The Wilder Life (27 page)

Pam said she'd grown up here in Mansfield; in school they'd all read the Little House books. “I can remember when Laura died,” Pam said. She'd been just a kid. “The strange thing was that really everyone just thought of her as Mrs. Wilder who lived at the edge of town.” For a moment I wondered what was so strange about it. Then I realized she meant that she could remember a time back before Laura was quite Laura, this figure we'd all come to feel closer to, this empty dress.

To see the Rock House you had to either drive about a mile down the road from the farmhouse and museum or else walk over, the way I did. I noticed the parking lot of this second house was vast but mostly empty; not as many visitors came over here. The Rock House tours ran only when enough people showed up.

There were just four other people in my group, and nobody really seemed to know why the house was important. It was a pleasant but ordinary 1920s cottage with stone walls, hence the name. It looked remarkably suburban.

A woman next to me squinted up at it as we waited to go inside. “Is this where Rose lived or something?”

“I don't think so,” I told her. “I think she just built it for her parents.”

She didn't quite believe me, so she tried asking the teenage tour guide, who was just getting ready to give her introduction. “Okay, so
who
lived here?”

“LAURA AND ALMANZO LIVED HERE BETWEEN 1928 AND 1936,” the girl replied, at a voice level calibrated for a somewhat larger group than ours. “SHE WROTE THE FIRST FOUR LITTLE HOUSE BOOKS HERE.”

The tour didn't take long. The house was mostly empty inside—only draperies and a few bits of furniture. (Talk about simple!) The guide led us through three carpeted rooms and pointed out the nice tile in the bathroom and the custom-built shelves in the closets, as if our tiny group were prospective buyers at an open house.

At the end of the tour an older man raised his hand. “So Rose never lived here at all?” he asked the guide.

You really couldn't blame folks for being confused, because it was hard to make sense of the real story: Rose had it built to be a modern, comfortable place for her parents to live in their old age, and presented it to them as a gift on Christmas Day in 1928, when Laura was sixty-one. Except you couldn't quite imagine that Laura and Almanzo had really wanted such a gift, considering they had that gorgeous farmhouse up the road they'd spent half their lives building for themselves, complete with its customized tiny Laura-sized kitchen (and as for comfort and modernity, the tour guide told us that Almanzo eschewed indoor bathrooms all his life, preferring the outhouse). Moreover, the fact that they moved back to the farmhouse a few years later, once Rose had vacated it (because, remember, she moved in there
herself
after she'd relocated her folks to the new place), made you wonder what was the point of even building the Rock House in the first place.

The biographies I'd read didn't make things any less convoluted. Depending on which book you believed, either Rose was pushy about having the place built, or Laura was ungrateful; or else Laura had felt that she couldn't say no; or else Rose acted out of an overwhelming sense of obligation to her parents that hearkened back to her belief that as a toddler she'd somehow been responsible for the house fire on the Dakota homestead (not that any evidence of this exists outside Rose's own head, but
whoa!
), and in building the new house she was attempting to alleviate the primal guilt. Got all that?

The guide pointed to a short set of crumbling flagstone steps leading down from the driveway. “Almanzo built those steps,” she told us, as if she was trying to convince us.

I could see why everyone kept trying to place Rose here. This house didn't quite fit in our Laura Ingalls Wilder imaginations, so it seemed an ideal residence for Rose, who didn't fit, either. Of course it wasn't like Rose really wanted a place in our Laura Worlds anyway. I didn't think so, at least.

I felt kind of sorry for the house, sitting out here all misunderstood: poor Little House in the Complicated Family Dynamic. But it really was pretty, the way it stood at the edge of a little bluff and faced the impossibly green valley all by itself.

The way back to the museum was a path that ran behind all the buildings, up the hill and a mile or so through the farm property. When Laura had lived in the Rock House and Rose had lived in the farmhouse, this was supposed to be the path that Laura and Rose had taken to visit each other. You had to pay an extra three dollars at the museum to walk the path. I seemed to be the only person doing it that day. It had rained that morning and the grass was still wet.

On the walk over to the Rock House I had been the dutiful tourist, looking for things on the little map I'd been given, though really the only man-made attraction was a stumpy concrete thing, once a water cistern built by Almanzo. The rest of it was lush green country—little woods and neatly mowed clearings; a wild turkey had even appeared on the path in the distance ahead of me and scurried off as I approached. I'd expected the view to be nice; it was frankly gorgeous.

