The Wilder Life (31 page)

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 unpublished 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:

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.