The Wilder Life (38 page)

“I don't know,” I said. I had simply acted on an impulse. “Maybe Jami?” I thought about it. “I just want to send a message to someone.” It felt like we could disappear out here. You could drive ten miles per hour faster once you crossed the state line and entered South Dakota, but despite the increased speed limit, I could feel, yes, the stillness. We pushed through it all afternoon.

De Smet was a bigger town than Walnut Grove, with a modern business strip along Highway 14 that had a couple of motels and convenience stores. But even on a pageant day, the quiet persisted. We stopped the car and parked along Calumet Avenue, the original main street that had risen from the prairie mud in 1880.

The wooden buildings from that time had been replaced just a few years later by brick buildings, the kind with the tall Victorian windows. At one point there'd been an opera house along this street, and later, an auditorium where dances were held and Lawrence Welk's orchestra had played. These days, what drew visitors to Calumet Avenue was the Loftus' store, the general store that had been mentioned in the books, still on the very same site. It had become a gift shop that sold merchandise labeled LITTLE TOWN ON THE PRAIRIE and little burlap sacks of seed wheat to commemorate
The Long Winter.
(You'll remember in the book that Mr. Loftus had put up the money for Almanzo and Cap Garland to buy a remote homesteader's wheat supply and then caused an uproar by trying to sell it to hungry townspeople at a profit. If the price of the souvenir wheat was any indication, clearly the days of markup outrage were long over.)

You could also see the corner where Pa's building had stood: a brick building with a law office was there now. Much of the block was given over to businesses that were closed on a Saturday. The street had the same stoic calm as its old photos.

Just across Second Street was a coffeehouse, also closed for the afternoon, but a sign that boasted
Wireless Internet
hung outside, and there was a bench by the door.

“Hang on,” I told Chris. My twenty-first-century twitches were getting the better of me. I sat down and pulled out my laptop. “I don't know why I'm even checking right now,” I said sheepishly. But sure enough, the coffeehouse had an open network. “The Wi-Fi at the motel was pretty weak this morning,” I said to Chris, by way of an excuse. But here I was, just across the street from the very place where the Ingalls family had endured the hard winter and twisted hay into sticks, checking my e-mail. Right over there, Pa had shaken his cold-stiffened clenched fist and raged at the keening wind! He had shaken it, in fact, to the northwest, in the very direction where I was sitting with my white MacBook. This is so not right, I thought.

I was less conflicted by the time we got to the visitor's center at Ingalls Homestead, where we sent Chris's mom a virtual postcard from a little kiosk across from the front desk. The center is like a well-built barn, spacious and rustic yet air-conditioned. Ingalls Homestead has been open since 1997, but it still has all the exuberance of a new enterprise; it feels like what I imagine being in De Smet in its early years was like. Even the bathroom stalls at Ingalls Homestead were built with planks of golden lumber that looked fresh and sturdy.

The woman at the front desk gave us the key to the “covered wagon” where we were staying for our first night and explained that our camping fee included admission to all the exhibits for the duration of our stay. She handed us a brochure with a map and marked the visitor's center with an
X.
I read the building description: “Enter the prairie through the back door,” it said. So we did.

There are few, if any, sidewalks or walkways at Ingalls Homestead. People simply walk across the expanse of mown prairie, wandering in all directions. We moved dutifully through a row of buildings at first, the small museum and the dugout and the shanty, but before long we gave in to the urge to just drift across the open field. There was a little hay-roof barn that sat all by itself against a gentle slope, and when we went inside, a brown-and-white cow peered up at us from her pen. She lounged in the straw with her calf, and her hide looked so silky that I wanted to climb into the pen and spoon against her side.

Beyond the hay-roof barn was the place called “Ma's Little House,” the reconstruction of the claim shanty that Pa had built in 1880—which, in the books, is at the end of
By the Shores of Silver Lake
. The replica had been built on the very location and to the same dimensions as the original shanty (which had disappeared sometime after Pa sold the land in 1892): a little board-and-batten house, handsomely weathered gray and determinedly cheery, with a tiny front porch.

The door was wide open, and inside it was surprisingly airy and light. Most of the other dugouts and houses we'd seen on this trip had been pretty musty, but here there was a breeze through the kitchen, which had a stove, a table, and a nice woman in a prairie dress who said, “Welcome to Ma's Little House! Would you like to know more about homesteading in the 1880s?”

I'd already read most of what she had to tell me, but how could we refuse?

There was a room just past the kitchen that I recognized instantly as the part of the house Pa had built for Mary's parlor organ, which stood by the back door. Or rather, the battered antique organ that stood in for the real thing. Although nothing here had ever belonged to the Ingallses, it hardly mattered. We were free to touch anything: to play the parlor organ, try the sewing machine, scrub laundry on a washboard in a tin tub that stood just outside the back door, then hang it to dry on the clothesline by the vegetable garden. You could pet the gray kittens curled up on the patchwork quilts in the bedrooms (I'd spotted another one darting around the front porch) or pump water from the well.

“Is there anything you want to try?” Chris asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “I'm not sure.” Somehow I was wary of doing the hands-on things, though I'd churned butter and ground seed wheat at home. I felt superstitious and weird at the thought of doing anything beyond just looking. It would be like touching a spinning wheel in a fairy tale. I'd either break a spell or invoke a new one.

All the same, we found ourselves on a wagon ride, which traveled along wheel ruts in the grass. It was full of visitors like ourselves, and the sides were open so that we could see the prairie all around. Our driver was the kind of young man you might call “strapping,” and when a girl sitting near the front of the wagon asked if the horses had names, he said they were called Skip and Barnum.

“They're named after Almanzo's horses,” I whispered to Chris.

The wagon took us to a genuine one-room schoolhouse that stood at the far corner of the homestead, and once inside we sat in wooden desks while a genuine retired local schoolteacher told us about the history of rural schools like this one. She pointed out how the legs of some of the desks had little messages of encouragement in molded letters in the metalwork.
TRY AGAIN,
said the desk next to mine. Then she let us pull the rope to ring the bell in the little belfry as we filed back out into the sunlight.

I was quickly becoming a model student here at Ingalls Homestead. On the wagon ride back, the driver quizzed our group about the requirements of the Homestead Act. “Anyone know how long you had to live on a claim to own it?” he asked.

“Five years!” I piped up.

At the activity center near the horse barn, a teenage staff member showed me how to feed dried corncobs into a hand-cranked corn sheller and wrap a scrap of calico around the stripped cob to make a little doll.

“And do you know what the name of Laura's corncob doll was?” she asked.

“Susan,” I said proudly.

The wheels of our covered wagon were partly buried in the ground, as if the imaginary settlers who drove it had simply decided to stay in the place where they'd gotten stuck. Beneath the wagon bed, in the spot where Jack the bulldog would've walked, there was an electrical hookup, and in back a short set of steps led up to a padlocked door. We opened it with our key. Inside was an efficient little compartment with benches and a bunk tucked in the back; the roof was fiberglass over a wood frame. The four sleeping wagons at Ingalls Homestead were modeled after the hardtopped sheepherders' wagons used in Montana and Idaho: as far as luxury went, they were considerably less posh than the pop-up trailer my family had owned when I was a kid, but probably a heck of a lot cushier than the Ingallses' covered wagon.

We carried our sleeping bags and pillows from the car and stowed them in the bunk, then sat at the picnic table outside. Around us was the camping area, a gentle slope dotted with the wagons and a few tents. Up by the parking lot was a hookup area for camping trailers and RVs. Our camping neighbors were mostly families with children.

“There's a kid in a prairie dress at that campsite,” I pointed out to Chris. “And I saw another one over by that blue tent.”

“And did you see the folks at that bunkhouse?” Chris asked. The bunkhouse was uphill from us and it was the fanciest lodging available at Ingalls Homestead, a tiny clapboard house with air-conditioning and a microwave. It was hard to imagine that the family staying there was much attracted to the modern amenities, though, since all four of the girls were wearing long calico dresses, and so was their mother. They'd come out of the little house one by one and we watched them head over to the visitor's center. Their faces were glowing, as if they'd been rolling barrel hoops with sticks all day. But it hardly seemed strange anymore to see people in period dress. Over at one of the tent sites, a woman wore a long dress and a flower-trimmed porkpie hat as she stood tending a grill—looking, I thought, very much like Laura might have looked when she and Almanzo and Rose camped along their journey to Missouri in 1894.

There was even wildlife in our midst: slinky ground squirrels that scurried over the grass; their holes were everywhere. The stillness we'd felt before had given way somehow, and now the whole landscape seemed impossibly animated, with all the scurrying and the rippling of the fields in the breeze.

Chris wanted to sleep for a little bit, so I took a walk by myself.

It was late afternoon, and the high July sun had only just ceased to be relentless. It would still be a few hours until sundown and the De Smet pageant. I walked until I reached a large swath of thin green stalks that grew dense and tall; the top of it rippled in the wind, and the rest of it teemed with the noise of birds and crickets and locusts and countless other rural creatures whom I only knew by name—chiggers, peepers, creepers, whatever they were. This had to be the slough, that mysterious natural expanse whose nature I couldn't quite understand when I first read the Little House books—was it a lake, a field, a bog? If you were lost in it, would you drown? Of course I knew now that a slough was a kind of wetland. As I peered into the green depths, I marveled at how much this resembled the slough of my childhood imagination.