The Wilder Life (9 page)

For me, though, the appeal of making butter the Little House way wasn't so much about the butter as it was about the
churn.
The churning scene in
Little House in the Big Woods
had always mystified me: it was wondrous and absurd that one could make butter just by rooting a pole around in a big crock of cream. I grew up watching commercials for Ronco kitchen gadgets, and our brand-new Amana Radarange microwave oven could turn a slice of American cheese into bubbly orange goop before my very eyes, but these things were never nearly as amazing as Ma's butter churn shown on page 31 of my vintage
Little House in the Big Woods
paperback.

Now that I'd had luck with finding the old coffee grinder to make Long Winter bread, I set my sights on a slightly more advanced Little House home-ec project: I was going to find me a churn and churn it.

Really this had been nothing more than an impulse, and I could have easily talked myself out of it. But I decided to pursue it in order to better understand what kind of Little House fan I was becoming. Already I knew I was the type who was willing to see the Little House in the Big Woods in the dead of winter. When Chris and I planned a drive up to Green Bay, Wisconsin, to visit some friends, I suggested that we leave a day early and visit Laura's birthplace in Pepin on the way up. I tried to make it sound like just a stop along the way.

“But isn't Pepin right next to Minnesota?” Chris asked. Green Bay was on the Lake Michigan side of Wisconsin. The
other
side of Wisconsin.

“Yeah, but it's still
Wisconsin
,” I said. I showed him how, on the map, Pepin and Green Bay were directly across from each other. Across the whole state, but still! Somehow, Chris agreed to the four-hundred-mile detour, and we would set out in early March. We would see the little town and, a few miles away, a log cabin built where the Ingallses' little house had once stood.

In the meantime my Laura-related reading had branched out. I'd found a number of online outposts of the Little House/Laura Ingalls Wilder fan community—bulletin boards and blogs and discussion groups—and I had subscribed to
The Homesteader,
a full-color biannual newsletter edited and published by a woman named Sandra in Kansas.

The online stuff ranged widely from beginner's-level message board threads where fans tried to sort out the differences between the books and the TV show (
“Does anyone know if there really was an Albert and did he die of Leukemia??? please answer if you know thanks!!!”
) to extremely thorough and detail-oriented discourse by folks who had thoroughly read the books and the biographies, scholarly articles, and rare archival stuff.

One of my favorite online finds was a website called Pioneer Girl written by a freelance researcher named Nancy Cleaveland. From what I could tell from her site, she knew things like the plot numbers of every Ingalls and Wilder land claim; the origin and function of every obscure tool used in
Farmer Boy
; and the history of every founding resident of De Smet, South Dakota. The breadth of knowledge was amazing and a little terrifying—my own Laura World seemed awfully fuzzy compared to the extensively cataloged universe that folks like Nancy explored. Reading her site made me feel guilty that I wasn't more interested in poring over land records or tracing genealogy. How could I not want to know
everything
?

I did, however, order an archival copy of the
Pioneer Girl
manuscript from the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in Iowa, which had inherited a collection of Laura Ingalls Wilder–related material along with her daughter's papers. (Rose Wilder Lane had been a friend of Hoover's after she penned a biography of him.) I'd requested the typed version of
Pioneer Girl
that Rose had sent to her literary agent, who had unsuccessfully shopped it around to publishers before it was suggested that Laura try her hand at children's books.

Since the photocopy fees for
Pioneer Girl
amounted to nearly a hundred dollars, I wondered how many people went to the trouble of ordering it. When I called the Hoover Library to request my copy, I asked the librarian on the phone about it.

“Oh,
tons
of people ask for it,” he said. He told me it was more popular than Hoover's inaugural speech, by a long shot. When it arrived a few weeks later, I flipped through the old manual-typewriter-typed fly-specked pages, possibly even typed by Rose herself, and felt a frisson of excitement that I hadn't expected and that made me understand why people loved digging up stuff like this. But I was also figuring out that even when it came to Laura Ingalls Wilder lore, I didn't know everything, but I knew that I was pursuing a different
everything
than the hard-core researchers.

