The Wilder Life (4 page)

Yes, I told him. It was
so
good. But that was all I could express. I mean, I could have gone on and on about all the wonderful stuff—the
bears
, the
fiddle
, the roasted pig's tail!—but it was more than that. I got to the end of the book, the part where Laura lies awake in bed listening to the world around her and thinks to herself, “This is now.”

I experienced the same thing I'd felt the first time I read those lines: suddenly, all the
nows
—mine, Laura's, the world's—aligned with each other and made a clear, bright conduit, and then my mind sped up and down it, and then I came back to myself.
Now
I remembered.

A month or so later Chris came home with a box that he held behind his back, though it didn't take more than a glimpse for me to recognize what it was. It was a complete set of the books—nine paperback volumes with matching blue spines lined up in a cardboard sleeve, a Reader's Digest Book Club set with the '70s-era design. They were in near-mint condition. He'd found them at a record store in Lincoln Square, a place that had an eclectic selection of used books—pulp sci-fi novels and comic strip collections, kitschy old cookbooks and nostalgic children's books.

“I didn't know if you wanted the whole set,” Chris said. “But they were too cheap not to buy.”

I started with
Little House on the Prairie,
reading it, like the one before it, in bed.

“So are the Ingalls family horrible racists?” Chris asked me, because I'd been telling him about the history of the books.

“Ma is, a little,” I admitted. “She's racist the way some people's grandmas are racist.” Which makes it all pretty awkward, of course, especially when you love your grandmother. At least the book itself acknowledged the uneasiness: Ma really was sort of a jerk, the way she sang wistful songs about vanished mythical “Indian maids” but then couldn't stand to be in the same room as a real Indian. And Pa, for all his sympathies, had to stop himself from calling the Osage “screeching devils.” As a child, I'd known
Little House on the Prairie
to be about an uneasy coexistence with Indians who were alternately fascinating and terrifying. Now as an adult I could see that the fascination and terror were embellished with “glittering” Indian eyes and other dismaying details, a whole pile of cultural baggage. As I read on, I found myself willing to take the bad with the good. Though when the bad was Pa in blackface during a minstrel show in
Little Town on the Prairie,
that
was
a little much.

“Oh, no,” I said, showing Chris the illustration. “Pa's, uh, a ‘darky.' ”

“You're worried that these books are going to turn
you
into a racist grandma, aren't you?” Chris joked.

“Go to sleep,” I told him, which is what Pa says to Laura in
Little House on the Prairie
when she asks him difficult questions about the Indians.

There were things I would always take issue with, of course—awkward moments in an otherwise happy reunion. Everything had come back so vividly that I learned to stop worrying and love the books as much as I had when I'd first read them. After
Little House on the Prairie
, I moved on to
On the Banks of Plum Creek,
then took a quick detour away from the books about Laura to read about Almanzo Wilder's childhood in
Farmer Boy.
Then it was back to the Ingalls family in
By the Shores of Silver Lake
and
The Long Winter
and, finally,
Little Town on the Prairie
and
These Happy Golden Years.

I took to carrying the books around. For the next four months I always had a Little House book in my purse. I could never remember whether or not my cell phone was charged or if I had any quarters for the parking meter, but if I needed to suddenly immerse myself in a passage about making button-strings, I was set.

It wasn't just that I was getting old feelings back from revisiting the books, or that they transported me to some sunny and comforting kind of place. At first the books were just an escape, but after a month or two of reading, Laura World had started to spill into other areas of my waking life as I began looking up Laura and the history behind the Little House books on Google and Wikipedia. At some point it wasn't enough to revisit the familiar memory landscape I'd known; now I had to know what the twisted haysticks the Ingalls family burned during
The Long Winter
looked like. I knew what year the Long Winter actually happened (1880–81), and that for years afterward it was known to locals as “the Hard Winter” and “the Snow Winter.” Now I knew exactly where
On the Banks of Plum Creek
took place (near Walnut Grove, Minnesota) and that it took about eight hours and thirtyseven minutes to drive there from my apartment.

The accumulation of knowledge began to radiate outward into the rest of my personal universe. Either that or it was a black hole sucking everything else in. I found out that Laura's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, helped found the Libertarian Party, and that there was some big lawsuit about book royalties nine years ago, and that the series is really big with homeschoolers, and that you can buy a special Christmas ornament depicting Jack, the brindled bulldog, and that there was a TV movie about Laura starring that actress who'd played the crazy girl on Season Two of
Dawson's Creek
.

I mean one minute I'd be looking up the years the Ingalls family spent living near Independence, Kansas, and then the next I was on
TV.com
poring over a page listing all twenty-six episodes of the 1975 Japanese anime series
Laura, a Girl of the Prairie (
also known as
Laura the Prairie Girl
). Who knew that such a thing existed? The episodes had titles like “A Cute Calf Has Arrived!” and “Dreams and Hope! Departing for the Prairies” and “Wheat, Grow Tall!” The series never aired in the United States and to my eternal frustration I have never seen a full episode, save a few clips on YouTube, one of them in Italian. I still search to this day. Dreams and hope!

