The Wilder Life (29 page)

“It's not that hot,” I told him.

“I know,” he whispered. He set it down by his chair.

The spread of food included beef stew, macaroni salad, and green beans that had been grown and canned by the church group. Rebecca had foraged the salad and the tea.

“Nettles are so good for your skin and your lungs and your stomach,” she told the group. “They have so many healing properties. It's just amazing to think about how nature is full of all these things God made for us, and everything has a purpose that He wants us to discover. It's all for us to use.”

“What about poison oak?” Samuel Ackerson said. He didn't say much, but I liked him. “What's it good for?”

For once Rebecca seemed stumped. “Well,” she said. “You just never know.”

I'd gone to the car to get a sweater and Chris followed me.

“Is it just me, or are these people just a little Holy Roller?” he said, his voice low. Dinner had started with a lengthy, multispeaker blessing thanking the Lord for providing food, revealing the path of righteousness, making His purpose known, and bringing like-minded people together.

“I think it's because so many of them are in that church group,” I whispered, though Heidi had led part of the grace, and I was beginning to wonder if the term “like-minded” was perhaps code for something that we weren't, even with Chris being a nice Lutheran boy who'd gotten me to go to church with him. “Look, some of these people who are into homesteading are just kind of like this,” I told Chris.

I was keeping an open mind. And I had gotten used to encountering people of a somewhat more evangelical bent in the Laura Ingalls Wilder fan world—plenty of homeschooling moms blogged about the Little House books, for example, and I'd noticed more than a couple fish symbols on the cars in the museum parking lot in Mansfield, Missouri. They were all nice folks who shared my love of Laura but maybe not my support for legalizing gay marriage. Well,
c'est la vie
. I'd liked Karen and Keith and their family just fine.

We went back to the fire pit. It was dusk now, and the fireflies were out in greater numbers than I'd seen in years. The meadow behind us appeared to glow with the fading sunlight. The fact that it was one of the most gorgeous summer evenings I'd ever seen gave way to thinking about where I was, and I finally admitted to myself that it felt strange to be here.

I'd struck up a conversation with the younger of the two pastel-sweatshirt women, Linda, who had prematurely white hair and a kind, round face. She'd been to Chicago once, she said, or just outside it, really. I asked her what it was like in Morristown, Wisconsin.

“Oh, well, a lot of people aren't working right now,” she said with a sort of half-laugh. She explained that the engine plant had been laying off employees by the hundreds. She hadn't worked there, but she was having a hard time finding full-time work after her divorce. She had a voice that made her sound like she was always on the verge of either a question or a sigh. “You just don't know what's going to happen next,” she said. “I guess that's why we're here.”

I nodded, though I didn't know quite what she meant.

“We were off the grid for four days back in December,” she said.

“In Morristown?” I asked. “Wow, what happened?” I thought she was talking about an ice storm or something.

“No, this was at our church,” she said. “It was sort of like a drill. We all stayed there to see what it would be like if something happened.”

For a moment I was dumbstruck. If
what
happened
?
I thought, but I didn't want to ask
.
So instead I said, “What was it like?” I was trying to imagine. “Was it cold?”

“Yeah,” she said, with that half-laugh again. “We had a generator that we ran a couple hours a day. It really wasn't fun. But I guess you've got to be ready, you know?”

Before long it was dark. Chris was sitting across the fire with Ron, the baseball-cap guy. Ron was hunched forward in his lawn chair intently. He seemed to really like Chris.

“I can tell you're a man of deep faith,” I heard him saying.

I needed to get Chris alone and tell him that the Wisconsin church group was a kooky survivalist sect whose name (Linda had told me) was something like New Life Testimony Revelation Ministry.

But before I could, Rebecca called me. “Heidi's going to show us her loom,” she said. “Come on.” All the women were heading toward the house.

Oh, no, I thought. They're separating the men from the women! Just like in cults!

As it turned out, we really
were
just looking at the antique looms and spinning wheels that Heidi kept in an upstairs workroom. But I could only pay attention to conversations about yarn for so long, so I excused myself and went downstairs to the kitchen. The kitchen was huge, part of an expansion built on the house, and there was one long wall of painted wooden shelves holding dozens of Mason jars of canned goods.

It was a gorgeous arrangement, almost mesmerizing: jars of peaches, fruit preserves, green beans, pickles, corn, tomatoes, even meat, their metal lids neatly sealed. I looked closely: they were real, not just the comforting décor that I'd long become accustomed to seeing at places like Cracker Barrel. What did they signify beyond that? Ma Ingalls would have likely been thrilled by this kind of abundance. Almanzo Wilder, struggling with Laura through one of their many setbacks, might have recalled his
Farmer Boy
childhood and conjured up an image of shelves like these. In 1944, Rose Wilder Lane had an entire cellar full of these jars, those eight hundred jars she displayed to a reporter as a symbol of her protest against income tax and the government. Heidi Ackerson had a hobby that was perhaps something more than a hobby. All the same, the jars were so pretty.

