The Wilder Life

by Wendy McClure

  “I really do feel like I am in the time of Little House on the Prairie ,” one visitor had written.

  “This place is so real,” wrote a girl who said she was visiting with her grandparents. “It is just like Laura Ingalls used to live in. I read the books, too. I am from Connor, Minnesota.”

  Others had felt compelled to write poetic-sounding things: “I only wish today had the beautiful hearts of days gone by.” Next to the guestbook was a binder filled with clippings about the exhibit, testimonial letters, and various journal entries and bits of creative writing composed by bed-and-breakfast guests. Flipping through the pages it occurred to me that Sod House on the Prairie was not so much a history museum as it was a sort of inspirational retreat, where people came to commune with the past and tap into its muselike powers.

  There was a lot of misguided nostalgia, to be sure, but as someone who had once decided that her writing could only improve if she wrote first drafts in the same kind of orange-covered notebooks Laura used, and thus spent an hour and a half searching online to see if some stationery company somewhere still made them, I understood.

  A few things in the sod house had Do Not Touch signs on them—a china cabinet, a little glass display case—but Virginia had encouraged everything else to be hands-on.

  There were at least half a dozen sunbonnets on the beds, all different sizes and styles. The brochure had mentioned “prairie clothes to dress in” and I remembered the photo of the woman in the calico dress on the website. While I still wasn’t sure how I personally felt about dressing up, I liked the notion of prairie clothes as amenities, courtesy items just like mints or hand lotion. Just like the marijuana bars in Amsterdam, you could experiment without judgment.

  We went out and looked at the tiny log cabin, and then the dugout, which had the bare gray sod walls on the inside and a dirt floor that was packed so hard it shone. Over the bed there was a sagging clothesline with a couple of stiff cotton things hanging from it, as if the hypothetical tenants were too depressed to even go outside to dry their laundry. The brochure had promised the dugout would have an “eerie feeling of hardship,” and there certainly was one, along with the musty smell and the shower of dust I got down my back when I stepped into one of the crumblier corners. Chris brushed off the back of my shirt for me.

  “Okay, that was enough hardship,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  We tried going farther along one of the little paths through the prairie grass. It was gorgeous, but after the morning rain the heat felt unusually thick and prickly, enough to wilt my impulse to explore and stroll around like Holly Hobbie.

  By now there were other visitors. Three of them, a pair of women with a grade-school-aged girl in tow, practically settled in at the big sod house. One of them rifled through an armoire and tossed antique books on the bed.

  “Gina, what are you doing?” her friend said. She was trying out the rocking chair while the girl flipped through the scrapbook binders.

  “They said we could explore,” said Gina, as she opened a wardrobe. “What are these, nightgowns?” she asked, grabbing one of the things that hung from wooden pegs.

  “They’re prairie dresses, Gina,” her friend called. “They’re for putting on.”

  “What, like for taking pictures?” Gina asked.

  “For whatever,” the woman in the rocking chair said. “You know, for fun.”

  On our way out we stopped at the farmhouse to talk to Virginia. She pointed out her husband, Stan, who’d waved at us and the other visitors but appeared to be busy working on something farmy and important over by the big sheds across the yard. The sun was hot on the porch so Virginia invited us inside to her kitchen and talked to us while she tended a pot of beets on the stove.

  She told us a little bit about the history of the sod house. Stan had gotten the idea to build one after he’d found an old sod cutter, a special kind of plow. “He used a tractor instead of horses to pull the cutter,” she admitted. Apparently Virginia’s husband was “one of those people who should have lived in another era”—she said that he’d built the sod house as a personal challenge and because he’d wanted to preserve something of the local history. There had once been plenty of sod houses in the area, but none had survived.

  I was surprised that Virginia hadn’t read the Little House books as a kid. She’d gotten so much about the Laura World fantasy right in the sod house exhibit that I’d sort of assumed she was building on a long-standing dream from childhood. “No, I grew up on a farm,” she explained, “and my family were not readers.” In high school, though, she was drawn toward English and for a while she was a teacher, she told us.

