The Wilder Life (30 page)

I was also remembering the 2005 Disney version of
Little House on the Prairie
and how it starts, like the books, with Pa wanting to leave the Big Woods. Only this movie version gives the impression that what the Ingallses
really
wanted was a lifestyle makeover. The movie makes the Big Woods seem like a downright lousy neighborhood: young Laura narrowly misses a bullet fired by a careless hunter, and Pepin, with its incessant wagon-wheel-and-horse-whinny traffic noise, is as bustling as a strip mall. Pa hates doing carpentry work for an uppity wealthy man who browbeats him and withholds payments, and whereas in the books a trip to the general store was always a fun occasion, in this version Ma stresses over the prices and the family budget, and Laura and Mary grab at candy just like they were in a supermarket checkout. The subtext of these early scenes seems to be:
surely there's a better way to live, a way to opt out of the materialistic rat race and the hassles of 1870s modern life!

I could see how certain aspects of the Little House books could help nurture a twenty-first-century homesteading dream. And while my default Little House fantasy always involved befriending Laura and exploring our respective worlds together, I knew that there was another extremely common daydream as well, one that Anita Clair Fellman mentions in her critique of Laura Ingalls Wilder fans in the book
Little House, Long Shadow:
Admit it: you've gone there, and so have I.

I considered this as I stared up at the ceiling of our tent. Who knew how many times those books made me idly wish for a
now
other than the one I was in, that the world would somehow crack open and reveal a simpler life?

Chris and I were glad for daylight, even though it was five a.m. Getting up at dawn was hardly a problem, with two roosters screeching away over the continuous garble-gackle of nearly a dozen geese and turkeys.

“I can sleep through car alarms in our neighborhood,” Chris said, “but not this crap.” We were the first ones up besides Samuel, who hurried out of the house to the barn for morning chores.

The homesteading activities did not start, as Heidi had stated, between five and seven a.m. But she did serve the whole group an incredible breakfast of eggs, potatoes, biscuits, and gravy in the big kitchen, and despite all our offers to help, she did much of the work herself. Even though they'd gone and invited an apocalypse cult to their farm, I was still impressed with Samuel and Heidi and the life they'd made for themselves. By now, though, I was pretty sure that at least Heidi believed in this End Times stuff. While we cleared the breakfast dishes, she was at the sink talking to Rebecca, who I heard say that “with all that's happening” phrase again.

“My mother is still pretty skeptical,” Heidi said. “She says I shouldn't let people hear me talk about being prepared because they'll think I'm crazy. Well, let them think I'm crazy.”

I already thought Heidi was crazy on account of the fact that she had a whole room full of yarn. I still liked her, though.

Rebecca came up to me again after breakfast.

“You don't have to be frightened,” she said. “I feel joy for what's to come because my family and I will be with Jesus. But I wanted to let
you
know, too.”

“Thanks!” I said again. “I'm fine.” I had no idea what to say to Rebecca.

After a night of End Times revelations, the soap-making demonstration was a little anticlimactic. Most of the women were gathered in the kitchen watching Heidi make a batch of scented cream soap. Chris and the men were in a shed across the barnyard for Samuel's blacksmithing demonstration. By now more visitors were arriving for the day's activities. It occurred to me that if we'd driven out from Chicago first thing in the morning, the way I'd originally planned, we might not have had such a close encounter with the New Life Promise Revelationers, or whatever they were called. This all might have seemed like just a nice day at the farm, and we might not have had any idea that it was about the end of the world.

The soap-making demonstration was almost over when I saw Linda's head drop back against her chair. She was snoring softly.

“Oh my,” Heidi whispered. She had just poured liquid soap into a molding rack. “Is she okay?”

Evelyn, the older pastel-sweatshirt lady, had scooted her chair over and put her arm around Linda. “She's fine,” Evelyn said. She explained that Linda suffered from sleep apnea and tended to nod off. She gently nudged Linda awake.

“My sister-in-law has that, too,” one of the newly arrived weekenders said. “She has one of those machines that help you breathe at night.”

“So do I,” said Linda sadly. “But I'm trying not to depend on it too much.” She looked miserable. I liked her more than the others in the Wisconsin group. At the campfire she'd told me that she'd been a social worker, but the job pressures had gotten to her. It didn't seem like she had a lot of options in Morristown. Unlike Rebecca, I got the impression that she wasn't terribly excited about the future. More than once she'd mentioned “being prepared” with a sort of weary shrug, perhaps because she sensed how hard the Coming Days would be for someone with a condition like hers.

