The Wilder Life Page 5

  Somehow, through the books—especially Prairie—I’d always felt like my mind had made some kind of direct contact with this other world and could go through the motions of living there by the sheer power of Laura’s memories. I thought the memories were what made Laura World the kind of place it was, some place I’d inhabited in my mind. Now it felt just as disputed a territory as that one lonely stretch of Kansas prairie.

  Making the Long Winter bread had suddenly become important. Deeply important.

  I had an antique coffee grinder now, and ajar full of seed wheat that I could grind into a primitive flour the way the Ingalls family had in The Long Winter. Now all I needed to make an authentic loaf of Long Winter bread was “the dish of souring”—sourdough bread starter.

  “If you want to make a starter exactly as [Laura] did, without such helps as sugar, yeast, or milk,” Barbara Walker warned in The Little House Cookbook, “you may have to try several times.”

  Of course I wanted to make a starter exactly as Laura did! I had to, now that so much of what I thought I knew about Laura World was wrong. The Big Woods were not what they seemed, and the Little House on the Prairie was built on something other than recollection. I needed something real, even if it was only the taste of the improvised bread the Ingalls family ate every day for months during the Long Winter. Couldn’t you understand, Barbara Walker? This bread was all I had.

  And so I was prepared to try as hard as possible to make sourdough. And try I did over the course of three weeks, making half a dozen batches of flour-and-water batter, which I’d leave in ajar somewhere around the apartment in hopes that the Fermentation Fairy would visit and turn it into bread-making mojo. The jar would start out looking like milk gone bad, and after a day or two it would smell like it, too, always failing to rise or bubble. I went through most of a five-pound bag of King Arthur flour with my failed attempts.

  The batter needed to be near heat for fermentation to work (Ma kept her batter under the stove). I tried putting the jar directly beneath a lightbulb, near radiators, and in sunny spots, all to no avail. The whole process began to feel superstitious and weird. Why did I have to get rid of half the batter once I’d added more batter to double it? Couldn’t it just stay doubled? This thing that I was trying to make happen depended on so many different factors: water quality, temperature, humidity, improper covering, lack of patience. Making sourdough is about capturing something from the air, literally, and I began to imagine that this elusive element wasn’t just wild yeast particles but the residue of a lost world. It kept failing to materialize and I was making myself miserable over it.

  Chris noticed the jar on the windowsill one day. I’d left it near one of our radiators, which in the wintertime clanked and hissed and blasted heat, since the boiler in our building wildly overcompensates during the deep winter months. It was an ideal temperature for growing sourdough, except that it tended to turn the top layer of batter into plaster. “Are you supposed to just let the stuff dry out like that?” Chris asked.

  I thought for a minute. In The Long Winter Pa brings home a sack of seed wheat and doesn’t know what the heck to do with it—boil it?—until Ma has an idea and takes out the coffee grinder.

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” I said. “But I’m going to try something.” I went to the closet and got out our portable humidifier, which I filled with water and placed next to the radiator. Then I set out a new jar of batter.

  The next day when we got home from work the apartment smelled like bread, and the jar was filled with something that looked like alien spit. Beautiful alien spit, I mean. My own Scotch ingenuity had paid off.

  I held up the jar. “Let’s get grinding!” I said.

  Chris and I took turns grinding a whole pound of wheat that night on the couch in front of the TV.

  “I feel like I’m sharpening a great big endless pencil,” Chris said. “The dull, relentless pencil of winter.”

  “The Ingalls family did this every day,” I pointed out. “And without French and Saunders to watch on DVD.”

  When at last we’d produced a bowl of coarse, brown flour, I mixed it with the sourdough starter, salt, and baking soda and kneaded the resulting dough. It made a round little loaf the size of a small hat, and it barely rose in the pan.

  Almost as soon as it had come out of the oven we had to try it. The bread was steaming as I cut two wedges. It was coarse and a little crumbly, like soda bread. I blew on my wedge to cool it and then put it in my mouth, this tiny bit of time travel.

