The Wilder Life Read online

The Little House Wayside is just that: a wayside, a sort of rest stop with a little parking lot, a picnic pavilion, and a concrete bathroom shed. The cabin is set back from the road, across an expanse of lawn—or, in our case, snow. It was indeed a little gray house made of logs, just as the book said, as well as the historical marker nearby. It was awfully tidy, with a cinderblock foundation and the logs perfectly aligned. Clearly it had been built by the parks and recreation service and not Pa, and more for the sake of picnics than for history. I felt a little dumb, coming out here thinking that all I needed was to see a log cabin. Now I wasn’t sure.

  “Well, this is it,” I said, as we walked through the patchy snow. Stapled to the front door was a plastic-covered paper sign. PLEASE CLOSE DOOR, it read, in text both capitalized and underlined, TO KEEP THE BEES, BIRDS & OTHER VAR-MENTS OUT!!!

  “Did Pa type that up?” Chris asked. “He doesn’t seem like an all-caps kind of guy.”

  “He wasn’t, but you had to make a trip to town to buy lowercase letters,” I said. “Just like white sugar.”

  Inside were two little horse-stall-sized rooms off the main room, one with a window and one dark as a closet. There wasn’t much else to do inside but just stand there and look up at the roof rafters and peer out the windows and study the things posted on the Plexiglas-covered corkboards along one of the walls: a few photocopied historical documents, a brochure about Pepin, a couple postcards—one had a portrait of Laura in her old age, another a photo of the very cabin we were in.

  We read a 1945 letter from Laura, written in that sort of shaky, elderly-looking script that I’d eventually come to recognize from at least four paces away.

  I am very glad that you Enjoy reading my books, she’d written to a group of schoolchildren in the letter, but sorry you could not read them in their order. They are all one story, you know, and they are not so interesting when you read the end first.

  “A little cranky of her, isn’t it?” Chris pointed out.

  I had to agree. At least we were standing in the place where the story began, I thought—or, well, near it. Although I really had to think about it, because truthfully, I felt like we were still a very long way from the Big Woods, and nowhere near Laura World as I knew it. Yet despite everything that was clearly wrong with the cabin, with its utterly blank hearth, I refused to feel disappointed.

  But then as I stood there and read the letter again, I suddenly felt an odd little pang of chastened helplessness. When it came to the Little House books, weren’t we always at the end of the story first? Inevitably out of order wherever we went? How could we avoid that? Here I was, standing where the woods had been, where the cabin the little girl had lived in had long since rotted away, where a slightly clumsy approximation of it had been built as a sort of monument to her, long after she’d grown up and grown old and died, and all her letters to schoolchildren kept for posterity, including the one I was reading now—this is now, lady!—and this now, this perpetual too-lateness, was all I had. I was doing the best that I could with it. Weren’t we all trying, those of us who drove out here in our cars, who knew “the end” but kept coming back to the story anyway?

  I stepped over to the window to look out at the field and the feathery little trees and the diminishing snow. Maybe it didn’t look anything like the landscape Laura had known, but it was bleakly pretty, nearly as lonesome as the sound of wolves howling outside.

  Before we headed out I looked at the postcard of the cabin again, which seemed to be there as a kind of reminder. Yes, we were here.

  Judging from the empty parking lot, we were the only guests at the motel I’d picked in Pepin. The lobby was empty, too, and there was nobody behind the front desk. I hit the bell, the way you do in a movie about being in a deserted motel, but nobody came. I hit it again and we waited. We could see an open door down a dim side hallway—it had a child gate, and the light in the room flickered to indicate a TV was on. Chris started to walk toward the room but hesitated.

  “You made a reservation here, right?” he asked.

  “Maybe I should just call,” I said. “Maybe they forgot.” I got out my cell phone and picked up one of the motel’s business cards from a holder on the front desk and dialed the number on it. After a moment the phone behind the desk started ringing through the empty lobby. Chris and I stood and watched it.