While the soap cooled, Heidi gave a quick lesson on skimming cream from milk, setting aside the separated cream in a glass jar to churn into butter later.

“Speaking of butter,” Evelyn spoke up, “we have a guide how to can it. The information's on the Internet but we typed it up, too.” In the interest of sharing homesteading skills, she passed out printouts of the butter-canning directions, which involved melting butter, pouring it into canning jars that had been sterilized in the oven, and waiting for the heat to seal the lids. I was trying to figure out what the point was.

“Well, it's not
technically
canning,” Heidi said, “but I've heard of people who've done it. How long is the shelf life?”

“Up to five years,” Evelyn said. “No refrigeration needed!” She went over to the table and picked up a little jelly jar that I'd seen both at breakfast and dinner the night before but hadn't touched on account of the rancid tang of its mysterious contents. Oh, no—that was
butter
? It was both oily and oddly granular, and I'd thought it was some kind of homemade mayonnaise. “This is from a batch we put up last fall,” Evelyn said. “You can do the same thing with Velveeta, too.”

I went outside and found Chris.

“I just got an
F
in blacksmithing,” he said. Samuel had showed them how to make little iron hooks, and his had fallen into the fire. “That's how I roll.” He made the heavy-metal sign. “Anything horrifying happen during Soap 101?”

I told him about how Linda was preparing for off-the-grid life by trying to go without her CPAP machine, and about Evelyn's dubious-sounding butter-storage methods. “Let's go soon,” I said.

“Now,” Chris said. “We're taking the tent down
now
.”

“Too bad you won't be able to help with the butter churning,” Heidi said, when I told her we were leaving.

“Yeah, something came up,” I said, knowing full well how it sounded: Oh, you know how it is with our hectic Chicago lives! We city people, we never change!

I bought several bars of her soap, which smelled wonderful, and thanked her for hosting. In my heart I wished her and Samuel well. “You guys are really living the dream out here,” I told her. Whatever their dream was, that is.

Most of the weekenders had gathered in the barnyard, and Samuel was showing everyone how to put a bridle on a horse and clean its hooves. But Ron and Linda and Evelyn were sitting by the picnic tables, so we went over to say good-bye to them.

“We don't know how long we're staying, either,” Ron said. “This ain't really the stuff we're needing to learn. I mean”—he nodded toward the barnyard—“this is nice, but it's not really practical for what we're wanting to do.”

Ron was a little creepy, but you couldn't help but feel a little sorry for him: clearly he was hoping this weekend would be more
Soldier of Fortune
magazine than
Country Living.
I wondered what kind of world he thought he was preparing for.

“I mean, there won't be horses,” he said.

“Good luck,” I said to Linda.
We have room in our car
, I wanted to tell her.

“Thanks.” She waved weakly.

Rebecca approached us one last time. To my relief, it wasn't to proselytize but to ask about our future Laura Ingalls Wilder trips.

“So are you going to see Mankato, too?” she asked. “Mankato, Minnesota?”

“Mankato? What's there?” I was pretty sure the place had never been mentioned in any of the biographies, and yet it sounded familiar.

“The Ingalls family were always taking trips to Mankato,” she said.

I stared at her for a moment before I realized what she was talking about. “Oh, you mean on the
TV show
.”

I remembered now—
Mankato,
the town that the show's writers had designated as the go-to place whenever the plot veered into situations that required the amenities of a considerably larger town than Walnut Grove. Characters frequently went to Mankato to visit medical specialists, buy fancy dresses, and get into bar brawls. From the way the TV Ingallses planned shopping trips to Mankato, you get the sense that the place was a sort of nineteenth-century Mall of America, but there's no indication whatsoever that the actual Mankato, about eighty miles from Walnut Grove (which back then would have been a three-day journey), ever served that purpose for Laura or anyone else.

Rebecca nodded. “But they must have gone there sometimes in real life.”

“I don't think so,” I said. “The show made that up.” I explained that
most
of the stuff on that show was made up and didn't happen in the books.

“Oh,” she said. “I only read the first book, and then I watched the show. It wasn't the same?” She looked a little disappointed.

“No,” I told her. “So, no, we're not going to Mankato. Why do you ask?”

“It just always sounded like a great place,” Rebecca said.