The Wilder Life

by Wendy McClure

  “Up to five years,” Evelyn said. “No refrigeration needed!” She went over to the table and picked up a little jelly jar that I’d seen both at breakfast and dinner the night before but hadn’t touched on account of the rancid tang of its mysterious contents. Oh, no—that was butter? It was both oily and oddly granular, and I’d thought it was some kind of homemade mayonnaise. “This is from a batch we put up last fall,” Evelyn said. “You can do the same thing with Velveeta, too.”

  I went outside and found Chris.

  “I just got an F in blacksmithing,” he said. Samuel had showed them how to make little iron hooks, and his had fallen into the fire. “That’s how I roll.” He made the heavy-metal sign. “Anything horrifying happen during Soap 101?”

  I told him about how Linda was preparing for off-the-grid life by trying to go without her CPAP machine, and about Evelyn’s dubious-sounding butter-storage methods. “Let’s go soon,” I said.

  “Now,” Chris said. “We’re taking the tent down now.”

  “Too bad you won’t be able to help with the butter churning,” Heidi said, when I told her we were leaving.

  “Yeah, something came up,” I said, knowing full well how it sounded: Oh, you know how it is with our hectic Chicago lives! We city people, we never change!

  I bought several bars of her soap, which smelled wonderful, and thanked her for hosting. In my heart I wished her and Samuel well. “You guys are really living the dream out here,” I told her. Whatever their dream was, that is.

  Most of the weekenders had gathered in the barnyard, and Samuel was showing everyone how to put a bridle on a horse and clean its hooves. But Ron and Linda and Evelyn were sitting by the picnic tables, so we went over to say good-bye to them.

  “We don’t know how long we’re staying, either,” Ron said. “This ain’t really the stuff we’re needing to learn. I mean”—he nodded toward the barnyard—“this is nice, but it’s not really practical for what we’re wanting to do.”

  Ron was a little creepy, but you couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for him: clearly he was hoping this weekend would be more Soldier of Fortune magazine than Country Living. I wondered what kind of world he thought he was preparing for.

  “I mean, there won’t be horses,” he said.

  “Good luck,” I said to Linda. We have room in our car, I wanted to tell her.

  “Thanks.” She waved weakly.

  Rebecca approached us one last time. To my relief, it wasn’t to proselytize but to ask about our future Laura Ingalls Wilder trips.

  “So are you going to see Mankato, too?” she asked. “Mankato, Minnesota?”

  “Mankato? What’s there?” I was pretty sure the place had never been mentioned in any of the biographies, and yet it sounded familiar.

  “The Ingalls family were always taking trips to Mankato,” she said.

  I stared at her for a moment before I realized what she was talking about. “Oh, you mean on the TV show.”

  I remembered now—Mankato, the town that the show’s writers had designated as the go-to place whenever the plot veered into situations that required the amenities of a considerably larger town than Walnut Grove. Characters frequently went to Mankato to visit medical specialists, buy fancy dresses, and get into bar brawls. From the way the TV Ingallses planned shopping trips to Mankato, you get the sense that the place was a sort of nineteenth-century Mall of America, but there’s no indication whatsoever that the actual Mankato, about eighty miles from Walnut Grove (which back then would have been a three-day journey), ever served that purpose for Laura or anyone else.

  Rebecca nodded. “But they must have gone there sometimes in real life.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “The show made that up.” I explained that most of the stuff on that show was made up and didn’t happen in the books.

  “Oh,” she said. “I only read the first book, and then I watched the show. It wasn’t the same?” She looked a little disappointed.

  “No,” I told her. “So, no, we’re not going to Mankato. Why do you ask?”

  “It just always sounded like a great place,” Rebecca said.

  It took about an hour on the road before we could start to laugh at the whole experience.

  “I can’t believe that just happened,” Chris said. “I can’t believe those people.”

  “I can’t believe Rebecca thinks the End Times and the TV show are for real,” I added.

  “There won’t be horses,” Chris said.

