The Wilder Life (37 page)

The amphitheater lights came up. By then it was nearly midnight. We joined the line of cars that crawled up the hill to the road, and we followed taillights in the dark all the way back to Tracy.

After my funny delusions back in Pepin, it was a kick to be in a town where the people really
were
talking about Laura Ingalls Wilder. Well, at least the families eating in Nellie's diner on the Saturday morning of a pageant weekend probably were—families with little girls, including one girl whose blond biracial hair allowed her to sport a pretty stunning crop of Nellie Oleson–style ringlets.

While Chris went up and paid the bill, I noticed how quiet a lot of the girls were. They seemed to slump a bit under the load of expectations a place like Walnut Grove carried, where everything was supposed to be fun and important at the same time. This wasn't like going to American Girl Place, an experience meticulously engineered by retail experts. In a place like this you saw everything, the things that hadn't changed and the things that had, the prairie grass and the gas station. And even as you tried to sense the spiritual presence of young Laura Ingalls at Plum Creek, you could see her image everywhere: on the town mural and various hand-painted signs, the bobblehead dolls and coloring books in the museum store, depictions that ranged from attractive to awkward to unrecognizably lumpy.

If I were one of these little girls, would I willfully ignore any of it, or would I take it all in and tell the Laura in my mind about it?
That's a Sinclair station, Laura, and it's for cars. Do you know what cars are?
What were they seeing?

Watching the girls with their families made me think about something else, too. I knew my decision to make this trip was in some small way informed by the fact that Chris and I had decided not to have kids. In other words, I knew if I wanted to see these places, I'd have to go for myself; I wouldn't ever be sharing the experience with a daughter, the way Little House fans often do. A friend of mine who similarly lacks the childbearing instinct once said, “I don't want kids because I don't want kids,” and it's always made perfect sense to me. I've never really regretted being childless, but it started to feel different after my mother died, in a way I couldn't describe.

But here in Walnut Grove I knew what it was:
I
felt invisible sometimes. Not ignored, but anomalous and ghostly. I wasn't the girl anymore, and I wasn't the ma.

I was grateful Chris had come along. I'd worried that he would be bored, like those TV boyfriends who sit outside department-store dressing rooms, and that it would dampen my prairie-wandering spirit. But he was my anchor. If it wasn't for him, I was sure, I'd still be back at Plum Creek, or in one of the sod houses taking inventory. I'd kept picking up those stupid flatirons (both the sod house and the museum had signs that encouraged visitors to do so, to
try it
or
feel it
) and I never knew what to make of the foreign heaviness in my hand. Sometimes it almost felt like there was a trick to it, that if I held this thing long enough I'd somehow be more human than I was now, here with my head full of someone else's life.

The pace in town had suddenly picked up now that the pageant weekend was well under way. The covered wagon outside the museum, permanently bolted to the ground, was constantly crawling with kids, whose feet thumped up and down the length of the wagon bed so much it sounded like it had been hitched to a team of panicked Clydesdales.

Already the Walnut Grove city park was starting to fill up with young Lauras. The Laura-Nellie Look Alike competitions wouldn't take place until the afternoon—by then we'd be on the road to De Smet—but the contest registration table had just been set up, and a line of girls and parents had formed. According to the sign near the table, it cost five dollars to enter the contest, and contestants had to be between eight and twelve. (It did not specify girls, a loophole that Meribah's third-grade classmate probably could have exploited if he'd wished.)

Today was the Walnut Grove family festival, where the park, a green and shady square block just west of the center of town, hosted a rummage sale, food tents, and live music. The Hmong Cultural Center had its own table, as did a woman who ran a makeshift salon offering French-braided Laura pigtails. I bought yet another sunbonnet, and at the rummage sale picked up a commemorative plate depicting Doc Baker from the TV show. Now I was watching the contest registration.

I looked around for the two girls we'd met yesterday, the ones who'd improvised their costumes, but I didn't see them. All the girls waiting in line so far were in full Laura drag.

“I think the competition is going to be stiff,” I told Chris. But maybe winning the contest was only a secondary objective. More than anything, the contest gave girls an excuse to dress up like Laura Ingalls or Nellie Oleson for a day. They'd be judged in part on their knowledge of the characters, but what's a little trivia when there were long pretty dresses to be donned?

The essential Laura look, of course, consists only of pigtail braids, a sunbonnet—preferably hanging down the back—and some sort of prairie dress. Everything else is extra credit: pinafores or aprons, hair ribbons (personally, I would award bonus points to any Laura whose braids sported blue ribbons in homage to that scene when Ma gets her tedious Laura/pink, Mary/blue color coding all mixed up for once), lunch pails or other accessories, and shoes.

