The Wilder Life (33 page)

And the TV viewers, too. Because lest you underestimate the deep connection some people feel to the NBC Walnut Grove, I submit these verbatim excerpts of a
Tripod.com
webpage that I found one night, written in 2004 by a man known only as “Lorenzo.” It seems that the remaining
Little House on the Prairie
exterior sets in Simi Valley, California—the titular Little House, the church, the school for the blind, and a few more structures that hadn't been “blowed up” in the finale—had burned down in 2003 during the destructive wildfires that year. Apparently this news left Lorenzo so bereft that he put up a single webpage to announce an ambitious endeavor:
Lorenzo (whose only available e-mail address bounced, to my dismay) hadn't quite worked out the particulars of his plan—“I will still need to get permission to rebuild the whole town of Walnut Grove, so please check back soon,” he wrote—but he was hoping that with the help of volunteers, donated materials, and proceeds from selling
Little House
memorabilia, T-shirts, and other merchandise that he had yet to procure, he could make it happen. He believed the rebuilt set could not only function as a tourist attraction for fans but also open up the possibility for new
Little House on the Prairie
episodes and TV movies to be filmed. He also seemed to just want to experience a little of the community spirit that the TV Walnut Grove embodied—that sense of hey-we'll-all-come-together-and-build-this-thing that characterized so many episodes. It would all start, he said, with a fund-raising rally in the parking lot of the Simi Valley set location.

“And I would like to have a Dance party there,” he wrote at the very end of his missive. “So bring your dancing Shoes, to dance to the 80's.”

(That part makes me especially wish that Lorenzo's vision had come to pass.)

And who could blame him for wanting a place like Walnut Grove, this place he knew so well in his mind, to still exist? It was the same reason why Chris and I were driving over five hundred miles in a single day, across the dullest part of Minnesota ever.

It was late afternoon when we started seeing the wind turbines, dozens of them. They filled the horizon and kept emerging from every direction ahead of us. Sometimes they loomed close to the road, great big spindly things with huge pinwheel heads turning slowly. We'd never seen so many of them before and had never seen a landscape so transformed by them. The sight was like something Laura would have seen—the open land one day changed by the seam of railroad tracks and the swooping lines of telegraph wires; the whole main street of De Smet emerging above the prairie in just two weeks.

We drove through the turbines for nearly an hour. The last ones we passed stayed visible for a long time behind us, lit up by the low sun in the rearview mirrors. I could still see them by the time we turned onto Route 14, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Highway.

Like a lot of the towns we passed, the first thing you see of Walnut Grove is its grain elevator. The business district lies behind it, beyond a gas station. The railroad tracks that run through town—parallel to the highway—look to be the same line that was still being built west at the time of the Little House books.

There's plenty of indication, official and otherwise, that the town is a Laura Ingalls Wilder destination, from the signs by the road to the faded but elaborate mural that depicts Laura in front of Plum Creek, looking a little grim-faced as she carries two giant buckets.

This Walnut Grove, the real one, had its first settlers in 1870; they were the Nelsons, the same Norwegian family who were neighbors to the Ingalls family in
On the Banks of Plum Creek
. When the railroad came through in 1873, the town began to establish itself; it was still a new town when the Ingalls family moved to nearby Plum Creek a year later.

The history on the town's website doesn't go much beyond that—you'd almost think the town just ceased to exist sometime in the late 1800s the way the TV town did (albeit with less of a bang). What happened instead was that Walnut Grove simply stayed a small town. You can guess that some of what's not written about Walnut Grove's past 120 years is also the history of thousands of small towns in the rural Midwest: the decline of family farms and job opportunities.

For the last thirty years, the connection to Laura Ingalls Wilder has influenced the town's fortunes in ways both typical—i.e., Little House tourism—and unexpected. Minnesota has one of the largest Hmong immigrant populations in the United States, and some accounts say that Walnut Grove's first Hmong residents were attracted to the town by the TV show. According to a 2004 Minnesota Public Radio segment, Harry Yang, the proprietor of an Asian grocery store in Walnut Grove, settled there on the advice of his daughter, who was a fan of the show and who thought it would be a good place to live because the people on the show seemed nice. The subsequent Hmong who moved there increased Walnut Grove's population (to nearly nine hundred, by some estimates), and now make up a quarter of the community. An essay by David Griffith in the book
New Faces in New Places: The Changing Geography of American Immigration
reports that the Hmong families in Walnut Grove helped the housing market, kept a school from closing, and have been admired by many of the longtime residents for their traditional family values.

Indeed, we saw Harry Yang's grocery store on Main Street. It was closed for the evening, along with the handful of gift stores, the museum, and Nellie's, a diner that faced Route 14 and appeared considerably more unassuming than its namesake restaurant on the TV show. The business district was only about two blocks, and there weren't any motels in town. We had reservations at the Wilder Inn in Tracy, a town just to the west, so we headed back out on Route 14.

