The Wilder Life (8 page)

In other words, the real-life Laura couldn't have possibly been the Laura of the book, who was big enough to help Pa put up the cabin door and ask pointed questions about why they were settling in Indian Territory.

Even though I'd always known the book was a novel, I nonetheless realized that all this time I'd truly, wholly believed that all the details of this book were from memory—the perfect circle of the sky around the wagon as it traveled on the desolate land, the prairie fire, everything. That it had all been
lived,
and that purity of recollection was what made
Little House on the Prairie
such a great book.

Why, exactly, had I needed to believe that this book was a true record of Laura's experiences? I couldn't even say. I felt, really, like Laura did in the book, when she wanted to keep the Indian baby who was riding by, though she wasn't able to say why, just that she'd looked into his eyes and felt a connection.

Somehow, through the books—especially
Prairie
—I'd always felt like my mind had made some kind of direct contact with this other world and could go through the motions of living there by the sheer power of Laura's memories. I thought the memories were what made Laura World the kind of place it was, some place I'd inhabited in my mind. Now it felt just as disputed a territory as that one lonely stretch of Kansas prairie.

Making the Long Winter bread had suddenly become important. Deeply important.

I had an antique coffee grinder now, and ajar full of seed wheat that I could grind into a primitive flour the way the Ingalls family had in
The Long Winter
. Now all I needed to make an authentic loaf of Long Winter bread was “the dish of souring”—sourdough bread starter.

“If you want to make a starter exactly as [Laura] did, without such helps as sugar, yeast, or milk,” Barbara Walker warned in
The Little House Cookbook
, “you may have to try several times.”

Of course I wanted to make a starter exactly as Laura did! I
had
to, now that so much of what I thought I knew about Laura World was wrong. The Big Woods were not what they seemed, and the Little House on the Prairie was built on something other than recollection. I needed something real, even if it was only the taste of the improvised bread the Ingalls family ate every day for months during the Long Winter. Couldn't you understand, Barbara Walker? This bread was
all I had.

And so I was prepared to try as hard as possible to make sourdough. And try I did over the course of three weeks, making half a dozen batches of flour-and-water batter, which I'd leave in ajar somewhere around the apartment in hopes that the Fermentation Fairy would visit and turn it into bread-making mojo. The jar would start out looking like milk gone bad, and after a day or two it would smell like it, too, always failing to rise or bubble. I went through most of a five-pound bag of King Arthur flour with my failed attempts.

The batter needed to be near heat for fermentation to work (Ma kept her batter under the stove). I tried putting the jar directly beneath a lightbulb, near radiators, and in sunny spots, all to no avail. The whole process began to feel superstitious and weird. Why did I have to get rid of half the batter once I'd added more batter to double it? Couldn't it just
stay
doubled? This thing that I was trying to make happen depended on so many different factors: water quality, temperature, humidity, improper covering, lack of patience. Making sourdough is about capturing something from the air, literally, and I began to imagine that this elusive element wasn't just wild yeast particles but the residue of a lost world. It kept failing to materialize and I was making myself miserable over it.

Chris noticed the jar on the windowsill one day. I'd left it near one of our radiators, which in the wintertime clanked and hissed and blasted heat, since the boiler in our building wildly overcompensates during the deep winter months. It was an ideal temperature for growing sourdough, except that it tended to turn the top layer of batter into plaster. “Are you supposed to just let the stuff dry out like that?” Chris asked.

I thought for a minute. In
The Long Winter
Pa brings home a sack of seed wheat and doesn't know what the heck to do with it—boil it?—until Ma has an idea and takes out the coffee grinder.

“I don't know what I'm
supposed
to do,” I said. “But I'm going to try something.” I went to the closet and got out our portable humidifier, which I filled with water and placed next to the radiator. Then I set out a new jar of batter.

The next day when we got home from work the apartment smelled like bread, and the jar was filled with something that looked like alien spit.
Beautiful
alien spit, I mean. My own Scotch ingenuity had paid off.

I held up the jar. “Let's get grinding!” I said.

Chris and I took turns grinding a whole pound of wheat that night on the couch in front of the TV.

“I feel like I'm sharpening a great big endless pencil,” Chris said. “The dull, relentless pencil of winter.”

“The Ingalls family did this every day,” I pointed out. “And without
French and Saunders
to watch on DVD.
”

When at last we'd produced a bowl of coarse, brown flour, I mixed it with the sourdough starter, salt, and baking soda and kneaded the resulting dough. It made a round little loaf the size of a small hat, and it barely rose in the pan.

Almost as soon as it had come out of the oven we had to try it. The bread was steaming as I cut two wedges. It was coarse and a little crumbly, like soda bread. I blew on my wedge to cool it and then put it in my mouth, this tiny bit of time travel.