  “But there will be butter,” I pointed out.

  We were so glad when we could see the Chicago skyline again, and when we merged onto the expressway that would take us back to our doomed and worldly life.

  That business about canning butter really stuck with me—something about it seemed to epitomize our strange encounter at Clover Meadow Farm. So shortly after we got home, I looked it up online. The practice, said to have originated with Oregon Trail settlers, now appears to be a very popular emergency-preparedness home project. This despite warnings from food preservation experts that letting butter recongeal in jars doesn’t really count as canning and that subsequently keeping the stuff around for a couple years perhaps isn’t the best thing to do. Since plenty of other staples could be used in place of butter (unless your emergency food supply consisted mostly of muffins), butter canning hardly seems worth the effort and risk, but lots of people do it anyway.

  I noticed that just about everyone who posted about canning butter on a blog or a bulletin board seemed to be preparing for the possibility of a Biblically sanctioned calamity more than any other kind of event. Or, at the very least, they were thinking about preparing. I suspected that was the appeal of butter canning: as preparedness methods go, it’s cheap and easy, a much less complicated endeavor than, say, building a reverse-osmotic water purification system.

  Most of all, it is homey—people often call canned butter “sunshine in a jar” and remark on how pretty it looks. Impractical though it is, I could see that canning butter was a way to play God’s pioneer, imagining a better life on a new frontier of mankind. It lets you create a comforting narrative of security and resourcefulness, an impulse that is very human, and, I have to admit, very Little House as well.

  In the weeks after our trip to the farm, I had a made-up story of my own, a variation on my childhood imaginary friendship with young Laura Ingalls, where I’d lead her around and show her the marvels of my modern life. Only now instead of Laura, I was mentally ushering around Linda from the Wisconsin church group, who had seemed so lost and sad. The night we’d talked by the fire she’d asked me all kinds of questions about living in the city: Did we know our neighbors? (Most of them, I told her.) Where did we park our cars? Was it hard living on the third floor and having to walk up all those stairs every day? What kind of people ride the subway? What about crime? I’d wondered if she was curious about living another kind of life.

  So for much of the summer I walked around the city with this Linda woman in my head, showing her the neighborhoods, imagining her walking with me down the tree-lined streets, greeting the people we passed, stopping in and talking to the owners of the grubby little grocery stores in Albany Park. It’s friendly here, see? I’d tell Imaginary Linda. It’s a different world, but you could live here.

  And then, for a while afterward, one question kept nagging me: what would Laura Ingalls Wilder think of all this—the homesteading movement, Samuel and Heidi Ackerson, the Wisconsin church group and their preparedness retreats? Like Rose, Laura disliked FDR and the public-works programs of the New Deal. They both valued self-reliance (so much so that in the Little House books they’d made the fictional Ingalls family more independent than the real one); they likely would have admired some of the modern homesteaders’ efforts and been impressed by Heidi’s kitchen. I already suspected that if the adult Laura were alive today, there’d be something of a cultural divide between us.

  One night, though, I was rereading Pioneer Girl, Laura’s unpubli
shed memoir manuscript, and skimming a bit, since much of the last half is material also covered in the final books in the series. I came across a passage about one of the town jobs Laura worked at in her teenage years, the stint sewing shirts at Clancy’s dry goods store. In Little Town on the Prairie, Laura has to listen to the constant quarreling of the merchant, his wife, and his mother-in-law.

  But according to Pioneer Girl, what she had to endure instead, in real life, were the two women’s rantings about “the Catholics,” who they feared would take over the government and do terrible things to Protestant women and children:While we sewed, the daughter would work herself up . . . wringing her hands and declaring that they should never take her Bible from her, never, never! no matter what she suffered.

  Then a comet appeared in the sky and both women believed this meant the end of the world, so they were more frightened than ever.

  I sat sewing and did not say anything. I did not believe what they said about the Catholics or the comet, but it made me feel sick to hear them talk.