Still, I was discovering things that I hadn't even known I wanted to know. I'd ordered all the back issues of
The Homesteader
newsletter, which was full of varsity-league Little House nerd talk. It included articles such as “Did Almanzo and Cap Garland Really Save the Town of De Smet?” (Cap's descendants aren't so sure he actually made the dangerous trip to find wheat during the Hard Winter); a story about the possible medical causes of Mary's blindness, written by an M.D. and fellow Little House fan; and a piece that speculated about the mysterious real-life disappearance of Ma's china shepherdess (had one of the Ingalls daughters inherited it, or had it been lost before then?). I ate it all up like johnnycake and molasses.

After a few e-mail exchanges, I'd become online friends with Sandra Hume, who edited
The Homesteader
newsletter. Sandra was a freelance magazine writer who lived in far western Kansas with her husband, who was a farmer, and their two kids. She'd loved the Little House TV show as a kid, but she said that the books and Laura's
Missouri Ruralist
essays had helped her make the transition from her Boston suburban background to farm life. She invited me to write something for the newsletter, which led to phone conversations
.
I'd never talked at length with someone who was as preoccupied with Little House as I was, and we started trading obsessive tidbits. It turns out I wasn't the only person in the world who had read
The First Four Years
and noticed the veiled reference to making whoopee. It's when newlywed Laura discovers she is pregnant and wryly smiles as she remembers an old saying of Ma's.

“‘They that dance must pay the fiddler!'” Sandra said. “I remember when I first realized what that meant.”

“Oh my God—me, too!” I exclaimed.

But even Sandra sounded a little incredulous when I told her I was looking for my own butter churn. “
Wow
,” she said. “That's really . . . dedicated.”

“It is?” I asked. “Do you think it's weird that I want to try it?”

“Not if you write about it for
The Homesteader,”
she said.

Years ago, I saw a
Twilight Zone
episode, one from the 1980s incarnation of the series, in which a teenage boy in modernday New England recovers from a high fever and finds out he is somehow telepathically connected, in some kind of parallel-existence time-warp scenario, with a Puritan girl who has also just recovered from a fever in the year 1700. The two can communicate with each other, as if they're on some kind of mental speakerphone or something, and they can even occasionally see things through each other's eyes, so that the Puritan girl gets to see an airplane flying overhead and she in turn can show the modern boy her reflection in a pond.

But the best part is when the boy happens to take a swig of orange juice and suddenly the girl is all, “Prithee, what is that
flavor
?” because it turns out that she can taste whatever he eats, and of course she's never had anything that delicious before since she probably gets nothing but porridge. The next thing you know, the boy's in his kitchen with the whole contents of his fridge and a bunch of fast-food containers strewn across the counter, and he's sampling it all so that the girl can “try” French fries and ice cream and cookies. It all sufficiently blows her mind until—and I bet you could see this coming—her fellow Puritan villagers accuse her of being a witch because she dares to utter heretical prophecies about the invention of aircraft and Häagen-Dazs. Somehow, though, she manages to avoid being burned at the stake in some twist where the boy runs to the library and digs up some crucial bit of information that can save her.

Whatever the ending had been, it wasn't nearly as thrilling to me as the basic premise that these two people, hundreds of years apart, were experiencing the same things through some kind of sensory interconnection, conveying the taste of ice cream to each other as directly and miraculously as clicks on a telegraph wire.

I was doing these things—making the recipes, planning the trips—to feel that little jolt of connection with Laura World. Of course I knew it wasn't a literal connection, no wormholes or tesseracts or any of those things. All I was trying to do was invoke the same feeling I'd had when I'd read the end of
Little House in the Big Woods
again. How many ways could I pursue it?

The kind of churn I was looking for was called a “crock and dash” churn, which, despite being the most classic type of churn, wasn't so easy to find on eBay. Most of the churns being sold were the early-twentieth-century contraptions known as Dazey churns—each one a set of gears and paddles that mounted on the top of a glass jar. (I'd had no idea home butter making had advanced like this—somehow I'd always been under the impression that we'd all just gone straight from the Ma Ingalls method to buying sticks of Land O'Lakes at the supermarket.)

I would come to learn several things about buying a butter churn on eBay: