The Wilder Life (39 page)

I walked along the edge of it for a while until I reached a sign that stood in front of it. That's when I learned that this whole time I'd been gazing at an oat field.

Oh. Never mind. I supposed that just because I was in Prairie Storybook Land it didn't mean I could instantly recognize everything. The oats grew alongside fields of wheat and corn—thirty acres all together, to show visitors how much cropland was required on homestead claims. (I had better luck identifying the corn and wheat.)

The afternoon shadows were growing longer. The visitors were beginning to thin out, and the brown cow and its calf were being led across the field to the livestock barn for the night. I wandered over to the corner of the homestead land where a grove of cottonwood trees had grown from the seedlings Pa had planted. They were huge now. I couldn't believe this place.

Even though we were making several stops on this trip, and had two more places yet to visit, I'd been thinking of this place as the true destination of our travel. After all, it was the place of fulfilled destiny, the place that I'd hoped Laura and her family would find from the moment they abandoned their lonely cabin in Kansas, which opened in me a deep need to see them find another little house on another prairie. More than anything, that's what stayed with me about the books, that they made it out here. Never mind the Long Winter or anything else that followed: they were here, the
here
of completion, the embodiment of Laura's Now. Everything I'd been doing for the past year, all the reading and cooking and traveling, I realized, was really about getting here, out to the farthest reaches of the big long dream that was the Little House series.

Back at the wagon, Chris was at the picnic table reading
By the Shores of Silver Lake.
I sat down beside him.

“Look at this,” he said, showing me the book. He had just begun chapter 8, and we looked at the illustration on the facing page: it showed Laura standing on a little rise of ground looking out over the railroad camp and the land beyond it, all the gentle swells of treeless prairie that reached back into the horizon under the banner of sky. Then he lowered the book. From the hill we were on we had the same vantage point.

“I just looked up,” Chris said, “and there it was.”

It looked like the same place. It
was
the same place.

While Chris read I watched the covered wagons, tiny in the distance, travel steadily back and forth in their tracks across the prairie. There were two of them making the trip to the schoolhouse and back. They'd wait by the little white school building, and a few times every hour, the bell of the schoolhouse would ring, its wispy peals punctuating the calm. Somehow it never got old. Then the wagon would make its way back while another one headed slowly toward the schoolhouse to repeat the pattern. I could've watched all day.

For the De Smet pageant, a performance of
The Long Winter,
we brought our camping chairs and sat near the back of the crowd. We didn't feel the need to be up close, since it was our second pageant in as many nights. It was being held in an open field just across the road from Ingalls Homestead; its set was a cluster of low-slung little buildings, almost like boxcars. We were far enough from the stage to see how the prairie dwarfed it. But of course this was the kind of country where you really had to take a step back to see everything: everything lent itself to these distances. The sun was setting to our right, the sky epic, the darkness deepening as the crowd settled in.

“I get the feeling that the De Smet pageant doesn't have as much to prove as the Walnut Grove one,” Chris would say after the show.

“I know what you mean,” I said. It was a simpler production, with its faithful, straightforward rendition of the book. Maybe it seemed a little odd to stage
The Long Winter
in the middle of July, but the lack of snow was explained by a cute little note in the program about “the fickle prairie weather.” I'd read later that the pageant tradition had actually started with
The Long Winter,
which had been adapted for a Hallmark Playhouse radio production in 1950; a few years later the town had gotten permission to perform the script on its own. Now every few summers the De Smet pageant switches to
These Happy Golden Years
or one of the other books set in town, but keeps returning to
The Long Winter—
which, after all, is as much about the town's survival as the Ingalls family's—and lets the story speak for itself.

The prairie grew chilly as we watched the familiar scenes: the family enduring the October blizzard, Ma grinding wheat for bread, the Wilder brothers in their feed store making pancakes, with Almanzo's brother Royal tilting his chair back just like in the Garth Williams illustration. From our far-off spot the little lit-up rooms of the set looked like pictures, or rooms in a dollhouse. Sometimes I'd look over in the distance beyond the set to Ingalls Homestead; I could almost see where the little replica shanty stood in the dark. I tried to imagine what it would be like in winter, with snow up to the eaves of all the houses, and wondered what that would be like from the inside.