  Chris heard me laugh out loud as I read this.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  I showed him the page. “Check out the good old days,” I told him.

  Maybe it was futile to think about what kind of ideology Laura Ingalls Wilder would have if she lived today. After all, the Laura of fifty years ago wrote The Long Winter, a story not just about survival, but about the survival of a family with a few too many mouths to feed and a tendency to rely on luck. And yet the story never for a moment becomes a cautionary tale about preparedness (though it’s certainly true the Ingallses weren’t prepared) or depending too much on the railroads for provisions (also true). It assigns no higher meaning to the relentless blizzards and terrible cold. In the end it’s enough that everyone survives.

  Chris and I had made it through our strange farm ordeal, but I was beginning to doubt that these excursions were getting me any closer to the world of the books. In less than a month we were going to see the places where the last five books took place—Minnesota and South Dakota, with a stop in Iowa, too, but I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for anymore. Suddenly I wanted to talk to someone who had done what I was about to do. It wasn’t just a trip I was going on—by setting out for the remaining homesites, I’d be excavating my childhood neverland once and for all.

  Maybe the weirdest e-mail you’ve gotten all week, I wrote in the subject line of an e-mail to a person I knew only from a book.

  I had found that Searching for Laura Ingalls book at the library again, that picture book with the photos of the kid traveling with her family in the RV on their Little House vacation. And then, because I can’t leave well enough alone, I’d found the girl, Meribah Knight. I’d searched her name online just out of curiosity and because she had a distinctive first name, but when I found out she was living in Chicago, I knew I wanted to talk to her.

  Meribah had been in grade school in 1993 when the book was published. Her mother, the children’s book writer Kathryn Lasky, had cowritten the book with Meribah, and her father had taken the photos. Now she was a journalism grad student in her midtwenties. I wondered what she’d think of the fact that someone else searching for Laura Ingalls was searching for her.

  She wrote back right away. “This is so hilarious,” she wrote. Well, yes, it was.

  We met for coffee about a week later. In Searching for Laura Ingalls, when she was eight, she wore a pink prairie skirt and matching blouse to go wading in Plum Creek; now she had cute silver cat’s-eye glasses and tattoos on her arms. I’d worried that she wouldn’t want to discuss Laura Ingalls Wilder at all, that the trip had left her disillusioned. But she was more than happy to talk about it—the saga of her Cambridge, Massachusetts, family trying to navigate the world of the midwestern RV parks; her teenage brother listening to the Dead Kennedys on his headphones; eight-year-old Meribah insisting that her mom braid and pin up her hair every morning to simulate a nineteenth-century hairstyle.

  Meribah said she thought one reason why she’d gotten into the books in the first place had something to do with her liberal Cambridge upbringing in a neighborhood with Harvard professors. When Meribah dressed up as Laura for her third-grade class’s Biography Day, so did another kid—a boy. “That’s so Cambridge.” She laughed. “I grew up with all these progressive ideas, all these people who were pushing the boundaries of things. So what could I rebel against?” As a result, she became fascinated with “ordinary things,” which of course the Little House books celebrate in spades. “I mean, Laura was an average girl,” she said.

  I could tell Meribah and I were the same kind of Little House fan: we’d both never bothered with the TV show, since it didn’t in any way resemble our own impressions of the books, and like me, she’d had the giving-Laura-a-tour-of-the-twentieth-century fantasy, though her version involved treating Laura to a modern Christmas, where “she’d get way more than just an orange and a piece of candy.” But most of all, she kept talking about the trip as a way to visit a world.

  I asked her if she’d felt like that world had still been there.

  “Well, there were a few jarring things, but sure,” she said. It turned out the disappointments she’d experienced along the way—finding Silver Lake drained, discovering De Smet mostly deserted on the Fourth of July—hadn’t diminished the experience for her. Sixteen years later, long after she’d moved on from the Little House books (in fact, she’d forgotten plenty of the specifics, to the extent that at one point she asked, “What was Laura’s husband’s name? Alfonso?”), she still thought of the trip as one of the best experiences of her life.

