The Wilder Life (35 page)

“Small like a person. Not
Tinkerbell
small,” I said.

And then there was that part when Laura and Mary made the button-string for little Carrie at Christmas; they'd had to keep it a secret from Carrie by hiding it and only working on it when she was napping. Now, when I imagined how it all took place in that tiny room, the whole thing was absurd. What had once seemed like a cozy scene was now practically a Beckett play, with everyone having to turn their backs to everyone else for privacy. All the cooking and fiddling and ironing and living that the Ingalls family did in that room seemed nearly impossible. Except in Laura World it wasn't. I had to keep remembering that.

I'd had a crazy notion to walk out and see where the family had lived near Plum Creek. After all, it was only about two miles from town—Laura and Mary had walked the distance to school on a daily basis, in bare feet no less; surely in my flip-flops I could get a sense of what it was like, yes? I asked the woman at the museum gift store who'd been giving us directions.

“I
guess
some people walk out there,” she said. “But you really should drive. Because, I mean, you walk out there, and then you gotta walk
back
.” So we drove. Good thing, because the barefoot prairie jaunt I'd imagined would've amounted to trudging two miles of shadeless cornfield at one p.m. in July.

The Ingallses' preemption land claim is now private farmland, still owned by the same family that was visited by Garth Williams on his research trip in 1947; until then, nobody in Walnut Grove had really been aware of the connection between their town and the Little House books. By the time Williams showed up, the house that Pa had built in
On the Banks of Plum Creek
was gone, with only a few guesses as to its location or fate, but Williams found what was left of the sod dugout on the creek. The site began to get regular tourists in the 1970s when the TV show became popular.

I'd heard that until the museum was built in town, the family who owned the property had had to contend with confused visitors who often descended on their house believing it had once belonged to the Ingallses. Now things were considerably more organized, and for a small fee they allowed a steady stream of cars and tour buses to wind through their front yard on their way to the creek area. We pushed a few bucks into the self-serve pay box by the barn and then drove until we came to a clearing and parked. The creek was ahead, somewhere in the trees; we could see a medium-sized footbridge that led across to the dugout site.

“This is perhaps the most unchanged of all the book locales,”
The Little House Guidebook
proclaims of this area. I was skeptical at first, until I saw the creek. Which really
is
just a creek, and at first glance you can easily forget that it is in fact a famous creek until you really look at it and recognize it. And I did: I
knew
it, and my mind shrieked
Plum Creek!
It was clear and shallow and flowing healthily along. I made Chris stop on the footbridge so I could look.

“Here it is,” I told him, as if I'd found it myself.

We went on over to the high bank on the other side, where the dugout house—the real one—had been. It was now a hollow spot marked by a large wooden sign; the ground was marked off with ropes in a rough square, either to show where the walls had been or to keep people off. Locals believe the dugout had caved in at least twenty years before Garth Williams had found it, and it was clear something had broken there under that particular patch of ground.

People kept coming up the path to the dugout; we all hovered around and stood at the ropes, peering over. “Anybody could walk over this house and never know it's here,” Ma had said in
On the Banks of Plum Creek
, but now anyone could see where the house had ceased to exist. More than any of the other sites, the dugout ruin was simply evidence. Unlike the log cabins I'd visited or the two replica dugouts I'd seen today, there was no pretense at trying to capture what it felt like to live here, no invoking those proverbial Eerie Feelings of Hardship. Somehow it was enough to see the surroundings, the shady creek bank, and the prairie that began at the edge of the crumbled roof. None of it was different from anything I'd seen before (it really
was
just a creek), but something about that little pit in the ground changed everything. It felt as if the dugout hadn't so much collapsed as it had simply turned inside out, so that the immediate world around it felt intimate and removed, as secret as a cave.

I was going to wade in the creek. Others were doing it—both adults and kids were seeking out clear spots along the bank where it was easy to step into the water. I found a place where the dirt was smooth from the feet of other visitors. I took off my flip-flops and stepped awkwardly down the slope of the bank. The water felt nice. A little cloud of silt rose up with each step, just like
On the Banks of Plum Creek
had described. Or it was just like each step I'd taken in the creek at the campground where my family spent weekends when I was a kid. I don't know which had come first, my own experience or the book, but either way, that smokelike swirl that wavered in the water was how I knew the book was true.

I stopped wading and stood still. I had to forgive the awkwardness, the feetfirst unwieldiness of trying to enter the world of the book this way, standing in the water with my shoulder bag and my cameras. It helped a bit to listen to the water and all the summer noises, birds and things rasping away and making clattering calls to each other; somehow it was quiet enough to hear them.