  “Are you sure the beet smell isn’t getting to you?” she asked us. She went over to the stove and checked the boiling pot. There was a slight earthy smell, but we weren’t bothered. She sighed and shook her head. “You know, I can barely stand it,” she said. “Beets are great, except when they’re cooking.”

  Back to the subject of Laura: Virginia said she hadn’t ever watched the TV Little House on the Prairie, either. In fact, she hadn’t really discovered the books at all “until we were doing this,” she said, nodding in the direction of the sod house.

  “But now, she’s an inspiration to me—Laura, I mean,” she said. “Because I felt like I should write my mom’s story.” Virginia had written a book about her late mother’s experience with Alzheimer’s and published it on her own in 2002. It was called Butterscotch Sundaes , and there was a page about it on the Sod House on the Prairie website, with an article reprinted from a newspaper in Tracy.

  In the book Virginia had written about how her mother had gotten into wandering moods on the prairie; she’d tried to give her the freedom to roam around. She’d had to learn to understand her mother “wherever she was at,” even if it was somewhere other than the present moment. Watching an aging parent for signs of illness, Virginia said, was like scanning the prairie horizon for storm clouds. (Yes, it was, I thought.)

  Virginia said she’d been terrified to write the book, but she’d thought, well, Laura could do it. She’d started out writing for the local papers the way, she noted, Laura had written for the Missouri Ruralist. “Just writing those kind of human-interest columns, you know?” she said. For all the sunbonnet dress-up she endorsed, she seemed to know the real-person version of Laura Ingalls Wilder better than most people.

  And as for the prairie dress-up stuff, “That was something I soon caught on to,” she said, not too long after she and Stan opened the bed-and-breakfast in the completed sod house. The B&B had been his idea at first. “I thought, ‘Who in the world would want to do this? And why would people want to pay us money?’ I was totally out of touch about that.” But of course the visitors started coming, and eventually Virginia figured out that they were coming for Laura.

  “People would ask, ‘Is this where she really lived? And how long did she live here? And when did she move?’ ” At first Virginia wondered who this “she” was. But once she understood, she put a few bonnets and aprons in the armoire of the sod house, just for ambience. “And then people would ask, very gently, if they could put them on,” she said.

  Now that the sod house was no longer a bed-and-breakfast, the place officially opened at sunrise. Visitors stopping by on their way to Walnut Grove could drop their admission fee in a pay box if the McCones weren’t up yet.

  “Do people really show up that early?” I asked her.

  “All the time,” Virginia said. “You should have been here.”

  By the time we were back in Walnut Grove, there was a line of parked cars and RVs along the grass by the railroad tracks outside the museum, which was housed in a relocated railroad depot building. The museum is a monument to the two Walnut Groves. The first room is dedicated to the usual Ingalls family history stuff and exhibits about some of the real-life locals who’d been the basis for characters in On the Banks of Plum Creek. You can see a photo of Nellie Owens, one of the three girls on whom the character of Nellie
Oleson was based, and who, like her fictional counterpart, had a brother named Willie and a father who owned a mercantile store in Walnut Grove. She looked ordinary, ordinary and brunette; I would read later that the golden ringlet curls were a trait of one of the other two girls on whom Nellie Oleson was modeled. You had to feel a little sorry for Nellie Owens, that so much of her life was appropriated and yet she didn’t even get to have the hair.

  I must admit to you now that we spent far more time in the second room of the museum. Yes, the TV show room. After the gently lit glass cases, didactic placards, and careful foam-board displays of the real Walnut Grove history, the museum room dedicated to the NBC Little House on the Prairie was lit with fluorescent lights and full of fabulous crap. A TV on a stand in the corner of the room played episodes with the sound at low volume, and the walls were lined with framed stills and commemorative plates.

  Chris stopped in front of a promotional still for a 1983 episode titled “For the Love of Blanche,” in which Mr. Edwards inherits a baby orangutan. In the photo Victor French is holding an ape. The ape is wearing a sunbonnet.