  In The Long Winter, Laura notes that the bread had “a fresh, nutty flavor that seemed almost to take the place of butter.” The bread we’d made did not taste like it needed butter, either, at least not while it was warm and soft. It was good enough that Chris said he’d eat it even if he wasn’t starving, but not so good that we’d be tempted to finish the loaf, even as small as it was.

  Somehow, it didn’t seem right to eat the whole thing and it didn’t seem right to waste it. And then, by the next day, it didn’t seem right to keep it. I took it to work and left it in the break room with a little note that said Long Winter Bread, for those who knew the story.

  “If I had a remembrance book, I would surely write down about the day we came to Plum Creek and first saw the house in the ground,” Melissa Gilbert–as-Laura was saying in voice-over at the beginning of “Harvest of Friends,” the first episode in the TV series after the pilot. It was the one where the Ingalls family first comes to Walnut Grove. I was watching it one day in early February when I was home sick. I’d been trying to fight off the symptoms all that week, taking doses of some stuff everyone was recommending lately, some kind of homeopathic preventive thing that came in vials of sugary granules that I had to dissolve on my tongue. (It hadn’t been part of my occasional pretend-I’m-in-the-1800s plan to have faith in dubious remedies, but it was sort of turning out that way.)

  I watched as TV Laura came skipping out of what was apparently supposed to be the dugout house in On the Banks of Plum Creek, though it looked less like the lovely green grassy dwelling with flowers around the doorway shown in the books and more like a bomb shelter. But no matter, because it was never shown again anyway, and the story completely changed from Plum Creek to this whole other kooky plot where Pa fell out of a tree somehow, and the guy he worked for at the feed store was suddenly a big jerk and repossessed Pa’s team of oxen, and wow, this was nothing like the books, I thought. I kept watching, even though I was feeling tired and sort of feverish. Maybe I had fever ’n’ ague, though I wasn’t sure what ague was. Was it like feeling achy, only quainter?

  Meanwhile TV Laura kept babbling in voice-over about things she wrote down in her remembrance book, or else would write down if she had one, I couldn’t tell which; maybe there was a continuity problem in the script, but of course it didn’t matter, did it, because this wasn’t really Laura, and none of this had ever happened.

  But I was still watching, and now TV Laura was trying to help her pa stack bags of grain in the shed of the feed store, and then all these other townspeople came to help them, too, and well, it was sweet. Sappy as it all was, I slouched back in the couch cushions and let it wash over me. I felt like I was eight years old again and trying, the way I know I did at that age, to hold everything in my mind all at once—everything I saw and felt and wanted to keep close with me.

  Like one day, when I was around that age, I actually took a piece of paper and wrote, If I should ever have a daughter, I will give her the name “Laura Elizabeth,” in memory of my favorite author, Laura Ingalls Wilder. It felt very important to write the words in memory of, aware that remembering was a sort of magical act. I had the sense that I was entrusted, perhaps even single-handedly, to carry the very fact of Laura’s existence to a future generation. Oh, I know it’s hilarious now, but I put the piece of paper with this solemn inscription into an empty wooden jewelry box that I had and closed it up with its little brass latch. Then I waited for life to flow past and become
part of Days Gone By, presumably carrying the wooden box with it on its invisible current until the moment I discovered it again. Which, I’m sure, had to be no more than a week or two later, when I’d decided I had better things to put in that box besides sacred intentions.

  I hadn’t thought about that in years, until this television Laura and her stupid hypothetical remembrance book reminded me. I wondered if maybe lately I’d been more like my eight-year-old self than I realized; maybe I’d been trying too hard to believe in everything I loved about the Little House books, trying to fit it all in precious little truth compartments: bites of bread, authentic memories, and so on.

  I mean I knew what was real (the year 1867, Wisconsin, two pounds of lard, those gray people staring up from their photographs) and what wasn’t (various myths about the American frontier, gigantic trees) and there was a lot of stuff in between that I wasn’t quite sure about (moments of deep connection with Indian babies). But maybe those distinctions ultimately didn’t matter, as long as I recognized them; maybe I didn’t need to sort truth from fiction from exaggeration in order to go further into Laura World.

