The Wilder Life Page 3

  I even started a secret Twitter account, @Half PintIngalls, where I pretended to be Laura Ingalls Wilder and wrote posts like: What a day. I curled my bangs with my slate pencil for this? and Today was a pretty good day until blackbirds ate the entire oat harvest.

  And thus for much of the summer of 2008 I was as frenzied and all-consuming as a grasshopper in a wheat field. My mind buzzed with the exhilaration of worlds colliding. Twitter! Anime! Laura Ingalls Dawson’s Wilder Creek!

  I went back and forth this way for weeks and weeks, going from the yellowed pages of the books to the Web in constant escape and re-entry, though of course looking up everything I could about the books was a kind of escape, too. I’d click and click and sometimes I’d really get somewhere.

  Or was I getting anywhere? The books were comforting, but they had started to unravel something in me, too.

  As I read my way through the series, I followed Laura and the Ingalls family as they move farther west—and then stop. While in some ways it’s satisfying to see the family get their homestead and help settle De Smet, South Dakota, that yearning to keep going stays deliberately and maddeningly unresolved. I wasn’t sure if I liked that Laura had traded in her old reckless adventures (poking badgers with sticks! riding horses bareback at railroad camps!) for the social dramas of town life, with all the spelling bees and organ recitals and engraved name cards.

  It’s not that I didn’t love those things, too—I never fail to be enthralled by the copious descriptions of parlor furniture in Little Town on the Prairie and hearing how the classier citizens of De Smet lived—but I noticed for the first time how the books enact the effects of civilization and adulthood: old impulses get thwarted and life gets cluttered with those china lamps.

  I’d barely gotten into These Happy Golden Years, the last official book in the series, when I began to dread finishing it. I was gradually remembering, after thirty years, how it ended for me the last time.

  Which is to say: not well. Laura marries Almanzo Wilder in These Happy Golden Years, just like the back-cover copy of my paperbacks said she would, a thrilling little oracle in fine print. But then the happy wedding-day final chapter is followed by a wobbly wagon train of three posthumous books, all of them deeply frustrating to me as a child. I’d read them dutifully—or rather, tried to—since their titles were listed in the front matter of some of the Little House books, implying they were almost part of the series.

  There was the novel The First Four Years, published in 1971 from a draft Laura had written in a notebook discovered long after her death. It had appeared to be a continuation of the Little House series—a story of Laura and Almanzo as newlyweds—and had been published as such, although Ursula Nordstrom, Laura’s editor at Harper and Brothers, admitted there was “a faint air of slight disillusion in it” that set it apart. Critics now believe that Laura had intended it to be an adult novel—the characters not quite the same as the ones in the earlier books—and a solo effort, unlike the books that had been edited (and sometimes enhanced) by her daughter, Rose. The First Four Years is now included as a ninth volume in the Little House series (it was in the box set Chris gave me), but anyone who reads the book expecting to return to the world of the earlier books will find it much changed. The couple suffers crop failures; they lose a baby; they get diphtheria. The book was oddly paced and hard for me to follow as a child, so I’d had almost nothing to go on except for the sparse illustrations, the final one an image of their little house burning down.

  The next two books didn’t destroy the world of the books for me—they simply lost it altogether. On the Way Home was Laura’s diary of the journey that she, Almanzo, and daughter Rose made in 1894 when they left South Dakota for Missouri. West from Home was a collection of Laura’s letters home from her trip in San Francisco in 1915 to visit Rose, now an adult, and to see the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Had I first read them when I was older, I probably could have connected the dots between the Laura of the Little House books, with her braids blowing in the wind, and the older woman who traveled across the country, writing about weather and hotel rooms.

  As an eight-year-old kid, though, I couldn’t make sense of any of it. I was bored by On the Way Home, with its logbook descriptions of fields and roads, and its murky old photos of the middling towns the Wilders had passed through. And West from Home just confused me. What was this Panama-Pacific thing? Where was Laura? I’d finally figured out that she went by the adult nicknames “Bessie” and “Mama Bess,” and at last I managed to glean two bits of information about her. One: that she was “growing fat,” or so her daughter, Rose, said, in a letter home to Almanzo. According to Rose, Laura ate multiple buttered scones “without a quiver!” At the time I read that I was growing up in a household full of diet books, so I was mortified. Two: Rose reported, in the very next letter, that Laura had fallen off a streetcar and hit her head. I couldn’t un-know these sad facts, that the little Half-Pint I knew and loved had become some kind of embarrassing middle-aged person who got into stupid mishaps in the big city.

  In my mind, the world of the Little House books just went up in smoke at the end, their heroine disappearing into clumsy ordinariness and ignominy. It had always trailed off with a vague, unspoken disappointment. It’s the kind of story we learn over and over again about everything in the world: your life starts out as a wild open frontier that you explore until the forces of time or history or civilization or nature intervene, and then suddenly it’s all gone, it all weathers and falls down and gets built over; everyone dies or moves away or becomes a grainy photograph, and yes, at some point you just get fat and fall off a streetcar. Progress—it dumps you on your aging and gigantic ass!

