The Wilder Life (10 page)

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 universal 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!)