  “So it’s all real?” I asked her. “I mean, you can say this?” Even though I knew I would still have to find out for myself.

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “It’s for real.”

  8.

  Fragments of a Dream

  ETIQUETTE DICTATES THAT you can’t invite yourself to a wedding, you shouldn’t drop in on friends unexpectedly, and you really can’t talk someone into letting you stay in their sod house. I found that last one out while planning the next trip, which was to be my most ambitious excursion into Laura World, in which Chris and I would visit three states and three and a half Laura Ingalls Wilder–related destinations in a single road trip.

  The main objective was to see Walnut Grove in Minnesota, the setting for On the Banks of Plum Creek, and De Smet, South Dakota, where the rest of the books about Laura and her family took place—By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, These Happy Golden Years, and The First Four Years. Both towns had summer pageants—outdoor stage productions based on the books—and since they were only a few hours’ drive apart from each other, it was possible to see both pageants in a single weekend. Of course I had to see them; doing so seemed to be one of the pillars of advanced Laura fandom.

  Our big trip was planned for July and would also include stops in Spring Valley, Minnesota (I counted that one as only the “half ” destination, since there wasn’t much there), and Burr Oak, Iowa, the one childhood home that Laura hadn’t written about in the Little House books. We’d be driving from Chicago across Wisconsin to Minnesota in a fourteen-hundred-mile loop across the upper Midwest. If we hadn’t already visited Pepin in the spring, we could have easily added it to our route. Plenty of families, including Meribah Knight’s, made a point of hitting Pepin, Walnut Grove, and De Smet in a single epic trip, and the towns tended to coordinate their festival and pageant schedules accordingly.

  I started to get more of a sense of the history of Little House–related travel as I planned the trip and researched the homesites. It seems Laura tourism began in earnest partly as a result of the Little House on the Prairie TV show. Several of the homesite foundations and memorial societies were formed in the mid-’70s to address the mass interest in the real-life places where the Ingalls family had lived; suddenly there was a need for more than historical markers.

  But Little House pilgrims had been
popping up for years before that, even during Laura’s lifetime. In addition to her visitors at Mansfield, Laura had received an enthusiastic letter in 1948 from a family who’d passed through De Smet, where one of the local residents had shown them her parents’ things and had even let them take buttons from Ma’s sewing box. I’d read about this in the introduction to The Little House Guidebook, by William Anderson (the Little House expert who’d begun his career in his teens). There’s no indication as to whether or not Laura found it creepy to learn that her old neighbors were letting strangers rifle through her mother’s belongings. God knows what they planned on giving away when they ran out of buttons. Good thing the pageants were created, I thought, no doubt in part to give folks something else to do besides paw through the Ingallses’ sock drawers.

  One of the places I wanted to see the most—to the extent that I’d gotten a little obsessed with it—wasn’t a Little House site at all. It was an attraction called Sod House on the Prairie, a short drive east of Walnut Grove in Minnesota. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a sod house, built and furnished twenty years ago by a local family, the McCones, using authentic historical methods. The exhibit on the McCone farm includes a dugout house, a log cabin, and a patch of restored prairie.

  Until a few years ago, Virginia McCone had also been running the place as a bed-and-breakfast, where guests could spend a night in the sod house without electricity or indoor plumbing, only oil lamps and an outhouse.

  Somehow the website made this sound appealing. Actually, it made it sound totally amazing. It was full of photos of the sod house against sun-dappled prairie vistas. The page for the bed-and-breakfast was still up, and it featured a photo of a woman, presumably a guest, sitting at an antique desk in the soddy wearing a prairie dress and reading a book. The guest testimonial read: I feel the magic of Laura Ingalls surrounding me when I snuggle under the quilts, when I read by the oil lamp, and when I wash my hands and face using the pitcher and the basin. Clearly this Virginia McCone lady understood the stuff of Laura World.