The Wilder Life (45 page)

“So here we are in South Dakota,” she wrote, as they crossed the border, and a line or two down added, “So far we don't like South Dakota.”

A day later they reached Manchester, the little town just past De Smet where Grace lived with her husband, Nate. And then a day after that Laura wrote, “Grace seems like a stranger, only now and then something familiar about her face. I suppose it is the same with me.”

Something clicked open in me when I read that, and I read on. That same day she'd gone into De Smet and visited places that I knew had been on Calumet Avenue. Her account is often cranky: “Ran around town awhile then sat at music store waiting for Manly and Nate to show up. Stupid, tiresome, hot. I got tired of it and went by myself up the street.” She writes of driving out to the place where Pa's homestead used to be, the road “nearly in the place where Carrie and I walked to school and Manly used to drive Barnum and Skip,” and then back through town out to the land she and Almanzo had owned, which, she noted, was simply fields now, all the buildings on it gone. They must have sat in their car and looked out at the empty hill just as we had the day before.

The diary was simple and the events it described were unexciting, but I found it strangely uplifting because it reminded me so much of what I'd just experienced. Throughout her visit she complains of the hot winds, of feeling ill; she is disappointed and joyful and irritated and wistful. “It all makes me miss those who are gone,” she writes. “Pa and Ma and Mary and the Boasts.”

I know, I thought. I'd always been a little at odds with this woman, this Bessie or Mrs. Wilder or whatever she was really called, who was not quite Laura and not quite
not
her, but I felt like I finally knew the story that continued, that I'd been where it had gone.

Now it was almost dark and we went to dinner, some place that was tucked into the hill behind the motel, close enough that we could walk. As we went we counted out loud, doing an inventory of all that we'd seen: six parlor organs, five dugouts (including replica, ruins of, and stage set), eight covered wagons, including the one where we'd stayed; countless girls in sunbonnets, at least fifty people in nineteenth-century dress onstage and almost as many offstage, Chris pointed out, if you counted the girls at the Laura and Nellie contests. Five chamber pots, three washboards. Three times we'd read or heard about the origin for the phrase “sleep tight,” two of them erroneously attributing it to tightening the ropes on a bed frame. Three cows, two china shepherdesses, six RVs. Ten to twelve disturbing artistic renderings of various members of the Ingalls family, not counting the Laura dolls, of which we'd seen about six, including the bobblehead figure I'd bought in Walnut Grove. Seven flatirons, three whatnots, eight decorative haysticks, five teenage tour guides. Maybe a dozen iron cookstoves. Two signs that advertised both Laura Ingalls Wilder and Miller beer. At least six horses. Two girls who weren't really dressed like Laura at all. We could go on.

By one of the back doors of the Super 8, back where the owner or manager must have lived, there was a small garden like the one we'd seen earlier that day, with carefully tended sage and basil plants. It made me think of an Elizabeth Bishop poem, the one about the filling station with the improbable doily and plant in its waiting room.
Somebody lives here
, the line went, and it was true, true and in the present tense.

It didn't feel like the last night of anything anymore, just that the world went on and would follow us home.

LESS THAN TWO WEEKS LATER I was in New York City, seeing friends. More than once I thought about this as I'd go up the stairs from the subway into the sunlight, not quite believing that I'd just been out on the prairie and now I was here. I've visited New York at least once a year for a while now, but this time the city's age, all its great, worn, beautiful, burnished parts, was more visible to me in a way it hadn't been since my first trip here. I liked being somewhere so vast and old.

One night when I met a friend for dinner in Greenwich Village I got off the subway a stop early so I could walk by a building on Jones Street where, according to
The Little House Guidebook
, Rose Wilder Lane had once lived in 1919. (She was a working writer in her thirties by this point, close to my age but still adventurous enough to spend a winter living so profoundly on the cheap that she'd slept under newspapers on a set of bedsprings on the floor. The place had been unheated and she warmed her hands under her arms as she sat at her typewriter during the day. She'd written about the experience years afterward in a letter to a friend and made it all sound like a blast.) Later I rode a battered elevator in an old factory in Brooklyn up to my friend Jami's apartment, where we pulled chairs along the concrete floor over to the great big windows and gazed out over the East River and the skyline at night.

Ever since I'd come back from the trip west, I'd been having moments where I'd tell myself to look around, to
look at this
, as if I'd needed to be apprised of my own life. It reminded me of what I used to do when I was little, when Laura was in my head. Now, though, it was just me, and that was all right.

“You're not seeing the
Farmer Boy
house?” Sandra Hume had said back when I'd talked to her in the spring. It was hard to tell over the phone, but I think she'd actually said it in
horror.
I didn't think it was a big deal whether or not I saw the place where the book was set and where Almanzo Wilder had been a boy. Like all the other book locales, there was an official homesite museum there now, but since it was of miles east from all the other Little House destinations—as far upstate in New York as you could get, really, up near the border of Quebec—visiting it would require a trip all its own, a trip I'd kept leaving out of my plans.

