The Wilder Life (11 page)

I know all this is very impressive, especially in the realm of freshwater lake enthusiasm, but Lake Pepin might be best known to most of the world as the place where, more than a hundred and thirty years ago, a little kid picked up too many pebbles.

It happens in Chapter 9 of
Little House in the Big Woods,
where four-year-old Laura fills her pocket with lake pebbles at the shore while the family is visiting town. And then, when Pa tosses her back into the wagon, the heavy pocket rips off her dress and she cries. For me, reading that scene never fails to bring on a brief, scalding instant of recognition in recalling exactly what it was like to be a tiny little kid, your whole sense of being so lumpy and vulnerable that the smallest things were everything, and the everything could be so unspeakably wonderful, and the wonderful could be snatched away in an instant, leaving a big ragged hole in your universe just like the one in Laura's dress.

Now Lake Pepin was in sight, a glimpse of pale between the buildings along the highway.

“I want to pick up pebbles on the beach,” I said. “A whole bunch of them.”

“Oh, that's not going to end well,” Chris said, because I had just made him read
Big Woods
before the trip.

Most of the town was perched on the side of the hill facing Lake Pepin, though the visitor's center and the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum were along the highway. They were closed for the winter, and as we drove down the hill into the rest of the town, we could see that Pepin was a lakefront vacation town in off-season mode, with a handful of brightly painted cafés and a dockside restaurant, all closed. It was not unlike the scene near the beginning of
Little House on the Prairie,
when the Ingalls family is leaving Wisconsin in their covered wagon and they pass through Pepin early in the morning, past all the quiet, shuttered houses. At the bottom of the hill a set of freight railroad tracks ran right along the shore, and across the tracks was a small marina.

We decided that in lieu of the visitor's center, we'd stop at the public library, a modern building with only one room. There we met a very nice librarian well accustomed to giving Little House tourist directions.

“Have you been up the hill yet?” she asked. She meant the Little House Wayside, the replica of the Ingalls log cabin on the original site, which was seven miles from town. We'd planned on going there next, we told her, and we asked if there was anything in particular we should look for.

Her advice, which I will attempt to paraphrase, was: “Well, the county road there is more or less the same route Pa would travel to town, and to get there you turn on that County Road CC, which you'll see the turnoff just past the place that sells gazebos over here, and then when you go up you can stop at Oakwood Cemetery to see where Laura's aunt is buried, and also her first teacher, and the Huleatts, you know the Huleatts, right? And then after the cemetery you just keep going, and if you can you should look for the intersection of County Road I, because
that's
where the school was, that Mary and Laura attended, with Anna Barry, who's in the cemetery, but of course the school's not there anymore, but where you see where it was, you'll be about two miles from the cabin, though that's by the road, because the way they walked to school was much closer. Anyway, then you'll get to the cabin.”

“Did you get all that?” Chris asked as we returned to the car.

“No, but let's go up there right now,” I said. “While I can still sort of remember.”

We turned off the highway as the librarian told us and went gradually uphill through thin woods and farm fields, past farmhouses that were at least a century old. The whole landscape seemed so sleepy and timeless that I had trouble imagining that it had once been different, that the woods—Big or otherwise—were ever there.

I made Chris turn off at the cemetery, which was in a clearing just up the hill from the county road, and we followed the tire ruts through the slush along the main aisle of the place.

“Who are we looking for again?” he asked, as we got out and stomped around in the old snow and mud. There was a mix of nineteenth- and twentieth-century headstones, the older ones thinner and spotted with lichen.

I was trying to remember what the librarian said. “I think she said Laura's aunt is here? And her first teacher? Anna something? Also some of the Huleatts.”

“Who?”

“Uh, the Huleatts? They were friends of the Ingalls who lived here, and they had some kids who played with Laura. You know the boy with the copper thingies on his shoes? Clarence? He was one of them,” I said. Then I actually spotted a small monument that said
Huleatt.
“Look!” I said. It was a stone for an Elizabeth, age 72, died 1889.

Chris came over. “Wait, so is that the boy with the copper toes on his shoes?”

“Well, no,” I said. “But this person was related to him.”

“So where's
his
grave?”

“I don't know. I mean, I don't know if he's even buried here.” It didn't feel quite right to be here, tromping over other people's graves, just to look at a familiar name. Were you
supposed
to want to see where Laura's aunt was buried? I had to remind myself: it was not
my
everything. “Let's go,” I said, finally. We got back in the car and continued up the road toward the cabin.

