The Wilder Life (40 page)

Chris checked his watch. “About one thirty.”

We were glad we weren't in a tent in all this wind and lightning, but was it that much better to be
here
, in what was essentially a wooden box stuck in an open field above an electrical outlet? We couldn't think about that.

“We went through some thunderstorms like this when my family went camping as a kid,” I told Chris. We were trying to distract ourselves with conversation.

“Me, too,” Chris said, though I could tell he was staring up at the roof at the thick metal bolts that were screwed into the wooden frame. Up here in the bunk, our feet were almost always touching one. I knew he was thinking, like I was, that if lightning hit the wagon those things would turn into little joy buzzers of death.

Another clap of thunder set off a car alarm in the parking lot. (Nothing in
The First Four Years
prepared us for that.)

“On the map it said the campground shower building is also a storm shelter,” I said, remembering.

“Do you think we're supposed to go there?” Chris asked.

Just then the lightning and thunder hit together.
CRAACCCK!
Out the window, a molten crack of light seared down the sky. Down to something somewhere across the road.

“Oh my God, I
saw
that!” I was trembling. “It hit somewhere right nearby. Did you see that?”

“We're going to die,” Chris said. “Just like Amassa Tower and his wife.” He was remembering the story of the Walnut Grove church deacon who was struck by lightning on the prairie.

“His wife went insane,” I reminded him.

“We're going to die
and
go insane,” Chris said.

It was one of the worst thunderstorms either one of us had ever experienced, we'd decided. “Except for that one last year,” Chris said. Once, a late-night storm back home had produced a thunderclap so massive and sudden that it caused us both to wake up shrieking and grabbing at each other like crazy folk. We'd been so shaken that we turned on the bedroom TV and spent the next two hours drinking scotch and watching infomercials in the wee hours of the morning. But when you've decided to take a Laura Ingalls Wilder journey out into the middle of the Dakota prairie, you'd rather not admit that you miss infomercials, even when there are times (such as two a.m., in a covered wagon, with no scotch to be had) that you do.

We looked out again, but outside there was nothing: no headlights, no alarms. I couldn't see the little red light on the tower in the distance. Everything was just storm.

At dawn when I woke up it was gray outside; there was soft thunder but no rain. I walked through the wet grass to the bathroom building, keeping my eye on the mass of dark storm clouds that hung in the sky beyond the visitor's center. So much for the glowing prairie dawn I'd hoped to experience. It was around five in the morning, but I wasn't the only one up: some people were breaking camp, or hanging things to dry along the rail fence by the parking lot. I encountered a woman in the bathroom who confirmed that lightning had struck nearby during the storm. She also seemed pretty unfazed that her family's tent had partially collapsed in the night.

“Oh, we were fine in our sleeping bags,” she said, as she brushed her wet hair. “They were only really wet on the outside.”

I was a little jealous that Chris and I had stayed so safe and dry and that our own tale of Dakota gumption wouldn't be nearly as impressive as hers. And it occurred to me that ever since the first burst of hail last night, I'd been forming the story of the storm in my mind, what we would tell people when we got home, how we
totally
thought we were going to die just like the hapless pioneers we read about in pageant programs. I wouldn't mention how, deep down, we knew we wouldn't die but thought it anyway because we're wimps.

On my walk back to the wagon, I saw a family striking camp: a mom and her three kids were working desperately to shake out the water from their tent and fold it at the same time.

“Do you see the sky?” I heard the mom snap. “Let's get a move on.
Now.
”

I was sure that for these kids this disastrous camping episode had only enhanced their Laura World experience, the way I'd heard back at Walnut Grove that sometimes children aspired to get their own leeches in Plum Creek.

Had it been that way for us last night? I could see ourselves telling friends about how we'd lived life to the fullest on our Little House vacation, where we'd paid fifty bucks to sleep in a covered wagon and gotten our very own prairie calamity for free. And after all, the whole point of going on a Little House Big Adventure was that the simple life, the exposure to the elements, and the inspiring example of the Ingalls family would make you realize what was important to you, right? Except that maybe we discovered that what was really important was having a TV where we could watch the ShamWow! guy. We could claim to have felt the trepidation and awe that the Ingallses and the Wilders must have felt in their little houses, but all I knew was that last night we'd been too rattled to feel like anyone but ourselves.

The first thing Chris said when he woke up was, “We have to go check on the wheat!”

“I know!” I said. We got dressed and hurried out across the grass. Worrying about the wheat had been our one true Little House thought during the whole storm.

To our relief the field was completely intact: still golden, the stalks swaying just as beautifully as they had the day before. “I guess the hailstones weren't big enough to flatten it,” Chris said.

