The Wilder Life (42 page)

Chris nodded. “Whatever you want to do,” he said.

“Well, it's not what I
want
,” I said. “It would be only if the weather was going to be bad again tonight.”

Weather.com
said only “partly cloudy.” So did the webpage for the Sioux Falls news station. “Chance of precipitation: less than 10 percent,” read the forecast on a third page, with a peaceful-looking icon of a moon and a handful of little clouds. It would be a fine night: no rain, temperatures in the low seventies. I let out a deep breath and looked up at Chris.

“So what's the verdict?” he asked.

“I don't know,” I said, even though, suddenly, I did. “I think we have to go,” I said. “It's not going to rain. But still. Maybe we should go.”

“You mean, leave today?” He looked confused.

“Yes,” I said, though I was feeling an odd weight slink down my spine. Something like dread but also like relief. I had to say it again. “Let's just go.”

Yes, we left De Smet a day early.

Maybe I was set on leaving before I fully realized it. All we had to do was put up the tent (more than once Chris had reminded me), and all day I'd kept putting it off, kept waiting for it all to feel
right.
It had, at first: those first few hours at Ingalls Homestead the day before, the way the world of the books was so wonderfully wrought that for a little while I could imagine it was my own.

And then it all started to feel less certain. Nothing had changed; there hadn't been any disappointments. And yet behind all my expectations there was a restlessness that I hadn't accounted for at all. It kept insisting that something wasn't right. What was wrong? And just then I knew exactly what it was: what was wrong was that
I was not Laura.

I actually laughed out loud a little bit in the restaurant when I had that thought. I was not Laura Ingalls Wilder! And this was not my town, with its fifteen-miles-per-hour speed limit, and its highway display of memorial crosses for the unborn babies of South Dakota. I did not like the heat or the stillness. I did not really like the Oxbow restaurant, which for lack of other options in town we'd visited three times already, and two of those times something had gone so profoundly wrong with their regular service that they'd steered us to their sad, sad buffet instead. And I'd wanted so badly to love the place, with its décor of beribboned haysticks and old town photos, that I did not like my feelings, which were beginning to extend to other things, radiating outward like rings on the surface of Silver Lake. Which somehow I did not even want to see, even though I'd been told that if you drove behind the cement plant you could, since all the rain this summer had filled it up again.

Reader, I did not mention all this before now because what kind of asshole would have bad thoughts about the Little Town on the Prairie? Would not want to see Silver Lake, even though it had magically reappeared like some watery Brigadoon? I was that kind of asshole, apparently. In the moment I decided to go, though, I had suddenly realized that I did not
have
to like it here: this was not where I had been born; my childhood was not here, even though I'd felt I'd gotten glimpses of the Laura World I remembered.

I knew, too, that what I felt wasn't really the fault of the place itself: the people were not unkind, and truthfully all of it—the town, Ingalls Homestead, everything—was as beautiful and compelling as I'd hoped. But for much of the time I'd been here I'd had a sort of manic fatigue, the feeling of someone who had to stay up all night watching guard over something, knowing that with a moment's rest or inattention it would vanish. I was exhausted. I wanted to feel like myself again more than I wanted to experience a breathtaking prairie dawn, and I was just now becoming reconciled to the fact that the two things were not the same. The Laura in me had seen everything she wanted. But I hadn't let myself believe that what
I
wanted could be anything different, and it was. I wanted to go.

“Are you sure?” Chris asked.

I was sure.

I wanted to see a few last things. One was the Big Slough, which was between the town and the homestead land. There was an overlook off the highway where you could park by the edge and look in. The grass was much taller than the oat field I'd seen the day before. And vaster. I could see how people could disappear in it. To the northeast of it somewhere was what was left of Silver Lake.

“We could still try to go see it,” Chris said. I'd said before that I hadn't wanted to, but he knew I changed my mind a lot. Case in point: we were skipping town.

“No, it's okay,” I said. It was almost starting to feel okay.