The Little House Wayside is just that: a wayside, a sort of rest stop with a little parking lot, a picnic pavilion, and a concrete bathroom shed. The cabin is set back from the road, across an expanse of lawn—or, in our case, snow. It was indeed a little gray house made of logs, just as the book said, as well as the historical marker nearby. It was awfully tidy, with a cinderblock foundation and the logs perfectly aligned. Clearly it had been built by the parks and recreation service and not Pa, and more for the sake of picnics than for history. I felt a little dumb, coming out here thinking that all I needed was to see a log cabin. Now I wasn't sure.

“Well, this is it,” I said, as we walked through the patchy snow. Stapled to the front door was a plastic-covered paper sign.
PLEASE CLOSE DOOR
, it read, in text both capitalized and underlined,
TO KEEP THE BEES, BIRDS & OTHER VAR-MENTS OUT!!!

“Did Pa type that up?” Chris asked. “He doesn't seem like an all-caps kind of guy.”

“He wasn't, but you had to make a trip to town to buy lowercase letters,” I said. “Just like white sugar.”

Inside were two little horse-stall-sized rooms off the main room, one with a window and one dark as a closet. There wasn't much else to do inside but just stand there and look up at the roof rafters and peer out the windows and study the things posted on the Plexiglas-covered corkboards along one of the walls: a few photocopied historical documents, a brochure about Pepin, a couple postcards—one had a portrait of Laura in her old age, another a photo of the very cabin we were in.

We read a 1945 letter from Laura, written in that sort of shaky, elderly-looking script that I'd eventually come to recognize from at least four paces away.

I am very glad that you Enjoy reading my books,
she'd written to a group of schoolchildren in the letter,
but sorry you could not read them in their order. They are all one story, you know, and they are not so interesting when you read the end first.

“A little cranky of her, isn't it?” Chris pointed out.

I had to agree. At least we were standing in the place where the story began, I thought—or, well,
near
it. Although I really had to think about it, because truthfully, I felt like we were still a very long way from the Big Woods, and nowhere near Laura World as I knew it. Yet despite everything that was clearly wrong with the cabin, with its utterly blank hearth, I refused to feel disappointed.

But then as I stood there and read the letter again, I suddenly felt an odd little pang of chastened helplessness. When it came to the Little House books, weren't we
always
at the end of the story first? Inevitably out of order wherever we went? How could we avoid that? Here I was, standing where the woods had been, where the cabin the little girl had lived in had long since rotted away, where a slightly clumsy approximation of it had been built as a sort of monument to her, long after she'd grown up and grown old and died, and all her letters to schoolchildren kept for posterity, including the one I was reading now—
this
is
now
, lady!—and this
now,
this perpetual too-lateness, was all I had. I was doing the best that I could with it. Weren't we all trying, those of us who drove out here in our cars, who knew “the end” but kept coming back to the story anyway?

I stepped over to the window to look out at the field and the feathery little trees and the diminishing snow. Maybe it didn't look anything like the landscape Laura had known, but it was bleakly pretty, nearly as lonesome as the sound of wolves howling outside.

Before we headed out I looked at the postcard of the cabin again, which seemed to be there as a kind of reminder. Yes, we were here.

Judging from the empty parking lot, we were the only guests at the motel I'd picked in Pepin. The lobby was empty, too, and there was nobody behind the front desk. I hit the bell, the way you do in a movie about being in a deserted motel, but nobody came. I hit it again and we waited. We could see an open door down a dim side hallway—it had a child gate, and the light in the room flickered to indicate a TV was on. Chris started to walk toward the room but hesitated.

“You made a reservation here, right?” he asked.

“Maybe I should just call,” I said. “Maybe they forgot.” I got out my cell phone and picked up one of the motel's business cards from a holder on the front desk and dialed the number on it. After a moment the phone behind the desk started ringing through the empty lobby. Chris and I stood and watched it.

The manager answered the phone from wherever she was in the back. “Oh, I'll be right out,” she said. She came out apologizing. “I just finished giving my kid a bath. I guess I couldn't hear anything over the splashing.”

I felt a little sheepish. We were probably the only Laura Ingalls Wilder tourists in town that week, and here she had to accommodate us and our crazy off-season whims. While Chris moved the car—“you can park it right against the side of the building if you want,” the manager had said—I told her we'd been to the Wayside cabin.

“Yeah ...” She seemed to be trying to find the right words. “There's ... not much there,” she said.

I had to agree. I asked her if she read the books. She looked like she was about my age. She was shy and kind and looked like she wanted to be back in her apartment down the hall with her family. I was sure this time of year she didn't have to spend much time venturing out into these carpeted hallways or this lobby with the big lofted ceiling with all its empty space.