  “Why have I not seen this episode?” Chris demanded. “WHERE HAS THIS BEEN ALL MY LIFE?”

  “We’ll try to TiVo it when we get home,” I told him.

  At the far end of the room was the front of the actual fireplace mantelpiece salvaged from the set of the Ingalls family kitchen. It had been installed in the wall, with the hearth painted black. Nobody seemed to pay it much attention, though I’d read in Melissa Gilbert’s memoir that when she’d visited here she’d sniffed it to see if it still smelled like her old memories of the set. (She said it hadn’t.)

  The real appeal of the TV show room seemed to be all the vintage merchandise from the ’70s on display—lunch boxes, dolls, buttons, paperbacks, posters, even a board game with spaces that proclaimed “Good Harvest” and “All’s Well That Ends Well.” It was a little stunning to see relics from the era of my own childhood, wonderfully cruddy stuff. We could have stayed there all day, flipping through the binders that held clippings, photos of cast member visits, and even a Mad Magazine parody (which was titled “Little House, Oh So Dreary,” and Chris could barely contain his joy when we found it).

  The museum continued in the lot behind the depot, in a series of scaled-down replica buildings: a tiny chapel, a schoolhouse, and a little frame house that was reportedly similar to the “wonderful house” that Pa had built. Inside, a sign encouraged us to “notice the fresh pine smell from the sawed lumber.” (It was a nice scent, but such an utterly familiar one that I found myself wishing that the mantelpiece back in the TV show room really did still smell like Melissa Gilbert’s childhood, because how many people can say they’ve smelled that?)

  Despite all these sensory prompts, there was so much about the Ingallses’ real life that I couldn’t quite grasp. The museum had its own replica dugout (the second one we’d seen that day), a little hutlike dwelling that was built to actual-size specifications. Supposedly it was as big as the place where the Ingalls family lived. It was also smaller than a freight elevator.

  “Well, the Ingallses were small people,” I pointed out to Chris at first when we looked inside. I would find myself saying that a lot whenever we came across the tiny living spaces where Laura and her family had lived. I realize now what I meant was that the size of these places seemed right and wrong all at once. The real Ingallses, I knew, were somewhat on the wee side, and they lived in a time and place where fuel for heat was scarce. Yes, I’d admit to myself, they could certainly live in little rooms like these with their relatively few possessions and their cultural acclimation to living in close quarters. Yes, of course, the Ingallses were small people, living in their cramped, chilly history.

  But as for the Ma and Pa and Laura and Mary of the books, the Ingalls family of my mind—no way was their dugout this small, I kept thinking. Once again, the actual past and the Little House world had different properties. Later that night we would go back to the motel and I would flip through Plum Creek to see how much weirder things were with these new dimensions. I’d seen how the room was so small that you could see everything in a single glance, and yet, in chapter 2, when the Ingallses move into the dugout, the book says Ma found a broom in the corner of the room. Which sort of implies that she had to go looking for it.

  “Well, you said Ma was small,” Chris pointed out.

  “Small like a person. Not Tinkerbell small,” I said.

  And then there was that part when Laura and Mary made the button-string for little Carrie at Christmas; they’d had to keep it a secret from Carrie by hiding it and only working on it when she was napping. Now, when I imagined how it all took place in that tiny room, the whole thing was absurd. What had once seemed like a cozy scene was now practically a Beckett play, with everyone having to turn their backs to everyone else for privacy. All the cooking and fiddling and ironing and living that the Ingalls family did in that room seemed nearly impossible. Except in Laura World it wasn’t. I had to keep remembering that.

  I’d had a crazy notion to walk out and see where the family had lived near Plum Creek. After all, it was only about two miles from town—Laura and Mary had walked the distance to school on a daily basis, in bare feet no less; surely in my flip-flops I could get a sense of what it was like, yes? I asked the woman at the museum gift store who’d been giving us directions.

  “I guess some people walk out there,” she said. “But you really should drive. Because, I mean, you walk out there, and then you gotta walk back.” So we drove. Good thing, because the barefoot prairie jaunt I’d imagined would’ve amounted to trudging two miles of shadeless cornfield at one p.m. in July.