  If I had a remembrance book, I’d write down the time I let myself be completely deluded about the size of the trees in the Big Woods. And then I’d go look for them anyway.

  3.

  Going to Town

  YOU DON’T NEED a churn to turn cream into butter. I knew this. My friend Cinnamon, who writes cookbooks (and yes, that is her real name), has told me that an electric mixer can make the inverse emulsification process (aka “buttery goodness”) happen in a matter of minutes. This is also why you commonly hear about people who accidentally turn whipped cream frosting into butter by letting the KitchenAid run too long. And then there’s always the most basic butter-making method, the choice of classroom demonstrations everywhere, which is to simply shake a jar of cream vigorously until the butterfat separates and the class learns an important lesson about frontier labor and/or dairy science.

  For me, though, the appeal of making butter the Little House way wasn’t so much about the butter as it was about the churn. The churning scene in Little House in the Big Woods had always mystified me: it was wondrous and absurd that one could make butter just by rooting a pole around in a big crock of cream. I grew up watching commercials for Ronco kitchen gadgets, and our brand-new Amana Radarange microwave oven could turn a slice of American cheese into bubbly orange goop before my very eyes, but these things were never nearly as amazing as Ma’s butter churn shown on page 31 of my vintage Little House in the Big Woods paperback.

  Now that I’d had luck with finding the old coffee grinder to make Long Winter bread, I set my sights on a slightly more advanced Little House home-ec project: I was going to find me a churn and churn it.

  Really this had been nothing more than an impulse, and I could have easily talked myself out of it. But I decided to pursue it in order to better understand what kind of Little House fan I was becoming. Already I knew I was the type who was willing to see the Little House in the Big Woods in the dead of winter. When Chris and I planned a drive up to Green Bay, Wisconsin, to visit some friends, I suggested that we leave a day early and visit Laura’s birthplace in Pepin on the way up. I tried to make it sound like just a stop along the way.

  “But isn’t Pepin right next to Minnesota?” Chris asked. Green Bay was on the Lake Michigan side of Wisconsin. The other side of Wisconsin.

  “Yeah, but it’s still Wisconsin,” I said. I showed him how, on the map, Pepin and Green Bay were directly across from each other. Across the whole state, but still! Somehow, Chris agreed to the four-hundred-mile detour, and we would set out in early March. We would see the little town and, a few miles away, a log cabin built where the Ingallses’ little house had once stood.

  In the meantime my Laura-related reading had branched out. I’d found a number of online outposts of the Little House/Laura Ingalls Wilder fan community—bulletin boards and blogs and discussion groups—and I had subscribed to The Homesteader, a full-color biannual newsletter edited and published by a woman named Sandra in Kansas.

  The online stuff ranged widely from beginner’s-level message board threads where fans tried to sort out the differences between the books and the TV show (“Does anyone know if there really was an Albert and did he die of Leukemia??? please answer if you know thanks!!!”) to extremely thorough and detail-oriented discourse by folks who had thoroughly read the books and the biographies, scholarly articles, and rare archival stuff.

  One of my favorite online finds was a website called Pioneer Girl written by a freelance researcher named Nancy Cleaveland. From what I could tell from her site, she knew things like the plot numbers of every Ingalls and Wilder land claim; the origin and function of every obscure tool used in Farmer Boy; and the history of every founding resident of De Smet, South Dakota. The breadth of knowledge was amazing and a little terrifying—my own Laura World seemed awfully fuzzy compared to the extensively cataloged universe that folks like Nancy explored. Reading her site made me feel guilty that I wasn’t more interested in poring over land records or tracing genealogy. How could I not want to know everything?

  I did, however, order an archival copy of the Pioneer Girl manuscript from the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in Iowa, which had inherited a collection of Laura Ingalls Wilder–related material along with her daughter’s papers. (Rose Wilder Lane had been a friend of Hoover’s after she penned a biography of him.) I’d requested the typed version of Pioneer Girl that Rose had sent to her literary agent, who had unsuccessfully shopped it around to publishers before it was suggested that Laura try her hand at children’s books.