The sky had been starless for most of the show, but we hadn't thought of rain until we felt a few scattered drops as we walked back to our car.

There were no lights in our sleeping wagon. We had our flashlights and a fluorescent camping lantern that I'd set on the little table that slid out from beneath our bunk, but it was too low to cast much light in the cavelike space. Chris nodded up at the curved top of the wagon.

“It's like being in a giant mailbox,” he said.

“Or a barrel,” I pointed out. “Or, I don't know, a churn?” I was trying to think of appropriately nineteenth-century things that being in this covered wagon could be like, if it wasn't quite like being in a covered wagon. Not that I wasn't excited.

“It's better than a tent,” Chris said, as a smattering of rain hit the roof. It had yet to rain in earnest, but the little bursts of precipitation came regularly enough that there was no use building a campfire outside. We tried reading by the light of the lantern for a few minutes. Finally we decided to go to bed early.

“I think this is what people did in the old days anyway,” I said.

“Slept in giant barrels?” he said.

“No! Went to bed early.” I laughed. “Because there wasn't enough light to do anything else.”

Our bunk felt a little cramped, but then again it didn't seem right for the bed to be
too
comfortable, either. There was a tiny louvered window above our bunk at the front end of the wagon. It faced the parking lot and the road, but it was too dark to see anything. Across the road, a ways off in a neighboring field, was some kind of utility tower; the little red light at its top blinked gently.

I wondered if the sheepherders who slept in wagons like these ever felt claustrophobic. I turned over to sleep and fought the canned-in feeling by thinking about the world that lay outside—the wide-open prairie, the fields and their eddying surfaces, the enormous sky.

A burst of rain against the roof woke me up. It was louder than it had been earlier. And it had another sound to it, a more acute clamor. Hail? I thought of the hailstorm that had ruined Laura and Almanzo's wheat crops in
The First Four Years.
Oh, no, I thought.

I sat up in bed to try to see out the window. Chris woke up just then.

“I think it might be a hailstorm,” I told him.

“Whoa,” he said. “What about the crops?”

I loved him for saying that.

I couldn't see anything through the bunk window; it was too dark. I wondered if it really was hail, and if so, how big were the hailstones.

“In
The First Four Years
it said the hailstones were as big as hen's eggs,” I told Chris.

“So
that's
how people described hail size before golf became popular,” he said. “I guess I always wondered.”

“Now you know,” I said. I had climbed down from our bunk and was trying to see out the window panel in the wagon's door. I thought better about stepping outside to look, since Ole Larson, Laura and Almanzo's neighbor, had done that in the book and been promptly conked out by a hailstone to the head. From the sound of the hail outside, that wasn't too likely to happen, but this would be a hell of a time to tempt irony, wouldn't it?

I opened the door just for a moment; I could make out tiny bits of hail on the wooden steps. Just when I wished it wasn't so dark, the sky lit up and a jag of lightning shot out over the horizon.

“Whoa!” I shut the door. “Never mind.” I climbed back into the bunk and listened to the rain until I dozed off again.

Sometime later the lightning flicked me awake again. I opened my eyes and the windows flashed.

“Are you awake?” Chris said.

I opened my mouth to answer and a thunderclap split everything open. It sounded like a gigantic shiny axe that would kill us all.

“Oh, shit!” I gasped.

It was raining even harder now, slapping against the sides and roof of the wagon with the rhythm of the wind. We both sat up in the bunk. We peered out the window and could see headlights in the parking lot. “Someone's leaving,” Chris said. “I wouldn't stay out in a tent in this weather, either.” We could just barely hear the engine start up over the rain, and we watched the lights disappear through the downpour.

I thought about all of these kids out here, who knows how many little girls with their families braving the lightning and rain in their tents and RVs and wagons like ours. My God, how were
they
faring? They had to be either frightened out of their minds or having the time of their lives. Or both, I thought, since when you're a kid, it's possible to be both. I remembered that much.

“What time is it?”