I looked up. A little girl about seven years old was standing on the bank. She'd stopped short when she saw me, and I could tell she was trying to reconcile her sense of Laura World with the strangely crowded reality: here was Plum Creek, but here was this
lady
, too. Over the course of the trip there'd be other little encounters like this, usually with kids but sometimes with adults, too, where everyone's reveries bumped up against one another. Chris told me later that the girl at the creek looked at him as if to say,
Is she going to stay in there all day?
But I knew it was time to get out. I climbed up the bank and picked up my shoes.

As we walked back to the car, I could see other people trying to have their private creek moments, children and adults alike, everyone standing in their little rings in the water.

We had time to kill before the historic bus tour and decided to wait it out over lunch at the Walnut Grove Bar and Grill. We sat in the bar room, at a table next to the only other people there, two guys nursing a pitcher of beer. They both wore baseball caps. The older guy was big, with a shaggy gray beard and overalls; the younger guy had a sunburned face and he kept getting up to throw darts at the electric dartboard.

“You in town for the Wilder festival?” the big guy with the beard asked us. Yes, we told him, and I asked him if he lived nearby. He shook his head. “We're here for fishing,” he said.

“From Iowa,” the younger guy added as he poured more beer into his glass.

“We were at that lake around here yesterday. Lake Shetek,” Big Beard said. “And then we heard about that Laura contest, so I brought my grandkids down so they could enter.”

It was then that I noticed the two girls at the pool table in the corner. They looked to be about nine or ten. They appeared almost identical at first, both sweetly chubby and with their fine brown hair French-braided into pigtails. They were taking turns trying to hit the pool balls, the huge pool cues teetering in their hands.

“The Laura contest? Wow,” I said.

The girls sensed our attention and wandered back over toward the table where their grandfather sat; they seemed happy to not have to entertain themselves. One of the girls wore glasses and appeared to be slightly older; the younger one grabbed a handful of popcorn from a basket on their table. She had a black T-shirt with something spelled out on it in rhinestone letters.

“So you're here with your grandpa?” I asked them.

“Our uncle, too,” the younger girl said. Neither girl seemed particularly shy. They both had a deadpan matter-of-factness about them that I loved. They didn't tell me their names, but I didn't ask, either.

Grandpa Big Beard told us about how they hadn't been quite sure when the Laura contest was; he and his son had been coming up to fish for a couple of weekends hoping they'd catch it. Finally they'd figured out the right weekend. Only the contest wasn't until tomorrow.

“Grandpa thought it was
today
,” the older girl said.

“But we're going to do it tomorrow,” her sister said.

“Are you going to get all dressed up in your prairie clothes?” I asked them. The girls exchanged a look with each other.

“Well, we already are,” the older girl said.

“Oh,” I said. Now that I looked more closely I could see both girls were wearing longish skirts. The older girl had one with a handkerchief hem, a brief trend from a couple of years ago, and she wore it with a slightly crumpled white button-down shirt. To my eyes it looked more parochial school than prairie, but I tried hard to see what kind of elements might have appeared right to her—a certain flounce in the skirt, perhaps, and with the tuckedin blouse, a sort of Sunday-morning sense of propriety as reassuring as the ribbons Ma tied in Laura's braids. “Oh yes . . . you are dressed up, aren't you?”

“See my skirt?” the younger girl said. Her tiered brown prairie skirt went almost to her ankles and was a little too big in the waist; I wondered if it was borrowed from an older sister, maybe. I could tell that her shirt had once said
Farmer's Girl
, but the rhinestone letters spelling
Girl
had worn off completely.

These little girls here in the bar, I watched them as they drank Mountain Dew and ran over to the self-serve popcorn machine and filled their baskets. I wondered how it would go for them the next day when they'd line up with all these other little Lauras—lucky kids in pristine color-coordinated prairie dresses that their mothers had bought (or perhaps even sewn for them in between homeschooling sessions). I didn't want to think about it. The older girl was wearing a scruffy pair of women's shoes, chunky old platform loafers with buckles. Clearly she understood the essential grimness of nineteenth-century footwear and had tried to find something similarly dreary. How did she know there's nothing bleaker than dress shoes from 1998? In her own way, she'd nailed it, I thought. I admired her.

While we waited for our food, I'd taken out my laptop so I could upload some pictures to it from my camera. The younger girl came over to watch the screen. Meanwhile, Grandpa Big Beard talked to us about the TV show, which he said he watched every day. He said he liked it better when the Hallmark Channel aired the episodes in the morning instead of the afternoon. Recently they'd put the show on hiatus for a month and put
Golden Girls
in that time slot and he'd had to “get on the computer” so he could protest. He noted that he'd gone to the network website just two days after the show had stopped airing and he was the 127th person to post a complaint.