  Maybe that was another reason why I didn’t come back to the Little House books for a very long time. But here I was again, coming back to this place where the path through Laura World seemed to end and disappear in the grass. Only this time I wanted to go further.

  I could see Laura Ingalls Wilder everywhere. Really, she was everywhere. She was no longer just a person but a universe made of hundreds of little bits, a historical fictional literary figure character person idea grandma-girl-thing. I knew there were poems about her and picture books; I found out there were festivals, pageants, plays, websites, weblogs, authorized spin-off series books, unauthorized spin-off series books, dresses, cookbooks, newsletters, fan fiction, albums, homeschool curriculums, aprons, craft items, figurines, dollhouses. Also, a guy in Minnesota believes she is God. No, really, he was running for mayor of Minneapolis and he has this whole religion called “Lauraism” and he wholeheartedly believes she has appeared to him in visions and that she created the world. And after spending a dozen hours online looking for Laura and finding her in these endless kaleidoscopic configurations, who was I to doubt him?

  I wanted to go to Laura World: I wanted to visit the places where Laura Ingalls and her family had lived, in Wisconsin and Kansas and Minnesota and South Dakota and Missouri. All these years I hadn’t quite believed that the places in the books existed, but they did, and house foundations had been unearthed, and cabins reconstructed, and museums erected. I’d even met a few people who’d been to them. My friend Brian, for instance, had claimed that his wife’s knees had buckled—buckled!—at the sight of Pa’s fiddle while visiting the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum in Missouri. The sites were all tourist destinations now, with gift shops and annual festivals and pageants. I learned there was even a “lost” homesite that Laura hadn’t written about in the Little House books, a town in Iowa where the Ingalls had lived in the years between On the Banks of Plum Creek and By the Shores of Silver Lake. To me this discovery was as astonishing as a breakthrough in physics. Imagine it, a wormhole to another Laura dimension!

  But in a way all these homesites seemed otherworldly to me. How could you not want to go to a place that you remember but have never been?

  It was fall when I started thinking seriously about exploring Laura World and all it entailed, which nat
urally involved seeing all the Little Houses or their facsimiles thereof, but there were other things that I found myself itching to experience as well. What was it like to wear a corset, or tap maple trees, or twist hay? The details of the books were in such sharp relief that I had the urge to grab at them, the way Laura in Little House in the Big Woods had wanted to taste the blackberry-shaped buttons on her aunt’s dress at the sugaring-off dance. This past life, which I knew was not really mine, kept surfacing, bubbling up in my head. It seemed to insist, the way past lives do, that there was something I needed to remember, and if I just found the right place or the right motions, I would know what it was.

  Chris and I always go somewhere else for Christmas—to Michigan, where his family lives, or else New Mexico to visit my dad—so we always have our own Christmas beforehand. This year he gave me The Little House Guidebook, a paperback travel guide to all the homesites. No more furtively looking up maps of rural Minnesota online; this was official now. I flipped through the pages of the guidebook and mentally subtitled it Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Driving Out to Remote Locations in the Upper Midwest to Find Your Childhood Imaginary Friend but Were Afraid to Ask. And I was still afraid to ask: what kind of person would I become if I just went with this, let my calico-sunbonnet freak flag fly?

  I hugged Chris to thank him and then thought of that moment in By the Shores of Silver Lake when the Ingalls family has just made it out to Dakota Territory and Laura says, “Oh, Pa, let’s go on west!” She doesn’t get to go farther, of course, which made it seem all the more important for me to act, to do, to go.

  As soon as it was spring, that is. Just then it was winter in our Chicago neighborhood near the river; in the deep snow you could see the delicate little tracks of rabbits right alongside the huge dirty craters where neighbors had dug out their cars. (The city has a winter street parking policy that’s very much in the spirit of the Homestead Act of 1862, in that anyone who can dig out his own spot can claim it with an old lawn chair.) Above all this was our apartment, on the top floor of our building, three stories up from the reliably plowed slush, high enough to see nothing but trees and sky and snow out the windows if you stood or sat in the right spot in the front room, the room where we were having our Christmas. At that moment it was the right spot, and a good place to start.

  2.

  Whose Woods These Are

  IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF WINTER when I started to explore this whole Laura business in earnest. I started ordering more books—biographies and academic stuff and even a collection of poetry about the Little House books called The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder. By late January my “winter provisions” consisted of a stack of stuff to read and a bag of horehound candy that Chris had included in my Christmas stocking. He’d listened to me describe a scene in On the Banks of Plum Creek where Pa comes back from town and brings a couple of pieces of it for Laura and Mary.

  “It’s not bad,” I’d told him truthfully. It came in dusty lozenges and tasted sort of like an off-brand Diet Dr Pepper. Then I remembered when Laura tried it she decided it tasted “brown.” “You know, it really does taste brown,” I said to Chris. “Brown in a good way, I mean.”

  “Let’s not think about the other ways,” Chris said. “Ever.”

  I even started programming the TiVo to record episodes of Little House on the Prairie—which aired about four times a day on my cable system, between the Hallmark Channel and a local station that showed late-night vintage reruns.