Because, and I'll confess right now, I wasn't a big fan of
Farmer Boy.
That was really the reason why I hadn't made it to upstate New York.

I mean I liked
Farmer Boy
just fine, but I'd never read it as many times as the Laura books. Often I forgot about it. It hadn't captured my imagination the way the rest of the series had. As far as I was concerned,
Farmer Boy
wasn't really in Laura World. I didn't identify with young Almanzo the way I did with Laura, perhaps in part because he was a boy, and also because I thought his family was a little too perfect. While I'd enjoyed the book, it felt secondary, like (forgive my nine-year-old mind) a spin-off of one of my favorite TV shows. I know some Little House fans will be extremely dismayed by this comparison to
Joanie Loves Chachi
, because
Farmer Boy
is one of the most beloved books in the series
.
It's also the most schismatic book, since plenty of people, myself included, consider it the one book in the series that you could skip if you had to.

I've always felt that the book starts off well enough, with that terrific early scene where the mild-mannered schoolteacher defeats the bully with a borrowed whip. After that, though, things get a bit dull, and the book plods along with its hardworking values, and character-building chores, and Father's two-page-long speeches about the value of a half-dollar.

But at least there are pancakes. Because, yes,
Farmer Boy
is not without its supreme pleasures, some of the best moments in the series. There's a coveted colt, a visit from the tinsmith, ice blocks, a pet suckling pig, and spreads of food so fabulous they eclipse even the sugaring-dance feast in
Little House in the Big Woods
. Honestly, without
Farmer Boy
in the series,
The Little House Cookbook
would be a much grimmer compendium, consisting only of Ingalls family frontier fare like bean broth and johnnycake instead of Mother Wilder's stuffed goose and pumpkin pie. So I will not begrudge anyone their love for young Almanzo and his virtuous but cushy life. I just wasn't sure if I wanted to experience
Farmer Boy
beyond the apples 'n' onions recipe. (Which, by the way, is
incredible
.)

So when I told Sandra that I didn't think I'd be going out to see the
Farmer Boy
house, I could tell she was on the other side of the schism, a real Almanzonian. But then she pointed out that the Wilder farmhouse was the
only
house mentioned in the Little House books that was
still on its original foundation
, which sounded pretty impressive. Would it be more full of ghosts, for instance, if there really was such a thing as ghosts?

“Trust me, the place is really SPECIAL
,
” Sandra told me over the phone, with something of a don't-say-I-didn't-warn-you emphasis on the word
special
. And then I knew that if I didn't go I'd always wonder.

Fine, then, I would go to see the dadblanged
Farmer Boy
house. I decided as long as I was in New York I'd make a detour upstate. Chris couldn't go with me this time, so I asked one of my oldest friends, Michael, whom I'd be seeing in New York City, to come along. We'd taken road trips together before: in college we'd gone to Washington, D.C., for a Pride march; more recently we'd gone to Iowa City together, spending the whole drive from Chicago comparing our worst ex-boyfriends. Now he was willing to fly from LaGuardia airport to Burlington, Vermont, with me, and drive two hours through the Adirondacks in a rented car just to see some place where a kid with a funny name once picked potatoes.

Michael had never read the Little House books, so he had only a vague sense of our destination.

“So this is the house of the guy that Melissa Gilbert marries on the TV show?” Michael asked. “Almanzo, right?” He pronounced it “Al-MON-zo,” the way most people do, since that's how they said it on the NBC show.

Yes, I told him. “But actually, it's pronounced ‘Al-MAN-zo.' ”

“How do you know?”

“Because that's how
Laura
said it.” I was so excited to get to tell someone about this. “There's this one recording of her speaking voice, and she says
Almanzo
with the flat
a,
but when she says
Iowa
she pronounces it ‘Ioway.'”

“Oh my God, you know so much about this now,” Michael said.

“I know!” Over the course of the drive, I let all the Laura knowledge I'd collected over the past year unspool while he listened. I told him about the real Ingalls family who'd kept moving to the wrong places and the fictional family who'd always just followed the sunset and their destiny, and the traces where they'd both been, all these hollows in the ground and these remade little houses. I explained who Rose had been and how she was both a part of the Little House books and a world unto herself. I talked about the storm in Kansas and the lightning in South Dakota and the frozen lake in Wisconsin, and how for weeks after our visit I'd look up the local news around Pepin to see if the ice had finally broken.

Michael was a good listener. You could do a lot worse than drive through the Vermont countryside near the end of summer with your best friend of twenty years, telling him about these people, these places that you were starting to know by heart.