  The manager answered the phone from wherever she was in the back. “Oh, I’ll be right out,” she said. She came out apologizing. “I just finished giving my kid a bath. I guess I couldn’t hear anything over the splashing.”

  I felt a little sheepish. We were probably the only Laura Ingalls Wilder tourists in town that week, and here she had to accommodate us and our crazy off-season whims. While Chris moved the car—“you can park it right against the side of the building if you want,” the manager had said—I told her we’d been to the Wayside cabin.

  “Yeah ...” She seemed to be trying to find the right words. “There’s ... not much there,” she said.

  I had to agree. I asked her if she read the books. She looked like she was about my age. She was shy and kind and looked like she wanted to be back in her apartment down the hall with her family. I was sure this time of year she didn’t have to spend much time venturing out into these carpeted hallways or this lobby with the big lofted ceiling with all its empty space.

  “I have the whole set,” she said quietly. “Here’s your key.”

  We had dinner at Ralph’s Bar/Mary’s Kitchen, which appeared to be one of the few places that was open during the evenings in winter. Luckily it was also one of the restaurants The Little House Guidebook recommended. It was a small place that displayed team logos for the Packers, the Badgers, and the Vikings; we sat in a booth and had very good hamburgers in red plastic baskets. There was a nice crowd for a Thursday evening—more than half the seats at the bar were full.

  “Everyone seems nice,” I pointed out to Chris. We could see that many of the people in the room knew each other. Mostly they looked settled—families with teenage kids, older couples. They were all perfectly normal-looking, but I found myself watching them as intently as I could without being conspicuous.

  “What are you looking for?” Chris asked.

  “Nothing, I guess.” But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching for something in particular, looking and listening. Hoping to overhear something.

  “Oh my God,” I said. “I just realized something really weird.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Somehow I keep expecting everyone here to be talking to each other about Laura Ingalls Wilder.” It was true. I’d been sitting there feeling like something was missing and that was what it was.

  Chris started laughing. “What, you mean talking like they know her? Like, what would they say?”

  “I guess I hadn’t imagined that far.” Though now that I thought about it, I supposed that they would say things like Have you been by the log cabin lately? and Boy, things sure have changed since the Ingallses lived here! I knew it was completely ridiculous. I’d been trying to cast everyone here in this bar as extras in this secret world of mine.

  “I suppose it’s just as well that this isn’t a room full of people talking about Laura Ingalls Wilder,” I admitted to Chris. “Because that would be a little creepy, right?”

  “Maybe a little,” he said.

  That night, back at the motel, I was getting ice from the ice machine near the lobby when the manager’s little boy in footed pajamas appeared in the dark hallway. He seemed to have come out of nowhere and didn’t look lost in the slightest.

  He growled at me, like a little bear. “Rowr!” he said, and then he giggled and ran away.

  “Just think,” I whispered to Chris later, just before we went to sleep. “We’re in the Big Woods.”

  We were out of the motel early the next morning. We’d need most of the day to drive to Green Bay to see our friends. It took us only a few minutes to see the historical marker in Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial
Park and the closed museum and visitor’s center, where I got out of the car and peered in the windows at the gift shop and felt a brief, inexplicable longing for a Little House collector’s spoon.

  “We should look at the lake again,” Chris said when we got back in the car. We’d driven along the marina the day before when we first came in, but we hadn’t really stopped to look. Now we made our way down the hill again, past the shuttered summer cottages and the rows of little brick storefronts.

  Near the bottom of the hill was a tiny garden-shed-sized log cabin with a tiny porch and a sign that said COMING SOON! SINGLE FAMILY YEAR-ROUND LOG HOMES. (“Wow, what a concept,” said Chris.) Then we crossed the railroad tracks and parked along a rocky beach. Except for a couple guys who were icefishing near the marina, the shore was deserted. The rocks looked boring and brown and dumped off a truck; so much for collecting Lake Pepin pebbles, I thought. But then we looked out at the lake.

  “I can’t believe it’s still frozen,” Chris said. I couldn’t believe it, either; we’d crossed the river twice on our way in and the ice had broken there. It was March, after all.