  The Ingallses’ preemption land claim is now private farmland, still owned by the same family that was visited by Garth Williams on his research trip in 1947; until then, nobody in Walnut Grove had really been aware of the connection between their town and the Little House books. By the time Williams showed up, the house that Pa had built in On the Banks of Plum Creek was gone, with only a few guesses as to its location or fate, but Williams found what was left of the sod dugout on the creek. The site began to get regular tourists in the 1970s when the TV show became popular.

  I’d heard that until the museum was built in town, the family who owned the property had had to contend with confused visitors who often descended on their house believing it had once belonged to the Ingallses. Now things were considerably more organized, and for a small fee they allowed a steady stream of cars and tour buses to wind through their front yard on their way to the creek area. We pushed a few bucks into the self-serve pay box by the barn and then drove until we came to a clearing and parked. The creek was ahead, somewhere in the trees; we could see a medium-sized footbridge that led across to the dugout site.

  “This is perhaps the most unchanged of all the book locales,” The Little House Guidebook proclaims of this area. I was skeptical at first, until I saw the creek. Which really is just a creek, and at first glance you can easily forget that it is in fact a famous creek until you really look at it and recognize it. And I did: I knew it, and my mind shrieked Plum Creek! It was clear and shallow and flowing healthily along. I made Chris stop on the footbridge so I could look.

  “Here it is,” I told him, as if I’d found it myself.

  We went on over to the high bank on the other side, where the dugout house—the real one—had been. It was now a hollow spot marked by a large wooden sign; the ground was marked off with ropes in a rough square, either to show where the walls had been or to keep people off. Locals believe the dugout had caved in at least twenty years before Garth Williams had found it, and it was clear something had broken there under that particular patch of ground.

  People kept coming up the path to the dugout; we all hovered around and stood at the ropes, peering over. “Anybody could walk over this house and never know it’s here,” Ma had said in On the Banks of Plum Creek, but now anyone could see where the house had ceased to exist. M
ore than any of the other sites, the dugout ruin was simply evidence. Unlike the log cabins I’d visited or the two replica dugouts I’d seen today, there was no pretense at trying to capture what it felt like to live here, no invoking those proverbial Eerie Feelings of Hardship. Somehow it was enough to see the surroundings, the shady creek bank, and the prairie that began at the edge of the crumbled roof. None of it was different from anything I’d seen before (it really was just a creek), but something about that little pit in the ground changed everything. It felt as if the dugout hadn’t so much collapsed as it had simply turned inside out, so that the immediate world around it felt intimate and removed, as secret as a cave.

  I was going to wade in the creek. Others were doing it—both adults and kids were seeking out clear spots along the bank where it was easy to step into the water. I found a place where the dirt was smooth from the feet of other visitors. I took off my flip-flops and stepped awkwardly down the slope of the bank. The water felt nice. A little cloud of silt rose up with each step, just like On the Banks of Plum Creek had described. Or it was just like each step I’d taken in the creek at the campground where my family spent weekends when I was a kid. I don’t know which had come first, my own experience or the book, but either way, that smokelike swirl that wavered in the water was how I knew the book was true.

  I stopped wading and stood still. I had to forgive the awkwardness, the feetfirst unwieldiness of trying to enter the world of the book this way, standing in the water with my shoulder bag and my cameras. It helped a bit to listen to the water and all the summer noises, birds and things rasping away and making clattering calls to each other; somehow it was quiet enough to hear them.

  I looked up. A little girl about seven years old was standing on the bank. She’d stopped short when she saw me, and I could tell she was trying to reconcile her sense of Laura World with the strangely crowded reality: here was Plum Creek, but here was this lady, too. Over the course of the trip there’d be other little encounters like this, usually with kids but sometimes with adults, too, where everyone’s reveries bumped up against one another. Chris told me later that the girl at the creek looked at him as if to say, Is she going to stay in there all day? But I knew it was time to get out. I climbed up the bank and picked up my shoes.