The Wilder Life Read online

  Whatever the ending had been, it wasn’t nearly as thrilling to me as the basic premise that these two people, hundreds of years apart, were experiencing the same things through some kind of sensory interconnection, conveying the taste of ice cream to each other as directly and miraculously as clicks on a telegraph wire.

  I was doing these things—making the recipes, planning the trips—to feel that little jolt of connection with Laura World. Of course I knew it wasn’t a literal connection, no wormholes or tesseracts or any of those things. All I was trying to do was invoke the same feeling I’d had when I’d read the end of Little House in the Big Woods again. How many ways could I pursue it?

  The kind of churn I was looking for was called a “crock and dash” churn, which, despite being the most classic type of churn, wasn’t so easy to find on eBay. Most of the churns being sold were the early-twentieth-century contraptions known as Dazey churns—each one a set of gears and paddles that mounted on the top of a glass jar. (I’d had no idea home butter making had advanced like this—somehow I’d always been under the impression that we’d all just gone straight from the Ma Ingalls method to buying sticks of Land O’Lakes at the supermarket.)

  I would come to learn several things about buying a butter churn on eBay:1. Most of the churns are not actually for churning. I’d thought I was in luck when I saw dozens of listings for charming wooden churns come up on the Search Results page. That was before I realized they were all four inches high and used to hold toothpicks. It turns out that on eBay, churns are far more common as empty signifier than as signified object, with an alarming number of churnshaped things used to hold plants, cookies, paper towels, and toilet paper. The idea that you might actually want an old-fashioned churn to do the task for which it was named starts to seem kind of strange.

  2. Newer dash churns seem to Exist, but nobody wants to admit it. Apparently every dash churn is an antique, even when it’s listed as “never used.” How is this possible? Was churn hoarding a popular hobby back in the day? Maybe people received multiple churns as wedding presents and just stuck the extras in closets, the way we do today with stick blenders? It’s a mystery!

  3. When talking to friends about buying a dash churn, one must be careful when making hand gestures. Do not simulate holding the dash in your hands and pumping it up and down, lest it appear you are talking about hand jobs. (Let’s not talk about how I learned this lesson.)

  4. The cost of shipping and handling for a dash churn with two-gallon stoneware crock will surprise you. I think it was enough to pay for one of Mary’s semesters at Iowa College for the Blind.

  And lo and behold, one day in February I had a butter churn in my home, sitting in my not-even-remotely-country-themed kitchen. The cream was waiting in the fridge: since milk is homogenized these days, Barbara Walker in The Little House Cookbook recommended heavy whipping cream instead. I decided to hold off on using Ma Ingalls’s milk-and-grated-carrot technique for coloring the butter until I knew if this wacky churning business would even work. I mean, I had no idea how hard it would be to churn butter. I’d always had the sense from the Big Woods passage that it was a real slog. In the book the dash was heavy; Ma “churned for a long time”; sometimes Mary churned “while Ma rested.” Ma had to rest? “Rest” as in “give her arms a break,” I wondered, or “lie back for a spell on the trundle bed?”

  Farmer Boy, which also had a churning scene, wasn’t any more helpful. Apparently the Wilders needed to churn butter twice a week in summer when the cows were producing the most milk. “Mother and the girls were tired of churning, and on rainy days Almanzo had to do it.” Had to! Even though the illustration shows a decidedly more fun-looking barrel-style churn mounted on rockers, churning still sounded tedious. “Almanzo had to [had to!] keep rocking the churn till the chugging broke the cream . . .” For how long? Hours? I couldn’t wait to find out. I was prepared to churn until my hands blistered.

  “Each day had its own proper work,” it says in Little House in the Big Woods, and according to the book, churning was done on Thursday, which of course made it sound like you needed, you know, the whole day. So I picked a Monday when I didn’t have any plans at all. It was one of those crazy February presidents’ holidays that my office took off from work but Chris’s office didn’t.

  “Have a good day off,” he said, as I poured him some coffee to take in the car.

  “It’s not a day off,” I told him. “I have to churn butter!”

  When I finally had the cream ready to go in the crock (it had to sit for an hour or so to warm up a bit), I slid the churn across the floor into our TV room so I could sit on the couch and churn.

  I figured that the only way I could get through a long spate of churnin’ was to do it while watching TV. It did feel a little bit like cheating—after all, Ma didn’t have any outside entertainment while she churned, and you can only sing “The Blue Juniata” to yourself so many times. (Maybe she had other songs. I hoped for her sake that she did.) As a compromise, I decided I would watch an episode of Little House on the Prairie that I’d recorded. It was the one where Laura impulsively swipes a pretty music box belonging to Nellie Oleson, who finds out about the theft and blackmails her into doing her bidding. This better be good, I thought, and I didn’t just mean the TV show.

  The wooden dash had felt awfully light when I’d first gotten the churn, but it felt a lot more substantial now that there was cream in the churn—it worked with a buoyant, natural motion, and I quickly got used to pushing it up and down, gently rotating the dash as I went.