In
The Long Winter,
Laura notes that the bread had “a fresh, nutty flavor that seemed almost to take the place of butter.” The bread we'd made did not taste like it needed butter, either, at least not while it was warm and soft. It was good enough that Chris said he'd eat it even if he wasn't starving, but not so good that we'd be tempted to finish the loaf, even as small as it was.

Somehow, it didn't seem right to eat the whole thing and it didn't seem right to waste it. And then, by the next day, it didn't seem right to keep it. I took it to work and left it in the break room with a little note that said
Long Winter Bread,
for those who knew the story.

“If I had a remembrance book, I would surely write down about the day we came to Plum Creek and first saw the house in the ground,” Melissa Gilbert–as-Laura was saying in voice-over at the beginning of “Harvest of Friends,” the first episode in the TV series after the pilot. It was the one where the Ingalls family first comes to Walnut Grove. I was watching it one day in early February when I was home sick. I'd been trying to fight off the symptoms all that week, taking doses of some stuff everyone was recommending lately, some kind of homeopathic preventive thing that came in vials of sugary granules that I had to dissolve on my tongue. (It hadn't been part of my occasional pretend-I'm-in-the-1800s plan to have faith in dubious remedies, but it was sort of turning out that way.)

I watched as TV Laura came skipping out of what was apparently supposed to be the dugout house in
On the Banks of Plum Creek,
though it looked less like the lovely green grassy dwelling with flowers around the doorway shown in the books and more like a bomb shelter. But no matter, because it was never shown again anyway, and the story completely changed from
Plum Creek
to this whole other kooky plot where Pa fell out of a tree somehow, and the guy he worked for at the feed store was suddenly a big jerk and repossessed Pa's team of oxen, and wow, this was nothing like the books, I thought. I kept watching, even though I was feeling tired and sort of feverish. Maybe I had fever 'n' ague, though I wasn't sure what ague was. Was it like feeling achy, only quainter?

Meanwhile TV Laura kept babbling in voice-over about things she wrote down in her remembrance book, or else would write down if she had one, I couldn't tell which; maybe there was a continuity problem in the script, but of course it didn't matter, did it, because this wasn't really Laura, and none of this had ever happened.

But I was still watching, and now TV Laura was trying to help her pa stack bags of grain in the shed of the feed store, and then all these other townspeople came to help them, too, and well, it was sweet. Sappy as it all was, I slouched back in the couch cushions and let it wash over me. I felt like I was eight years old again and trying, the way I know I did at that age, to hold everything in my mind all at once—everything I saw and felt and wanted to keep close with me.

Like one day, when I was around that age, I actually took a piece of paper and wrote,
If I should ever have a daughter, I will give her the name “Laura Elizabeth,” in memory of my favorite author, Laura Ingalls Wilder.
It felt very important to write the words
in memory of
, aware that remembering was a sort of magical act. I had the sense that I was entrusted, perhaps even single-handedly, to carry the very fact of Laura's existence to a future generation. Oh, I know it's hilarious now, but I put the piece of paper with this solemn inscription into an empty wooden jewelry box that I had and closed it up with its little brass latch. Then I waited for life to flow past and become part of Days Gone By, presumably carrying the wooden box with it on its invisible current until the moment I discovered it again. Which, I'm sure, had to be no more than a week or two later, when I'd decided I had better things to put in that box besides sacred intentions.

I hadn't thought about that in years, until this television Laura and her stupid hypothetical remembrance book reminded me. I wondered if maybe lately I'd been more like my eight-year-old self than I realized; maybe I'd been trying too hard to
believe
in everything I loved about the Little House books, trying to fit it all in precious little truth compartments: bites of bread, authentic memories, and so on.

I mean I
knew
what was real (the year 1867, Wisconsin, two pounds of lard, those gray people staring up from their photographs) and what wasn't (various myths about the American frontier, gigantic trees) and there was a lot of stuff in between that I wasn't quite sure about (moments of deep connection with Indian babies). But maybe those distinctions ultimately didn't matter, as long as I recognized them; maybe I didn't need to sort truth from fiction from exaggeration in order to go further into Laura World.

If I had a remembrance book, I'd write down the time I let myself be completely deluded about the size of the trees in the Big Woods. And then I'd go look for them anyway.

YOU DON'T NEED a churn to turn cream into butter. I knew this. My friend Cinnamon, who writes cookbooks (and yes, that is her real name), has told me that an electric mixer can make the inverse emulsification process (aka “buttery goodness”) happen in a matter of minutes. This is also why you commonly hear about people who accidentally turn whipped cream frosting into butter by letting the KitchenAid run too long. And then there's always the most basic butter-making method, the choice of classroom demonstrations everywhere, which is to simply shake a jar of cream vigorously until the butterfat separates and the class learns an important lesson about frontier labor and/or dairy science.