Ah yes, the shoes. It was one thing to sew or buy a reasonably convincing prairie dress, quite another to get the footwear right. Most girls weren't doing much better than my clunky-shoed friend from the day before: only a couple girls had the highbuttoned boots; perhaps they were the more competitive Laura contenders. A few wore Mary Janes, which had a certain quaintness that sort of worked. But most of the girls just wore sandals or gym shoes under their dresses.

“I'm already judging the contest based on feet,” I said. “Look, that kid has Birkenstocks.”

“How do you know some of the girls aren't going to take off their shoes and go barefoot when they go onstage?” Chris asked.

“Oh, good strategy.” Barefoot would be the most authentic Laura touch of all. And the most ironic, I pointed out, since Laura had felt so ill-equipped when she showed up on her first day of school and saw that the other Walnut Grove schoolgirls had decent shoes and dresses.

“You're really thinking about this too much,” Chris said.

We'd spotted only a couple of entrants for the Nellie contest around the park. They appeared to be very good Nellies, though, with their hair done up in blond curls and wearing ruffled dresses: one girl in pink, the other yellow. I couldn't tell if the dresses were historically accurate, but then again, I suspect the only thing that has to be authentic about impersonating Nellie Oleson is the attitude. I asked the woman at the registration table if she thought there'd be more Nellies showing up later—there still were a few hours before the contest, after all, and it would be rather Nellieish to show up at the last minute and upstage everyone.

“You know, there just aren't a lot of Nellies,” the woman told me. She said the Laura contestants always outnumbered the Nellie ones, sometimes by as much as six to one. “Most girls just want to be Laura.” I supposed any kid who read and loved the Little House books enough to come to Walnut Grove would most likely feel an affinity for Laura. I could see how perhaps it took a special kind of girl to want to be a Nellie, someone who was willing to cross over to the dark and frilly side.

I had given up hope that
my
girls would show up, the two we'd met the day before. Maybe they'd lost their nerve, and you couldn't count on Grandpa Big Beard to get the time right.

We were crossing the park for the last time on our way to the car when I finally saw them—the girls, their uncle, and Grandpa Big Beard, waiting in line to sign up for the Laura contest. They wore the same clothes they'd been wearing the day before—the older girl in the crooked skirt and white blouse, the younger with her brown-tiered skirt and black rhinestone T-shirt. Now, though, they both had brand-new sunbonnets, in red and pink. I pointed the girls out to Chris.

“We could stay another couple of hours to see the contest,” Chris said. “You could tell them to take off their shoes.”

“That's okay,” I said. I didn't want to see who'd win or not win. The girls had new sunbonnets and that was enough for me. The older girl had the pink one and she wore it hanging down her back. It was bright enough that I could still see it from the car across the street as we turned the corner to get back to Route 14.

HOW DO YOU DESCRIBE a place like Ingalls Homestead? I hesitate to call it a Laura Ingalls Wilder theme park, but that's a pretty good approximation of what it is. It's situated on the open prairie just a couple of miles from the town of De Smet, just like the original Ingalls homestead shanty is in the books.
Just like
—but of course I had to keep reminding myself that Ingalls Homestead
was
on the original land the Ingalls family had bought. Now the 160-acre plot has nearly a dozen buildings and exhibits, including an 1880s schoolhouse, a real 1870s shanty, a replica dugout (the fourth we'd see on this trip), a lookout tower, a welcome center with a gift shop, and a camping area. It has its own
slough
. And a horse barn with miniature ponies. And covered wagon rides! When you're at Ingalls Homestead, you can be simply walking around, admiring the prairie view, and a friendly fellow with a straw hat and suspenders will just come up to you and say, “Have you taken a covered wagon ride yet? Would you like one?” Of course you would! And, of course, we did.

It was early afternoon by the time we'd arrived in De Smet after driving the two hours from Walnut Grove. The land in South Dakota was flat, as we'd expected, but also the sky had grown or seemed to press down more. We couldn't tell at what point along the two-lane highway this change had taken place.

“Laura couldn't say how, but this prairie was different,” it says in
By the Shores of Silver Lake,
as she rides with her family in an open wagon toward the place where the town of De Smet would eventually be built. Pa senses it, too, but is similarly unable to put his finger on what it is. The book finally describes it as “an enormous stillness that made you feel still,” a strange sentence but a true one, as we found. Somehow all the usual noise sounded distant: the car radio and the air-conditioning and the engine on cruise control, all of it oddly faint under that sky.

“Who are you messaging?” Chris asked me. He'd looked over from the driver's seat and seen that I'd taken my phone out and was looking at the blank screen for sending text messages.