Rebecca had come downstairs and now she stood gazing at the shelves, too. “Look at those. Isn't it amazing?” she said. “It really reminds you that there are ways to provide in a time when you can't go to the grocery store.”

It was maybe the third time that she'd said something to this effect. By now, I knew, she wasn't talking about late nights when you have to pick up the milk at the 7-Eleven. I knew,
knew
that she wanted me to ask what she meant.

“You keep saying that,” I said. “Could you, you know, elaborate a little? As to the kind of circumstances where that would happen?”

The tiniest smile flickered on Rebecca's face. Then the line of her mouth straightened and she was serene.

“Could you just, you know, clarify?” I asked.

“Well, with the economy failing and all that's happening,” she said. (I heard that phrase “with all that's happening” mentioned a few times over the weekend: I suspected it referred to the recession, terrorism, and the belief that the recently elected Barack Obama was evil incarnate.) “We're getting into an emergency situation, and people are going to panic. We just don't know what's going to happen next. Don't you sense that? And it's on a worldwide scale.”

I nodded, only because I wanted her to go on.

“And all the disasters, which are signs,” Rebecca went on. “I believe that we
are
in the end times now. And the Lord will summon us to Heaven soon, but we don't know what will happen in
this
world before that happens, and we need to be ready. What do you think about that?” she asked. “Does that scare you?”

“Thanks,” I said. “I was just curious.”

I really
had
been curious to see if she would say something like “end times.” Lucky me!

“If you're worried, we can talk about it,” Rebecca said.

“Not right now,” I said. “But thanks!”

I walked outside.
She'd said “End times”!

From everything that I'd read, End Timers were waiting for the collapse of civilization the way fans of the
Twilight
series awaited the trailer for
Breaking Dawn.
They were bracing themselves to endure the myriad destructive ordeals that would wipe out infidels, atheists, unrepentant sinners, industrialists, government officials, and
Salon.com
readers, with the expectation that they, the prepared ones, would be among the worthy few who would be raptured to Heaven either before or after (this part was never clear) the massive worldwide crapfest. Compared to these folks, Keith and Karen seemed as secular as Brad and Angelina.

I was heading back to my chair by the fire, but Chris intercepted me and led me in the other direction, away from the group.

“If anyone asks,” he whispered. “We've been married three years.”

“What?” I whispered back.

“Ron thinks we are. I didn't want to tell him we weren't. That guy is freaking me out. He was practically speaking in tongues.”

“These people do survival drills!” I hissed.

“I know! Ron said they hid out for two weeks in the woods. He's freaking me out,” Chris said.

“What did he say to you?”

“Too many things. He's freaking me out. What did Rebecca say?”

“Rebecca said ‘end times'!”

“We're leaving tomorrow,” Chris said.

Later on in the tent I got out my notebook. The church group's tents were only a few feet from ours, close enough for us to see the glow of their flashlights as they got ready for bed. We didn't speak for fear of being overheard.

I'm so sorry I made us come to this thing
, I wrote in the notebook.
I love you.
I handed it to Chris with the flashlight.

He wrote,
I love you too but these people are freaking me out.
We passed the notebook back and forth, writing our conversation. We decided that we would take in a couple of the skill demonstrations and leave by midday, sooner if things got any creepier. We also decided that if the End Times ever happened we didn't want to be anywhere the hell near Rebecca and Ron and would take our chances with whatever postapocalyptic fate awaited us.

I lay in the dark in our sleeping bag while Chris slept. How had my quest for Little House–style experience led us here? I thought about Rebecca in her sundress and pigtail braids. I had been searching for Laura Ingalls Wilder and I'd gotten Hippie Half-Pint instead, half full of her crazy, crazy Kool-Aid made from foraged berries.

But that wasn't the only thing that was making me uneasy. Deep down, I was starting to wonder if the Little House books had more to do with this sort of worldview than I'd been willing to admit. Not the end-of-the-world stuff, of course, but that “simple life” mind-set and all that it rejected. I thought about Rose and her cellar again. I thought about the moms who bragged online that their homeschooled kids were not only reading the Little House books but were learning from reprinted editions of the same
McGuffey's Eclectic Readers
that Laura and Carrie used, as if all of twentieth-century pedagogy simply didn't exist.