  It didn’t take long for things to start happening. After just a few minutes the splashing sound stopped, replaced by an eerie silence. No—a very faint squishing when I moved the dash around. What was that? I picked up the lid and peered inside. At this moment it seemed things had taken a horrible turn, both on TV and in my living room: Little Half-Pint had accidentally broken Nellie’s music box, and I had made a bucketful of dessert topping.

  I knew I was working with whipping cream, but I hadn’t expected to see it whip. When you see that much whipped cream at once, the sight becomes a lot less delightful somehow. And a lot more perverted.

  But I put the lid back on, took a deep breath, and kept churning. Maybe another ten minutes or so, by which time Nellie had discovered Laura with the music box. “You know stealing is against the law?” Nellie said, sneering. “You’re lucky I like you.” Then the sound inside the crock changed again. Back, somehow, to splashing.

  This time when I looked, the cream was thinner—though really, it wasn’t cream anymore—and there were mounds of thick, curdlike stuff that was yellow, a pale but unmistakable yellow. The taste confirmed it: in the amount of time that it took for an hour-long TV show plot to thicken—about twenty-five minutes, including commercials—I had made butter. I felt like a genius and a complete idiot at the same time.

  Churning, it turned out, was the easy part: it was much more tedious and awkward to press all the buttermilk out, rinse it, salt it, and mold it. I had to press a spoon hard against the butter while keeping the bowl it was in tilted far enough to let the buttermilk run. By the time I was finished I’d made nearly two pounds of butter from two quarts of whipping cream. Of course, I’d also wound up with butter that cost almost twice as much as supermarket butter, not counting labor. Only about an hour and a half of labor, but still.

  Chris called at lunchtime to ask how the butter making was going. “Oh, it’s done,” I said breezily.

  “How does it taste?” he asked. “Compared to store-bought butter?”

  I thought about it. “Exactly the same,” I told him. I even took my new butter out of the fridge and sampled it again while I was on the phone.

  Yes—the taste was good, but no different from the butter that came from the store. Maybe it had something to do with the cream, which was supermarket cream, after all, but for the most part, butter was butter. It was a little disappointing and yet comforting, too, to know that it had such a univ
ersal essence. Still, most people were convinced that hand-churned butter had to be better.

  “I bet it’s incredible,” friends would say. “It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

  Not really, I always tried to tell them. It was just butter. I felt a strange pride at this. I own a butter churn, I thought. You want to make something of it? Butter wasn’t even the point.

  But nothing in Laura World was just butter. I knew that, too.

  Whenever my family went on camping trips, I used to imagine that the contents of our campsite—the sleeping bags, the plastic lantern, the little propane stove—were all we owned in the world. When we’d return home to our house in Oak Park, I’d fantasize that we were coming to our house for the first time, that we had come to it out of some remarkable good fortune, a marvel like the “wonderful house” that Pa was suddenly one day able to build near Plum Creek. And once the station wagon pulled into the driveway I’d take the first chance I could to run upstairs and gaze at my room, describing its details to myself as if I’d never seen them before: a green-and-white-checked quilt (I might even have called it a “coverlet”) lay on the bed; on the white dresser sat a little wooden jewelry box. For a few moments my room felt enchanted, just from the power of observation I’d borrowed from Laura.

  It was a power I’d come to recognize. Other books I read had an I, a chatty presence who made a point to confide in me. I’d been befriended in my mind by a number of middle-grade novel protagonists, such as Sheila the Great, or else listened to omniscient narrators describe Ramona Quimby’s scrapes. But Laura’s point of view felt unmediated and clear, as if she were right behind my eyes. The story of the Little House books was always a story of looking.

  Everything looks like a wilderness in early March. We were driving through Wisconsin to see Laura’s birthplace outside Pepin—also known as “The Holy City of Pepin,” at least to that Minneapolis guy who believes Laura is God. I couldn’t help but feel the sense of a pilgrimage as well. We were on our first Little House trip at last.

  To get to Pepin from Chicago we had to drive all the way across Wisconsin, cross the Mississippi into Minnesota, and then drive for another hour north along the river before crossing back over. The landscape had suddenly changed once we reached the river, going from gently rolling farmland to high rock formations and craggy hills. It was an overcast day and everything felt wonderfully raw, as if the river and the ice and the wet, chilly weather had been gnawing at this part of the world for a few hundred years. I couldn’t see anything that looked like my imaginary Big Woods, but I liked it out here.

  The river was still mostly frozen—some stretches of it that we passed were gray mosaics of water and broken ice; in other places there were ice fishermen out on the surface. We crossed back into Wisconsin and turned onto a winding two-lane road with a sign that said Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Highway.

  I asked Chris if the sign meant I could start geeking out now.

  “Now?” he said. “What do you mean ‘now’?”

  You have to hand it to Pa Ingalls for knowing how to pick his homesites. Whether it was due to luck or his aversion to population density, the guy clearly had a knack for settling in small towns that stayed small. I would find over the course of all the trips that none of the homesites were in any danger of becoming lost amid urban renewal or suburban sprawl.

  According to the highway sign, Pepin had a population of 878 people. On the map, the town grid appears as just a few cross-hatched lines along the shore of Lake Pepin, which shows up as a bulge in the Mississippi River between Wisconsin and Minnesota.