Now that I was heading back I found myself trying to take in as much as I could. I paid attention to
everything
—the plodding bird calls, the keening horn of a distant train. Since I was alone out here maybe I could really feel the spirit of the place, whatever that was. That was sort of the same question that invariably came up with Laura and Rose: not whether one of them had helped the other write the Little House books—because it's clear, from all the drafts and correspondence, that of course Rose had helped—but whose
soul
was in the books, who really inhabited them and made the girl in them come to life. But then what a stingy question it was, implying, sort of like that prayer in the TV movie, that it wasn't enough that they were good books; somehow they had to be the right kind of good. They had to be written by a woman who guilelessly wrote only the truth, or who loved the Good Lord, or who was a
real
writer, or a genius, or “progressive,” or something. It was better to let go of all that.

Nothing happened while I walked, except that I knew I was seeing things that Laura saw, and that Rose saw, and I liked that. We were all sort of the same person out here, everyone who came to this place and looked and looked. The path was so hilly that the highway and the houses slipped away and for a while there wasn't anything else around, except for us.

BACK AT HOME Spring commenced. The rainy weather I'd seen in Missouri made its way up to Illinois and then turned mild. Seeing Laura's homey kitchen in Mansfield had made me excited to come home and continue my Little House lifestyle experiments. But after a couple weeks it was clear I was starting to run out of ways to live La Vida Laura.

I'd made a few more recipes from
The Little House Cookbook,
with mixed results. The two batches of vanity cakes tasted all right, though they lacked the exquisite, airy melt-in-the-mouth texture that Laura had described in
Plum Creek,
and which had always made me imagine them as the Krispy Kremes of the prairie. They were the ones that called for two pounds of lard for deep-fat frying, and for the rest of the day after I'd made them the whole apartment smelled like a state fair.

I'd also made a meal of fried salt pork and gravy, apples 'n' onions, and buttermilk biscuits one night for Chris and me. Since I'd used the pork drippings to season everything, most of the meal was a raging success, save the salt pork itself, which was, well,
really
salty and much denser than we'd bargained for. After just a few bites, it was clear that a little salt pork went a long way. Chris pointed out that it was the sort of meal that was best eaten after a long day working in the fields, as opposed to migrating the contents of your in-box from the old version of Yahoo! Mail to the new one, which is what he'd been doing all afternoon.

I was getting tired of recipes, though, and both soap and candle making were just more recipes, when it came down to it. But I had only a vague sense of what else I wanted to do, just that it couldn't be anything too over the top, like build a log cabin. Ditto for anything that had an obvious component of drudgery (i.e., scrubbing laundry with a washboard) or viscera (as in animal butchering). By now I understood that there was a precarious balance to my Little House daydreams; it helped that the baser details had always been absent from the books so that one thought more about pretty butter molds than outhouses.

I briefly considered a weekend at some rustic destination, and friends sent me information on hippie resorts, backpacker waysides, remote spots deep in Montana and a five-hour drive from the airport. But I soon realized I wasn't interested in spending time off the grid for its own sake. I just wanted to be in Laura World, not a yurt. I didn't want to simplify my life or live in another era. I wanted the places I knew in the books to still be there and I wanted to see them.

Though I still didn't quite believe it was possible.

Years ago, maybe a decade, and long before I picked up the Little House books again, I came across a children's book called
Searching for Laura Ingalls
while doing some work-related research at the Chicago public library. It was a nonfiction picture book by Kathryn Lasky, and it was about a girl traveling with her family to see the locations from the Little House books. The girl's name was Meribah and she was an avid Laura Ingalls Wilder fan, so the family set out in an RV to visit the homesites in Wisconsin and Minnesota and South Dakota. The color photos that illustrated the book gave it a casual quality that seemed part documentary and part vacation album. I remember flipping through the book and feeling a twinge of my old love for the books and even some jealousy. This girl had gone and had the Little House vacation
I'd
wanted as a kid.

But then on page after page in the book, the girl kept discovering that all the old things weren't quite what she expected. She was shown sadly regarding the log cabin that was smaller and emptier than she'd thought, and she warily eyed gift shop merchandise at one of the hometown museums. She stood on the asphalt in downtown De Smet, South Dakota, waiting for a Fourth of July parade that never happened. She squinted in the sunlight of an open field where the Big Woods had once stood. I remembered enough about the books—just barely—to know what she'd been searching for.

It figures, I'd thought, and put the book back on the shelf.

By May, I'd all but given up on finding ways to play Laura, when something, out of the blue, revived my interest: I discovered my dream farm. Okay, so it wasn't
my
farm, but still.

I was on a website I'd bookmarked back in the fall for its very good page on butter churning, complete with photos. The site had an extensive section of “homesteading lessons,” which included instructions for making cheese, using a spinning wheel, and even rendering lard (which didn't look terribly gross at all), but until now I hadn't looked at the home page to see who was putting this stuff online. It turned out to be a couple named Samuel and Heidi Ackerson, who owned a small farm downstate. According to the website, Clover Meadow Farm sold homemade yarn and soap, raised heritage farm animals, and offered “a peek into the past.”