  It would be months before the weather was decent enough to go see any little houses anywhere. Thus I spent three weeknights in a row staring at northwestern Wisconsin on Google Maps. I was supposed to be planning a road trip that Chris and I would take in the spring to see Laura’s birthplace near Pepin, the “little town” mentioned in Little House in the Big Woods, but I wasn’t really looking at the roads.

  Part of me wanted to believe the Big Woods still existed the way they had in the book. I’d study the very first page of Little House in the Big Woods, the Garth Williams illustration. These woods are where Laura World begins, this place where, as the first page reads, “there was nothing but woods. There were no houses. There were no roads. There were no people.” The Big Woods were a perfect place to get lost and become someone else. And those trees, they were huge, right? If you looked at the illustration on that first page, you could see that the tree next to the log cabin had about the same circumference as a concrete sewer main.

  I’d find Pepin on the online map and then scroll up toward the north. I’d use the “satellite” feature to see the aerial photo view of the land, and then I’d zoom in as close as I could to the nubbly green expanses between towns, until I was situated above whatever forests were still there. I could never get close enough. At some point the photo would become illegible, a smudgy quilt of pixels. But I’d still try to see. I’d click around the Mississippi River Valley where Pepin was, or else I’d go farther north and search, floating over the indistinct treetops, wondering what was down there, wishing I could just slip beneath the surface.

  Somewhere on YouTube there’s a video of a girl giving a 4-H Club speech about the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder. The girl’s name is Shelby Ann and she’s fourteen. In the video she stands in front of an unseen classroom audience, wearing the best approximation of prairie garb that she could put together, a peasant blouse, a skirt, and an apron. She looks just a year or two too old to be wearing her hair in pigtail braids. She reads from index cards. Shelby Ann makes my heart melt.

  “The life of a great writer,” she begins. For the first two minutes she reads off the names of Laura’s family—her grandparents, parents, and siblings; her husband and her children—and the dates and places of their births. Then Shelby Ann lists the places where Laura and her family lived and the years they lived there.

  Beyond the names, dates, and places, the marriages, births, and deaths, only a very few details are mentioned: Almanzo courted Laura with buggy rides; they endured bad crops and diphtheria. Really, it’s as much as any of us might know about our great-great-grandparents. But Shelby Ann appears more than happy to tell us where the Ingalls family moved to in 1877 and 1879; who was born in 1870, who died in 1946. She can recite the facts and hardly has to look at the index cards. Maybe she loves that she’s memorized something real to go alongside everything she’s absorbed from the books. Maybe to her all the years and towns and names are the currency of her Laura World, valuable things worth collecting.

  Until then, I had never thought to wonder if the Little House books were a factual account of Laura’s life. As a kid, I never kept track of dates: unlike Shelby Ann and her time lines, I was content with the simple, romantic notion that there once was a Laura. That was enough for me. Plus there was something sort of mystical about reading the books and feeling a connection to her longago existence, her once-life. With that kind of enchantment, who needed facts?

  And yet, I couldn’t quite abide by the idea that the books were fiction, either, even though that was the section of the library where they were shelved. But then, what was nonfiction to us kids, besides the World Book Encyclopedia and The Shaun Cassidy Story? I wouldn’t have put the Little House books in with those, either. I think ultimately I considered the books as having a category all their own—fiction but with a secret true world lurking behind the stories, somewhere in the trees beyond the trees.

  Over two dozen biographies and scholarly books about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family have been published over the last forty years, for practically every reading level, from picture book to dissertation. Now that I was deep in the woods of my Little House obsession, I wanted to read them.

  I started in on the copiously footnoted three-hundred-page biographies and critical books published by university presses. Sometimes, though, I couldn’t resist reading the cute little fiftypage biographies cranked out by school library publishers for grade school kids, too. Laura Ingalls Wilder (A See & Read Biography) and Laura Ingalls Wilder
: Growing Up in the Little House—the sort of things I would’ve read at the age when I first fell in love with the series.

  And then a copy of The Little House Cookbook: Frontier Foods from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Classic Stories arrived mysteriously, a surprise from my friend Jen in Utah. MAKE VANITY CAKES!!!, read the note she’d included. I actually shrieked a little as I flipped through the pages. I’d been hoping to find an old cookbook that could give me a sense of how to make the bread the Ingallses had made in The Long Winter, or even churn butter, but I’d had no idea that back in 1979 a woman named Barbara Walker had taken up the task of compiling recipes to replicate as many of the dishes mentioned in the Little House series as possible, from mashed turnips to roasted goose. There was, indeed, a recipe for the vanity cakes Ma had made for Laura’s country party at Plum Creek, astounding confections that sounded as wonderful as they were impossible to imagine. Were they cakes, or donuts, or what? But now I could just cook up a batch and find out, couldn’t I? There were also recipes for cornmeal mush, pancake men, fried salt pork. My mind reeled (like the cast-iron handle of a coffee grinder) as I considered the possibilities.

  I showed Chris the book. “I’m going to make vanity cakes!” I told him.

  “What are those?” he asked.

  “They’re these things, and Ma made them, and they’re supposed to melt in your mouth, and they’re . . .” I found the page where the recipe was and started reading. “They’re, uh . . .”