I even started a secret Twitter account, @Half PintIngalls, where I pretended to be Laura Ingalls Wilder and wrote posts like:
What a day. I curled my bangs with my slate pencil for this?
and
Today was a pretty good day until blackbirds ate the entire oat harvest.

And thus for much of the summer of 2008 I was as frenzied and all-consuming as a grasshopper in a wheat field. My mind buzzed with the exhilaration of worlds colliding.
Twitter! Anime! Laura Ingalls Dawson's Wilder Creek!

I went back and forth this way for weeks and weeks, going from the yellowed pages of the books to the Web in constant escape and re-entry, though of course looking up everything I could about the books was a kind of escape, too. I'd click and click and sometimes I'd really get somewhere.

Or was I getting anywhere? The books were comforting, but they had started to unravel something in me, too.

As I read my way through the series
,
I followed Laura and the Ingalls family as they move farther west—and then stop. While in some ways it's satisfying to see the family get their homestead and help settle De Smet, South Dakota, that yearning to keep going stays deliberately and maddeningly unresolved. I wasn't sure if I liked that Laura had traded in her old reckless adventures (poking badgers with sticks! riding horses bareback at railroad camps!) for the social dramas of town life, with all the spelling bees and organ recitals and engraved name cards.

It's not that I didn't love those things, too—I never fail to be enthralled by the copious descriptions of parlor furniture in
Little Town on the Prairie
and hearing how the classier citizens of De Smet lived—but I noticed for the first time how the books enact the effects of civilization and adulthood: old impulses get thwarted and life gets cluttered with those china lamps.

I'd barely gotten into
These Happy Golden Years,
the last official book in the series, when I began to dread finishing it. I was gradually remembering, after thirty years, how it ended for me the last time.

Which is to say: not well. Laura marries Almanzo Wilder in
These Happy Golden Years
, just like the back-cover copy of my paperbacks said she would, a thrilling little oracle in fine print. But then the happy wedding-day final chapter is followed by a wobbly wagon train of three posthumous books, all of them deeply frustrating to me as a child. I'd read them dutifully—or rather, tried to—since their titles were listed in the front matter of some of the Little House books, implying they were almost part of the series.

There was the novel
The First Four Years,
published in 1971 from a draft Laura had written in a notebook discovered long after her death. It had appeared to be a continuation of the Little House series—a story of Laura and Almanzo as newlyweds—and had been published as such, although Ursula Nordstrom, Laura's editor at Harper and Brothers, admitted there was “a faint air of slight disillusion in it” that set it apart. Critics now believe that Laura had intended it to be an adult novel—the characters not quite the same as the ones in the earlier books—and a solo effort, unlike the books that had been edited (and sometimes enhanced) by her daughter, Rose.
The First Four Years
is now included as a ninth volume in the Little House series (it was in the box set Chris gave me), but anyone who reads the book expecting to return to the world of the earlier books will find it much changed. The couple suffers crop failures; they lose a baby; they get diphtheria. The book was oddly paced and hard for me to follow as a child, so I'd had almost nothing to go on except for the sparse illustrations, the final one an image of their little house burning down.

The next two books didn't destroy the world of the books for me—they simply lost it altogether.
On the Way Home
was Laura's diary of the journey that she, Almanzo, and daughter Rose made in 1894 when they left South Dakota for Missouri.
West from Home
was a collection of Laura's letters home from her trip in San Francisco in 1915 to visit Rose, now an adult, and to see the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Had I first read them when I was older, I probably could have connected the dots between the Laura of the Little House books, with her braids blowing in the wind, and the older woman who traveled across the country, writing about weather and hotel rooms.

As an eight-year-old kid, though, I couldn't make sense of any of it. I was bored by
On the Way Home,
with its logbook descriptions of fields and roads, and its murky old photos of the middling towns the Wilders had passed through. And
West from Home
just confused me. What was this Panama-Pacific thing? Where was Laura? I'd finally figured out that she went by the adult nicknames “Bessie” and “Mama Bess,” and at last I managed to glean two bits of information about her. One: that she was “growing fat,” or so her daughter, Rose, said, in a letter home to Almanzo. According to Rose, Laura ate multiple buttered scones “without a quiver!” At the time I read that I was growing up in a household full of diet books, so I was mortified. Two: Rose reported, in the very next letter, that Laura had fallen off a streetcar and hit her head. I couldn't un-know these sad facts, that the little Half-Pint I knew and loved had become some kind of embarrassing middle-aged person who got into stupid mishaps in the big city.