  Since the photocopy fees for Pioneer Girl amounted to nearly a hundred dollars, I wondered how many people went to the trouble of ordering it. When I called the Hoover Library to request my copy, I asked the librarian on the phone about it.

  “Oh, tons of people ask for it,” he said. He told me it was more popular than Hoover’s inaugural speech, by a long shot. When it arrived a few weeks later, I flipped through the old manual-typewriter-typed fly-specked pages, possibly even typed by Rose herself, and felt a frisson of excitement that I hadn’t expected and that made me understand why people loved digging up stuff like this. But I was also figuring out that even when it came to Laura Ingalls Wilder lore, I didn’t know everything, but I knew that I was pursuing a different everything than the hard-core researchers.

  Still, I was discovering things that I hadn’t even known I wanted to know. I’d ordered all the back issues of The Homesteader newsletter, which was full of varsity-league Little House nerd talk. It included articles such as “Did Almanzo and Cap Garland Really Save the Town of De Smet?” (Cap’s descendants aren’t so sure he actually made the dangerous trip to find wheat during the Hard Winter); a story about the possible medical causes of Mary’s blindness, written by an M.D. and fellow Little House fan; and a piece that speculated about the mysterious real-life disappearance of Ma’s china shepherdess (had one of the Ingalls daughters inherited it, or had it been lost before then?). I ate it all up like johnnycake and molasses.

  After a few e-mail exchanges, I’d become online friends with Sandra Hume, who edited The Homesteader newsletter. Sandra was a freelance magazine writer who lived in far western Kansas with her husband, who was a farmer, and their two kids. She’d loved the Little House TV show as a kid, but she said that the books and Laura’s Missouri Ruralist essays had helped her make the transition from her Boston suburban background to farm life. She invited me to write something for the newsletter, which led to phone conversations. I’d never talked at length with someone who was as preoccupied with Little House as I was, and we started trading obsessive tidbits. It turns out I wasn’t the only person in the world who had read The First Four Years and noticed the veiled reference to making whoopee. It’s when newlywed Laura discovers she is pregnant and wryly smiles as she remembers an old saying of Ma’s.

  “‘They that dance must pay the fiddler!�
��” Sandra said. “I remember when I first realized what that meant.”

  “Oh my God—me, too!” I exclaimed.

  But even Sandra sounded a little incredulous when I told her I was looking for my own butter churn. “Wow,” she said. “That’s really . . . dedicated.”

  “It is?” I asked. “Do you think it’s weird that I want to try it?”

  “Not if you write about it for The Homesteader,” she said.

  Years ago, I saw a Twilight Zone episode, one from the 1980s incarnation of the series, in which a teenage boy in modernday New England recovers from a high fever and finds out he is somehow telepathically connected, in some kind of parallel-existence time-warp scenario, with a Puritan girl who has also just recovered from a fever in the year 1700. The two can communicate with each other, as if they’re on some kind of mental speakerphone or something, and they can even occasionally see things through each other’s eyes, so that the Puritan girl gets to see an airplane flying overhead and she in turn can show the modern boy her reflection in a pond.

  But the best part is when the boy happens to take a swig of orange juice and suddenly the girl is all, “Prithee, what is that flavor?” because it turns out that she can taste whatever he eats, and of course she’s never had anything that delicious before since she probably gets nothing but porridge. The next thing you know, the boy’s in his kitchen with the whole contents of his fridge and a bunch of fast-food containers strewn across the counter, and he’s sampling it all so that the girl can “try” French fries and ice cream and cookies. It all sufficiently blows her mind until—and I bet you could see this coming—her fellow Puritan villagers accuse her of being a witch because she dares to utter heretical prophecies about the invention of aircraft and Häagen-Dazs. Somehow, though, she manages to avoid being burned at the stake in some twist where the boy runs to the library and digs up some crucial bit of information that can save her.