  From all my reading about Lake Pepin, I could tell you that it had been formed just past where the Chippewa River feeds into the Mississippi, where the smaller river’s delta made the water back up and widen. Water skiing, of all things, was invented on the lake in the 1920s. Maybe the best thing about Lake Pepin is that it has its own lake monster. Dubbed “Pepie,” it was first spotted in 1871, with initial reports describing it as “the size of an elephant and rhinoceros, and [it] moved through the water with great rapidity.” It’s one of only three known lake monsters in existence, next to the Loch Ness Monster and “Champ” of Lake Champlain in Vermont. (And do you know who was born only fifty miles from Lake Champlain? Almanzo. Whoa!)

  I know all this is very impressive, especially in the realm of freshwater lake enthusiasm, but Lake Pepin might be best known to most of the world as the place where, more than a hundred and thirty years ago, a little kid picked up too many pebbles.

  It happens in Chapter 9 of Little House in the Big Woods, where four-year-old Laura fills her pocket with lake pebbles at the shore while the family is visiting town. And then, when Pa tosses her back into the wagon, the heavy pocket rips off her dress and she cries. For me, reading that scene never fails to bring on a brief, scalding instant of recognition in recalling exactly what it was like to be a tiny little kid, your whole sense of being so lumpy and vulnerable that the smallest things were everything, and the everything could be so unspeakably wonderful, and the wonderful could be snatched away in an instant, leaving a big ragged hole in your universe just like the one in Laura’s dress.

  Now Lake Pepin was in sight, a glimpse of pale between the buildings along the highway.

  “I want to pick up pebbles on the beach,” I said. “A whole bunch of them.”

  “Oh, that’s not going to end well,” Chris said, because I had just made him read Big Woods before the trip.

  Most of the town was perched on the side of the hill facing Lake Pepin, though the visitor’s center and the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum were along the highway. They were closed for the winter, and as we drove down the hill into the rest of the town, we could see that Pepin was a lakefront vacation town in off-season mode, with a handful of brightly painted cafés and a dockside restaurant, all closed. It was not unlike the scene near the beginning of Little House on the Prairie, when the Ingalls family is leaving Wisconsin in their covered wagon and they pass through Pepin early in the morning, past all the quiet, shuttered houses. At the bottom of the hill a set of freight railroad tracks ran right along the shore, and across the tracks was a small marina.

  We decided that in lieu of the visitor’s center, we’d stop at the public library, a modern building with only one room. There we met a very nice librarian well accustomed to giving Little House tourist directions.

  “Have you been up the hill yet?” she asked. She meant the Little House Wayside, the replica of the Ingalls log cabin on the original site, which was seven miles from town. We’d planned on going there next, we told her, and we asked if there was anything in particular we should look for.

  Her advice, which I will attempt to paraphrase, was: “Well, the county road there is more or less the same route Pa would travel to town, and to get there you turn on that County Road CC, which you’ll see the turnoff just past the place that sells gazebos over here, and then when you go up you can stop at Oakwood Cemetery to see where Laura’s aunt is buried, and also her first teacher, and the Huleatts, you know the Huleatts, right? And then after the cemetery you just keep going, and if you can you should look for the intersection of County Road I, because that’s where the school was, that Mary and Laura attended, with Anna Barry, who’s in the cemetery, but of course the school’s not there anymore, but where you see where it was, you’ll be about two miles from the cabin, though that’s by the road, because the way they walked to school was much closer. Anyway, then you’ll get to the cabin.”

  “Did you get all that?” Chris asked as we returned to the car.

  “No, but let’s go up there right now,” I said. “While I can still sort of remember.”

  We turned off the highway as the librarian told us and went gradually uphill through thin woods and farm fields, past farmhouses that were at least a century old. The whole landscape seemed so sleepy and timeless that I had trouble imagining that it had once been different, that the woods—Big or otherwise—were ever there.

  I
made Chris turn off at the cemetery, which was in a clearing just up the hill from the county road, and we followed the tire ruts through the slush along the main aisle of the place.

  “Who are we looking for again?” he asked, as we got out and stomped around in the old snow and mud. There was a mix of nineteenth- and twentieth-century headstones, the older ones thinner and spotted with lichen.

  I was trying to remember what the librarian said. “I think she said Laura’s aunt is here? And her first teacher? Anna something? Also some of the Huleatts.”

  “Who?”

  “Uh, the Huleatts? They were friends of the Ingalls who lived here, and they had some kids who played with Laura. You know the boy with the copper thingies on his shoes? Clarence? He was one of them,” I said. Then I actually spotted a small monument that said Huleatt. “Look!” I said. It was a stone for an Elizabeth, age 72, died 1889.

  Chris came over. “Wait, so is that the boy with the copper toes on his shoes?”

  “Well, no,” I said. “But this person was related to him.”

  “So where’s his grave?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know if he’s even buried here.” It didn’t feel quite right to be here, tromping over other people’s graves, just to look at a familiar name. Were you supposed to want to see where Laura’s aunt was buried? I had to remind myself: it was not my everything. “Let’s go,” I said, finally. We got back in the car and continued up the road toward the cabin.