived in Laura’s head and maybe all of ours, too.

  At the gift shop I bought a little flask of local maple syrup, just to have something to represent the Idea of Pancakes.

  Michael couldn’t quite believe that I was ready to drive back to Burlington. “Are you sure?” he asked. “The guide said we could walk down to see the river if you wanted to see more.”

  “No, it’s fine,” I told him. Farmer Boy and I had come to an understanding, or maybe Laura and I had. I didn’t need to see every last thing anymore. I stood on the grass outside the gift shop and watched as the next tour group made its way from the red farmhouse to the barns. A woman hung behind the group and stopped to sit on a little bench under the grove of apple trees. She looked to be in her sixties, dressed in crisp summer clothes. She simply walked up to the bench and stayed there as long as I stood and watched, as if she’d paid her ticket admission just to sit in that one place. She was still sitting there when we left.

  There are other destinations I could visit. In central Missouri, near a town called Rothville, there is now a sign to commemorate the place where the Ingallses may have built a log cabin and lived for a year or less before setting out for Kansas. Laura would have been only a year old, and in the biography Laura, Donald Zochert refers to the place as “this little unremembered house on the Missouri prairie,” a phrase so forlorn that it sometimes makes me want to drive out there just to stand at the edge of the field.

  I could drive a considerably shorter distance to a place in Elgin, Illinois, where Charles Ingalls, Laura’s pa, had lived for a time as a boy, marked only by a few Ingalls family graves in a tiny fenced plot on someone’s lawn. Or I could go to South Troy, Minnesota, since records indicate that Laura’s infant brother died near there, and while the exact location of his gravesite or the house where he died is unknown, some Little House fans have been known to stop in South Troy just to visit a marker displaying a copy of his death certificate.

  And sometimes I want to see the piney woods near Westville, Florida, where Laura and Almanzo had spent their doomed interlude in 1891. I understand there’s even a historical marker there now, so that you can see exactly where they’d been miserable. I guess if I wanted to, I could consider all these places as entry points into my Laura World. I could keep changing the boundaries and make it bigger and bigger, a weird kind of manifest destiny.

  There are also places I can’t visit, of course. Given the chance I’d probably wander around the farmland surrounding Plum Creek looking for any sign of the Wonderful House, because someone somewhere has an idea of where it might have been. I wished I could see all the little houses now disappeared, even the burned-down house where the Ingallses had camped for the night at the end of Little House on the Prairie, even though I know that may well have been fiction, and even though this whole yearlong tour had taken me past so many other vanished places where a luckless family had once lived.

  It was enough that these places had once been real, that they were still a little real.

  My friend Kara agreed to see Little House on the Prairie: The Musical with me, an undertaking that required a drive to St. Paul, Minnesota, in October. It seemed to be getting as much publicity as a Broadway show, especially since it starred Melissa Gilbert as Ma, but just like the real-life Ingalls family, it was a road production, playing in small cities like Madison, Wisconsin, and Des Moines, Iowa, and Oklahoma City. It hadn’t opened in New York and it didn’t appear it would be coming to Chicago anytime soon. Kara said we could stay with a friend of hers in Minneapolis for the weekend, so off we went.

  I didn’t know quite what to expect from Little House on the Prairie: The Musical. I don’t usually go for anything with a Colon, The Musical tack
ed on the end of it. But maybe the show was a good idea—after all, the books were full of music in their own way, all those lines of lyrics marching down the page whenever Pa played his fiddle. As a kid, I’d always tried to hear the songs in my head, even when I didn’t know them at all, so I was curious to experience the show in musical form. Besides, I had seen so many different Lauras by now—all these pigtailed pageant players and look-alike contestants, book cover models and actresses and even a wide-eyed anime character—why not see one more Laura, a singing and dancing one to boot?

  Kara had volunteered to be my Indian guide, and she wasn’t kidding. My familiarity with the Twin Cities was limited to what I’d seen in the movie Purple Rain. I knew that there were lots of expressways, because Prince always drove his motorcycle around under them, but I wasn’t prepared for how complicated they were. From a map they looked fine, but all the Internet driving directions read like tax forms. Luckily Kara could navigate.

  “Do I go on 394 or do I stay on 94?” I asked her on the way to the theater when yet another boggling array of ramp signs appeared. “Or does it become all the same thing, or what?”

  She peered down at the screen of her BlackBerry. “This says stay in this lane until we see the exit for 241B,” she said.

  “Are you sure?” I was panicking.

  She held up the phone. “My spirit guide is not wrong,” she said. And it wasn’t.

  We arrived at the Ordway Theater nearly an hour early and wandered around the vast, carpeted lobby with the rest of the growing crowd. What does one wear to the musical theater? Kara and I had no idea, so we’d worn nice dresses, just to be safe.