  It was a gray morning, nearly misty. The temperature was in the forties, almost warm enough to leave our coats in the car, certainly mild enough to not feel the weather at all. Which is why it was so strange to see that the expanse of Lake Pepin that opened out in front of us was still frozen solid. A rough lip of ice was pressed up against the rocks on the shore, and behind it the entire lake stretched motionless for at least a mile. The great bluffs on the Minnesota side were faint in the distance, rising above the soft white line of the frozen lake. There was no wind, and despite the vastness of the lake, everything felt muffled and still.

  “Pa drove the covered wagon across here.” I said. It wasn’t until I spoke that I realized that the fact astonished me.

  “In which book?” Chris asked.

  “Little House on the Prairie. Right at the very beginning. And in real life, too.” I couldn’t stop looking out across the ice. “I think this is the same time of year they went across.”

  “Really?”

  I tried to remember. The book had said they set out “in the very last of the winter.” “I think so. Then the night after they went across the ice started breaking.”

  This didn’t look like it would break, though. I went a little closer to where a ridge of ice met the rocks and considered stepping out over it. The only thing that kept me from doing it was knowing that I’d want to take another step, and another. As solid as the lake looked, there was also something sort of miragelike about it, with the overlay of gray weather between us and the opposite shore. I felt, very distinctly, that if we went across we would follow them. I mean “them” as in them, and it seemed to me, too, that the same other side they’d reached in their covered wagon would be there instead of Lake City, the present, whatever. It seemed perfectly matter-of-fact that it would be this way; that just as the winter turns water into roads, it makes the world revert like this.

  “I hadn’t expected it to be like this,” I told Chris. Meaning I hadn’t thought I would find something like an opening into Laura World, that I would come this close.

  4.

  Good Girls and Golden Curls

  I DON’T HAVE A SISTER, but for a time, while growing up, I had Laura Ingalls.

  I’m the only daughter in my family, the younger of two. My brother, Steve, is four years older than I am, and for much of my childhood his life seemed infinitely more advanced than mine. While I didn’t grow up alone, sometimes being a girl felt lonely.

  Books often helped. Plenty of them offered surrogate sisterhood through their characters, but none filled the need the way the Little House books did. I enjoyed Little Women, but the March sisters were a self-contained bunch, the four of them so chummy together that I could only be an onlooker at their attic plays and Christmas mornings. Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables was a little more solitary, but she seemed awfully needy. While I had a perfectly decent set of parents, girlhood felt like an unknown territory. I loved that Laura World was full of wide open spaces that expressed the sort of not-alone lonesomeness that I often felt. One frontier seemed to stand for another.

  Of course, this is just a personal metaphor, and maybe a hopelessly quaint one at that. So it seemed to me when I walked into American Girl Place in Chicago with my friend Kara on a late winter afternoon. Located on North Michigan Avenue, an upscale shopping district that attracts throngs of tourists, American Girl Place is the flagship store for the American Girl brand, which began as a small line of historical-themed dolls and has become a veritable empire of dolls, toys, books, clothing, and accessories, all for girls from toddler to tween ages. It’s a massive place, as big as a department store, with its own doll hospital, doll beauty salon, and restaurant.

  American Girl Place didn’t exist when I was young, but I can see why an eight-year-old girl would love it, where everything from the pink-accented décor to the slogans on the wall (FOLLOW YOUR INNER STAR, read one motto) emphasizes how special it is to be a girl, how powerful. At American Girl Place, girlhood is not a lonely prairie. If anything, it’s a city, or even an industry. The sense you get when you visit the store and ride the packed escalator is that American Girl girls have places to go, things to buy, important girly work to do.

  “Why are we here again?” Kara asked. We’d been out on Michigan Avenue when I’d talked her into going into the store. “Do they have a Laura Ingalls Wilder doll?” she asked. By now most of my friends knew about my recent preoccupation.

  “No,” I said. “I just really like looking at the stuff sometimes,” I confessed.