Then we went back to Ingalls Homestead for a final look. “I just want to walk around a little, one last time,” I told Chris.

Walking across the giant green pathless sprawl of this place was an uncanny sensation; I'd felt it when we'd come here yesterday and I felt it again: like walking into a painting, the sense of being there and never quite arriving at the same time. Every direction I turned it would happen.

I looked for a place to go. There was a little building over on the eastern edge of the homestead, just a resting area for the walking trail, the map said, and I'd meant to go and see it, whatever it was, because then I would have seen everything. “Let's go that way, I guess,” I said, but after a couple minutes of walking I could feel my eyes filling up and I had a catch in my throat, a sob, and Chris heard me and we stopped and I pressed my face into his shoulder.

“We can stay,” he said. “Do you want to stay?”

“No,” I said. I was giving up. I couldn't see you anywhere east or south, I thought. It's okay, I thought.

We went back to the car. The haystick, the messy, half-assed haystick, was in the backseat. I stuffed it in a plastic supermarket bag and tucked it in next to our luggage.

“So we're really taking that with us?” Chris asked.

I laughed. “I think so.”

The lump in my throat began to unclench itself as we drove east to Brookings and then south to Sioux Falls. It was nearly gone by the time we were back on I-90 in Minnesota. We listened to an improbably wonderful oldies station that played things like “Dancing in the Moonlight” and “Ain't No Woman (Like the One I've Got).” We were driving away from the sunset and into the dark and I did not mind.

We didn't want to stop, or maybe I didn't. Finally, we did near Albert Lea, Minnesota, where we found a Holiday Inn that cost too much. We hadn't had dinner and the only place we could find that was open after nine p.m. on a Sunday was the Applebee's across the street, which was shiny and horrible inside, with music we hated. The lead singer of Nickelback bellowed over the speakers while we ordered monstrous burgers and slumped in the booth.
Fine,
I thought; I was fine. If I'd been under some kind of prairie spell, it was good and broken now.

THE SKY HAD SHRUNK and was simply the size of the Holiday Inn window now. Here in eastern Minnesota things had reverted back to normal, and nothing was too flat or still anymore. But I felt better: we looked at the maps and the travel directions and realized that if we'd stuck with our original plans and left De Smet this morning, the drive wouldn't have left us time for both our other stops. Today we'd gotten to sleep late and eat muffins from the hotel lobby; we were on vacation, after all.

Months after all this I would talk to Sandra Hume, who'd been to most of the Little House sites two or three times, about the way I'd felt about leaving De Smet, how everything had seemed wonderful until suddenly I couldn't wait to get the hell out of there. Was that weird?

Sandra didn't seem to think so. “There really is a point where it gets to be too much,” she said over the phone. “You can't keep pretending it's not the real world or else you'll just go crazy. But here's the real question: do you want to go back there?”

Well, it's really out of the way, I told her. I mean, I'd always figured that seeing it would be a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and as such I couldn't imagine that I'd
get
to travel all that way and go there again if I wanted to.

“But do you want to
?”
she repeated. “Forget whether or not you can. Logistics aside,
do you ever want to go there again
?”

I didn't even have to think. “Yes,” I said. “Despite everything.” I didn't know why. I just did. I knew it would always still be there and I would still want to go.

“That's how it goes,” she said. “And you always know it'll never be perfect, but you go anyway.”

Back at the Holiday Inn in Minnesota I had yet to forgive myself, but a few hours of overpriced hotel life had done us good. I felt like a regular person, one you'd never suspect had a bundle of slough hay in the hatchback of her car.

But something still nagged at me, and when we were back on the road I realized what it was. I was at that confounding place again, the point where the books left off and I didn't really know what happened next. I mean, I knew that she went to Missouri, traveled to San Francisco, wrote things in notebooks, but I'd hated that there wasn't a story to live in anymore. I thought I could find the way past it, but I'd gone all this way, and the prairie hadn't led anywhere, and here I was again.

But Chris said, “You look happy about something.”

“Just that it's our last day,” I said.