“It's nice to see that someone can actually grow some wheat out here,” I pointed out. To read the Little House books, you wondered if anyone ever managed to harvest a successful crop, since it seemed the minute the wheat grew ripe enough, something horrible always happened.

The Ingalls Homestead attractions had just opened up for the day. The activities building was still empty except for the two high school kids who worked there.

“Would you like to make a corncob doll?” a girl standing by the shelling machine called over to me.

“Actually, could you show us how to twist a haystick?” I asked her. There wasn't anyone over at the hay station, and making my own haystick—the little improvised bundles that Pa and other prairie settlers burned for fuel during the Long Winter when the coal and firewood ran out—was one of the few hands-on things I wanted to try.

She shrugged. “Sure.” She came over and grabbed a long shock of hay from a big bin, twisted it until it doubled in on itself, and then tucked the ends in. She handed a bundle to me to try. I'd wanted to do it ever since the winter, when my Internet searches started picking up news items about various Laura Ingalls Wilder–related educational talks: they were at public libraries, park districts, community colleges, always somewhere in another state where I couldn't attend, and almost invariably, they involved haystick-twisting demonstrations. There was something deeply appealing about it. After all, we'd all just watched the economy's strange, sickening lurch that past fall—we'd seen the news, stared in shock at our own 401k statements with their freakish, dismal numbers, and while we knew what they meant, we couldn't touch them, could barely comprehend them. So I couldn't help but think that twisting haysticks must be damned good therapy, that it would let you
feel
the hardship, knowing that this
thing
that you held in your chapped hands made a difference, even as it was destined to burn away and vanish, just like a chunk of retirement savings! Hay twisting was literally a productive wringing of hands.

So I tried to twist my hay, wanted to twist it as tight as I could. I'd seen haysticks hung on the walls at the Oxbow, the one family restaurant in town, and they'd been twisted tight and shiny as pigtail braids; the one the girl made frankly looked more like a tidy tumbleweed. But then, I couldn't get mine to look any better: the hay crumbled if you twisted it too hard. “It's awfully loose,” I said. “Shouldn't it be denser so it can last while it burns?” I asked the girl. The thunderstorm had eroded what little pioneer credibility I'd imagined for myself, but it still seemed important that I understand haystick thermodynamics as much as possible.

She shrugged again. “That's just how the hay is this time of year, I guess. But you can take this one and try burning it on your campfire and see what happens.” She handed the one she'd made to me. (It was still better than mine.)

“Thank you,” I said, taking it reverently. It was almost big enough to cradle like an infant. It was a scraggly bundle of dried grass, but like dried grass, it also smelled clean and barnlike and nice. I held it gently.

“You're not really going to burn your prairie baby, are you?” Chris whispered as we walked back to our wagon.

“No way,” I told him.

Chris was letting the car idle down Second Street.

“Why are you slowing down?” I asked him. We'd picked up a paper map of De Smet that showed sixteen different historical points of interest. I looked over at an old frame house. “Is that where the schoolhouse used to be? What are you looking at?”

“Nothing,” Chris said. “I'm driving this slow because the speed limit in this town is fifteen miles per hour. I can't believe it.”

“Maybe it's so we can get a feel for what it was like to ride around in a buggy,” I said.

We'd just turned in our wagon key at Ingalls Homestead, since we'd had the wagon for only one night. We decided to set up our tent later, after we'd seen the attractions in town. Now we were approaching the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society, which operated a gift shop and tour operation out of a Victorian house on a side street in De Smet. Next to it stood a completely unassuming little white clapboard house, though I'd seen it in photos and knew exactly what it was.

“There's the surveyors' house!” I said as Chris parked the car.

“
That's
the surveyors' house?” Chris said incredulously, since like everything else from the Little House books, it was smaller than we'd thought.

I was glad Chris was reading
By the Shores of Silver Lake
, because it's really hard to explain to people who don't know the books why the surveyors' house is such a big deal. It shows up in
Silver Lake
a few chapters in, when Laura and her family, having recently arrived in Dakota Territory, are staying at the railroad camp in a cramped shanty with a dirt floor. One day Laura looks out and notices, among the assemblage of temporary shanties and bunkhouses, a lone house—a
real
house on the shore of Silver Lake. “I wonder what that house can be and who lives there,” Laura says to herself.

I remember having to wait two whole chapters to find out that the big fancy house was for the railroad surveyors and all their tools, which of course was a letdown, since nothing's more boring than surveying tools. But then, just as the Ingallses are considering the depressing prospect of going back east for the winter, Pa announces that the family can spend it
living in the surveyors' house.
Which has to be the best house-sitting gig ever, and all Pa has to do is make sure nobody steals the surveying tools (like
that's
hard); the place is stocked to the gills with provisions, and later the family even makes extra money by running the place as an impromptu hotel during the spring land rush.