  It’s true: while I’ve never owned an American Girl doll, my fascination with the company dates back to my college days, when one of their catalogs inexplicably showed up at my apartment in Iowa City. While my “thing” for tiny doll accessories has never run as deep as my Little House obsession, I was starting to suspect they were related somehow.

  It would be another month before my next attempted foray into Laura World, a trip to both the Little House on the Prairie site in Kansas and Laura’s adulthood home in Mansfield, Missouri, and I was itching to see something in the meantime. So when I’d noticed the American Girl sign gleaming forth from Water Tower Place, I thought, why not? Maybe American Girl was the methadone to my Little House heroin, good for a fix. And maybe it would help me figure out why I’d gotten hooked in the first place.

  American Girl is now owned by Mattel, Inc., but it was created by a teacher named Pleasant Rowland, who founded the brand’s original company, Pleasant Company (clearly her entrepreneurial destiny demanded she call it this), and started the doll and book line in 1986. Reportedly she came up with the concept following a trip to Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia; eventually she’d create a doll character, Felicity, whose stories were set there. The very first American Girl to launch, though, was Kirsten, a Swedish immigrant girl who comes to live on the Minnesota prairie in the mid-1800s with a trunk full of calico dresses and sunbonnets. It might be just a coincidence that when American Girl set out to build its empire, it started in Laura’s very own neighborhood. Or it could have been a shrewd move based on market research. (“The gingham sunbonnets scored high with the focus group, Ms. Rowland.”) All I know is that if I’d been about seven years younger, I might have encountered the American Girl products firsthand.

  As it happened, my first acquaintance was by accident in 1992. “What the hell is this?” I’d asked my college roommate, Kelly, when the catalog showed up in our apartment’s mailbox. “Why are we getting this creepy doll stuff?” She didn’t know how it had come to us, either; it seemed the catalog had been addressed to a previous tenant or otherwise mistakenly sent. Yet neither of us could bring ourselves to throw it out.

  “I can’t stop looking at it,” Kelly admitted one day.

  “I know!” I said. When I wasn’t writing English papers, I’d curl up on our thrift-store couch with a Camel Light 100 and fl
ip through the pages studying each of the historical dolls. At the time there were only four American Girls: Kirsten, of course, and Felicity from Williamsburg; also Samantha, the Victorian one, and Molly, the bespectacled girl from the 1940s. The accessories amazed me: little wooden armoires and kitchen chairs, tiny baskets for bitsy golden brown loaves of bread, straw hats, bandanna-sized quilts, mini trunks. Felicity had the snobbiest accoutrements, but Kirsten’s things had a folk-art cuteness, and I wanted some of Molly’s stuff full-sized for my apartment, especially that retro dinette set.

  I wouldn’t fully give myself over to it, though. It was decadent, useless, expensive crap. The dolls themselves cost as much as a monthly car payment, and even the accessories were pricier than most of the clothes I bought at Ragstock. American Girl represented a spendy middle-class existence that I didn’t want to partake in.

  I still felt a little of that as Kara and I walked around the store’s first floor, watching the families carrying big red American Girl Place shopping bags along with their bags from Bloomingdale’s and Banana Republic. More than once we spotted a little girl whose American Girl–purchased outfit matched her doll’s clothes, and group outings where gaggles of well-groomed mothers blocked the aisles.

  “A little Stepfordish in here, isn’t it?” Kara whispered.

  “I know. Sorry,” I said. “Let’s look at the books.” I steered her over to the appropriate section.

  As a children’s book editor, I’ve come to grudgingly admire the American Girl books. Their very first books were historical fiction chapter books that accompanied their doll characters. They were full of tidy morals and prefab story arcs that even the boilerplate titles give away: each girl Learns a Lesson and Saves the Day and so on. Imagine the Little House books written by literate robots, and you get a sense of what the early books were like.

  But that was then: these days American Girl courts established children’s writers to write their fiction titles and have a respectable line of expert-approved nonfiction guides that cover self-esteem, bullying, and other tough subjects (an impressive feat, because, really, you try explaining eating disorders to a ten-year-old).