The Wilder Life (5 page)

In my mind, the world of the Little House books just went up in smoke at the end, their heroine disappearing into clumsy ordinariness and ignominy. It had always trailed off with a vague, unspoken disappointment. It's the kind of story we learn over and over again about everything in the world: your life starts out as a wild open frontier that you explore until the forces of time or history or civilization or nature intervene, and then suddenly it's all gone, it all weathers and falls down and gets built over; everyone dies or moves away or becomes a grainy photograph, and yes, at some point you just get fat and fall off a streetcar. Progress—it dumps you on your aging and gigantic ass!

Maybe that was another reason why I didn't come back to the Little House books for a very long time. But here I was again, coming back to this place where the path through Laura World seemed to end and disappear in the grass. Only this time I wanted to go further.

I could see Laura Ingalls Wilder everywhere. Really, she
was
everywhere. She was no longer just a person but a universe made of hundreds of little bits, a historical fictional literary figure character person idea grandma-girl-thing. I knew there were poems about her and picture books; I found out there were festivals, pageants, plays, websites, weblogs, authorized spin-off series books, unauthorized spin-off series books, dresses, cookbooks, newsletters, fan fiction, albums, homeschool curriculums, aprons, craft items, figurines, dollhouses. Also, a guy in Minnesota believes she is God. No, really, he was running for mayor of Minneapolis and he has this whole religion called “Lauraism” and he wholeheartedly believes she has appeared to him in visions and that she created the world. And after spending a dozen hours online looking for Laura and finding her in these endless kaleidoscopic configurations, who was I to doubt him?

I wanted to go to Laura World: I wanted to visit the places where Laura Ingalls and her family had lived, in Wisconsin and Kansas and Minnesota and South Dakota and Missouri. All these years I hadn't quite believed that the places in the books existed, but they did, and house foundations had been unearthed, and cabins reconstructed, and museums erected. I'd even met a few people who'd been to them. My friend Brian, for instance, had claimed that his wife's knees had buckled—
buckled!
—at the sight of Pa's fiddle while visiting the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum in Missouri. The sites were all tourist destinations now, with gift shops and annual festivals and pageants. I learned there was even a “lost” homesite that Laura hadn't written about in the Little House books, a town in Iowa where the Ingalls had lived in the years between
On the Banks of Plum Creek
and
By the Shores of Silver Lake.
To me this discovery was as astonishing as a breakthrough in physics. Imagine it, a wormhole to another Laura dimension!

But in a way all these homesites seemed otherworldly to me. How could you not want to go to a place that you remember but have never been?

It was fall when I started thinking seriously about exploring Laura World and all it entailed, which naturally involved seeing all the Little Houses or their facsimiles thereof, but there were other things that I found myself itching to experience as well. What
was
it like to wear a corset, or tap maple trees, or twist hay? The details of the books were in such sharp relief that I had the urge to grab at them, the way Laura in
Little House in the Big Woods
had wanted to taste the blackberry-shaped buttons on her aunt's dress at the sugaring-off dance. This past life, which I knew was not really mine, kept surfacing, bubbling up in my head. It seemed to insist, the way past lives do, that there was something I needed to remember, and if I just found the right place or the right motions, I would know what it was.

Chris and I always go somewhere else for Christmas—to Michigan, where his family lives, or else New Mexico to visit my dad—so we always have our own Christmas beforehand. This year he gave me
The Little House Guidebook,
a paperback travel guide to all the homesites. No more furtively looking up maps of rural Minnesota online; this was official now. I flipped through the pages of the guidebook and mentally subtitled it
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Driving Out to Remote Locations in the Upper Midwest to Find Your Childhood Imaginary Friend but Were Afraid to Ask.
And I was still afraid to ask: what kind of person would I become if I just went with this, let my calico-sunbonnet freak flag fly?

I hugged Chris to thank him and then thought of that moment in
By the Shores of Silver Lake
when the Ingalls family has just made it out to Dakota Territory and Laura says, “Oh, Pa, let's go on west!” She doesn't get to go farther, of course, which made it seem all the more important for me to act, to do, to
go.