“Wait a minute,” Chris said, after we'd been driving for a few minutes. “
How
far is Tracy?” He was reading
By the Shores of Silver Lake,
which meant he'd just read the part where Laura, Mary, Carrie, and Ma had taken their first train ride, to the end of the line in Tracy, an experience that merited its very own chapter, “Riding in the Cars,” one of my favorites.

“Seven miles, but that doesn't sound right, does it?” I'd seen how close it was on the map, but I didn't quite believe it myself. I'd always had the idea that the train ride described in
Silver Lake
took hours. Well, maybe not
hours
but certainly long enough for Laura to give Mary a highly detailed inventory of the train's interior, the passengers, the view outside, and the fascinating water fountain (and didn't it sound like the best fountain in the world?); take a drink from aforementioned fascinating water fountain; buy candy from vendor; distribute candy among siblings; and finally, consume the candy in that protracted trademark Ingalls one-restrained-lick-at-a-time fashion, yes?

Now, though, the trip by car on Route 14 was just long enough for the oldies radio station to play “Oye Como Va” and part of “Bette Davis Eyes
.
”

On our drive back to Walnut Grove for dinner, we tried to figure out the puzzle. Maybe, back in Laura's day, distances were measured in special prairie miles, or else the whole town of Tracy had simply been picked up by a tornado at some point and moved about thirty miles closer, or else there was a wormhole, or something
.
It wasn't until we remembered that the train in the book went only
twenty miles an hour
at its fastest that it started to make sense, in a wretched math-word-problem kind of way. A train nudging along the prairie at the same rate as the #81 bus in Chicago rush-hour traffic would be a long trip indeed, long enough for a rich, epic swath of Little House description.

We had dinner at the Walnut Grove Bar and Grill, which sported a Miller Lite banner reading
GREAT FOOD/COLD BEER /SMOKE-FREE ROOM/HOME OF LAURA INGALLS WILDER
. The waitress told us how to get to the pageant grounds, and so just past dusk we drove out, over the creek, up a hill, and into a little valley where the amphitheater lay. The final rehearsal was in progress—we could see just a glimpse of the stage, cast members dancing in a pool of light beyond the parking field. We turned the car around to head back. It was a warm night and we had the windows down as we drove down the hill. Even though the stage was a quarter of a mile away, voices from the rehearsal still carried; we could hear a girl's excited shriek on the wind.

We Invite You to Experience the Lifestyle of Laura Ingalls,
read the sign along the side of the road just outside the McCone farm, home of the Sod House on the Prairie attraction. We'd come out here just after breakfast at Nellie's, driving east on 14. We parked in the driveway of the farmhouse and Virginia came out to say hello and collect our admission fee. She was in her fifties, and with her quiet good-naturedness she reminded me of one of my favorite grade-school teachers. She pointed out the gate that led out back to the exhibit.

“Enjoy it,” she told us. “Feel free to look around as much as you want.”

We walked along a narrow path through the prairie; the grass was tall enough and the sod house so low-slung that we could only see the roof, which had a thin layer of grass growing on top.

From the signs along the path we learned that the main sod house was “a rich man's soddy.” As sod buildings went, the dugout where the Ingalls had lived in
On the Banks of Plum Creek
had been a pretty basic model, but the place the McCones had built was the extra-fancy kind, really the Cadillac Escalade of sod houses—big, with glass windows and wood floors and plaster walls. It looked a little crusty on the outside, but inside was one big, bright room, with two beds made up with patchwork quilts, an iron cookstove, a wooden table and chairs, a cradle, two rocking chairs, a wardrobe, and a washbasin and pitcher on a stand. The wooden ceiling beams were just a few inches over our heads and the door and windows were low on the walls. It all looked exactly like the place where an old woman would live in a fairy tale.

In fact, I'd forgotten for a moment that I'd come here to feel like I was in Laura World, but from looking at the guestbook on the table, it was clear that other visitors had had strong associations.

“I really do feel like I am in the time of Little House on the Prairie ,” one visitor had written.

“This place is so real,” wrote a girl who said she was visiting with her grandparents. “It is just like Laura Ingalls used to live in. I read the books, too. I am from Connor, Minnesota.”

Others had felt compelled to write poetic-sounding things: “I only wish today had the beautiful hearts of days gone by.” Next to the guestbook was a binder filled with clippings about the exhibit, testimonial letters, and various journal entries and bits of creative writing composed by bed-and-breakfast guests. Flipping through the pages it occurred to me that Sod House on the Prairie was not so much a history museum as it was a sort of inspirational retreat, where people came to commune with the past and tap into its muselike powers.

There was a lot of misguided nostalgia, to be sure, but as someone who had once decided that her writing could only improve if she wrote first drafts in the same kind of orange-covered notebooks Laura used, and thus spent an hour and a half searching online to see if some stationery company somewhere still made them, I understood.