As soon as it was spring, that is. Just then it was winter in our Chicago neighborhood near the river; in the deep snow you could see the delicate little tracks of rabbits right alongside the huge dirty craters where neighbors had dug out their cars. (The city has a winter street parking policy that's very much in the spirit of the Homestead Act of 1862, in that anyone who can dig out his own spot can claim it with an old lawn chair.) Above all this was our apartment, on the top floor of our building, three stories up from the reliably plowed slush, high enough to see nothing but trees and sky and snow out the windows if you stood or sat in the right spot in the front room, the room where we were having our Christmas. At that moment it was the right spot, and a good place to start.

IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF WINTER when I started to explore this whole Laura business in earnest. I started ordering more books—biographies and academic stuff and even a collection of poetry about the Little House books called
The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
By late January my “winter provisions” consisted of a stack of stuff to read and a bag of horehound candy that Chris had included in my Christmas stocking. He'd listened to me describe a scene in
On the Banks of Plum Creek
where Pa comes back from town and brings a couple of pieces of it for Laura and Mary.

“It's not bad,” I'd told him truthfully. It came in dusty lozenges and tasted sort of like an off-brand Diet Dr Pepper. Then I remembered when Laura tried it she decided it tasted “brown.” “You know, it really
does
taste brown,” I said to Chris. “Brown in a good way, I mean.”

“Let's not think about the other ways,” Chris said. “Ever.”

I even started programming the TiVo to record episodes of
Little House on the Prairie
—which aired about four times a day on my cable system, between the Hallmark Channel and a local station that showed late-night vintage reruns.

It would be months before the weather was decent enough to go see any little houses anywhere. Thus I spent three weeknights in a row staring at northwestern Wisconsin on Google Maps. I was supposed to be planning a road trip that Chris and I would take in the spring to see Laura's birthplace near Pepin, the “little town” mentioned in
Little House in the Big Woods,
but I wasn't really looking at the roads.

Part of me wanted to believe the Big Woods still existed the way they had in the book. I'd study the very first page of
Little House in the Big Woods,
the Garth Williams illustration. These woods are where Laura World begins, this place where, as the first page reads, “there was nothing but woods. There were no houses. There were no roads. There were no people.” The Big Woods were a perfect place to get lost and become someone else. And those trees, they were
huge,
right? If you looked at the illustration on that first page, you could see that the tree next to the log cabin had about the same circumference as a concrete sewer main.

I'd find Pepin on the online map and then scroll up toward the north. I'd use the “satellite” feature to see the aerial photo view of the land, and then I'd zoom in as close as I could to the nubbly green expanses between towns, until I was situated above whatever forests were still there. I could never get close enough. At some point the photo would become illegible, a smudgy quilt of pixels. But I'd still try to see. I'd click around the Mississippi River Valley where Pepin was, or else I'd go farther north and search, floating over the indistinct treetops, wondering what was down there, wishing I could just slip beneath the surface.

Somewhere on YouTube there's a video of a girl giving a 4-H Club speech about the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder. The girl's name is Shelby Ann and she's fourteen. In the video she stands in front of an unseen classroom audience, wearing the best approximation of prairie garb that she could put together, a peasant blouse, a skirt, and an apron. She looks just a year or two too old to be wearing her hair in pigtail braids. She reads from index cards. Shelby Ann makes my heart melt.

“The life of a great writer,” she begins. For the first two minutes she reads off the names of Laura's family—her grandparents, parents, and siblings; her husband and her children—and the dates and places of their births. Then Shelby Ann lists the places where Laura and her family lived and the years they lived there.

Beyond the names, dates, and places, the marriages, births, and deaths, only a very few details are mentioned: Almanzo courted Laura with buggy rides; they endured bad crops and diphtheria. Really, it's as much as any of us might know about our great-great-grandparents. But Shelby Ann appears more than happy to tell us where the Ingalls family moved to in 1877 and 1879; who was born in 1870, who died in 1946. She can recite the facts and hardly has to look at the index cards. Maybe she loves that she's memorized something
real
to go alongside everything she's absorbed from the books. Maybe to her all the years and towns and names are the currency of
her
Laura World, valuable things worth collecting.