The Wilder Life (28 page)

“We continue the same farm practices that our ancestors used over a hundred years ago,” the page read.
We
as in Samuel and Heidi, who lived in southern Illinois, only a short drive from Chicago.

The Ackersons, I discovered, worked their land with horse-drawn plows; they owned cows, pigs, and several heirloom breeds of turkeys, chickens, geese, and guinea fowl. They sold eggs from their front yard and took Thanksgiving orders for the turkeys. Heidi made soap, spun yarn, and made her own cheese and butter; Samuel had his own blacksmith's forge, which he used to make wrought-iron fixtures. It all sounded like the idyllically industrious Wilder farm in
Farmer Boy,
where Almanzo's mother worked at her loom and Father made roof shingles by hand, and the cellar was filled with bushels of homegrown apples and potatoes and jugs of maple syrup.

I was getting pretty smitten by this place, especially when I read that the Ackersons gave tours of the farm and hands-on classes in traditional skills. It was like a living history museum, except it was
real
. None of this earnest-volunteer-in-a-pinafore business like at the pioneer villages I'd visited as a kid! The Ackersons were like the Amish, I thought, except without all the bizarre rules and shunning.

I thought about contacting them, but would they understand that I didn't want to tan hides or raise chickens, that I just wanted to play Laura Ingalls Wilder every now and then?

I looked on the Ackersons' “About” page. Samuel's hobbies included historical reenactments, it said, and Heidi first fell in love with the past when she read
Little House in the Big Woods
as a little girl.

That was all I needed. I had to see this place.

I considered taking one of the tours that the Ackersons offered by appointment. But then I noticed on the site that they were hosting their annual “Homesteading Weekend” in June, a gettogether for “like-minded people who would like to share their homesteading skills and learn from others.” There was no set schedule, the description said, but the activities usually included demonstrations in blacksmithing, spinning, weaving, and cooking on an open fire with cast iron. It was just a few weeks away.

“Wait, so these people, you want to go to their house and learn how to make candles and stuff?” Chris said when I showed him the site.

“Not their house,” I said. “Their
farm.
” I knew it sounded a little weird, but these people were experts. Clover Meadow Farm had been featured on a History Channel series about rural American traditions. That sounded plenty trustworthy to me. “They're really serious,” I told Chris. “They plow with horses and everything.”

For me the greatest appeal of the homesteading weekend was that it seemed just Laura-esque enough. At last I'd found the next logical step beyond re-creating a few dishes in
The Little House Cookbook
and churning butter. Learning some of these “homesteading” skills, I figured, would be perfectly in the spirit of the Little House books and Laura's intentions. In
Little House, Long Shadow,
Anita Clair Fellman points out that by the late 1920s, when Laura was writing the pages that would eventually become
Little House in the Big Woods,
the highway near her home was being paved and “more than 50 percent of the population lived in urban areas and had ready access to canned goods and year-round fresh foods.” No doubt this sense of a rapidly changing world must have motivated Laura to write down the domestic practices of her pioneer childhood with enough detail to ensure that Ma's ways were not completely forgotten.

The Ackersons seemed to have the same objective. For the most part.

I watched an online video of their History Channel segment, which showed lovely footage of the farm and the draft horses while the narrator called the farm “
Little House on the Prairie
come to life.” The segment featured the Ackersons as they gave a tour to a Chicago suburban family who were thinking of taking up a similar lifestyle. The Ackersons were shown churning butter and spinning yarn while the children looked on.

Then Heidi gave an interview sound bite: “There might be a time in the future that these kids need to know this stuff,” she said. “Our resources won't be around forever.”

The meaning of that was not lost on me. Ever since I'd gotten the churn and started to build a small collection of “playing Laura” accoutrements, I'd occasionally think about how these things, along with my budding pioneer knowledge, might be of use. Wasn't it nice that I could make bread starter from scratch, and that I had a kerosene lamp that could come in handy in a blackout?

“You're so totally set for the apocalypse with all this stuff, you know,” my friend Jami joked one night when I was telling her I was thinking about fermenting my own apple cider vinegar.

“Yeah, right,” I said. But I felt a tiny swell of pride at the thought of being prepared for something. Even if I didn't see the point of thinking too much about that
something,
which of course could be anything: peak oil, global warming, terrorist attacks, zombies. Oh, I'd had a moment or two of Y2K panic back in the day, and in the months after 9/11 I'd collected a dozen cans of cheap soup and off-brand spaghetti and stashed them in a box under the sink, a gesture that in retrospect seemed more about managing anxiety than anything else.

Then there was the word
homesteading
. In the course of searching online for obscure butter-making utensils and other such things, I'd come across this word enough times to understand that it no longer meant proving up on a 160-acre land claim the way Pa Ingalls had done. It now stood for the pursuit of a self-sufficient lifestyle—living off the land, so to speak.

This appeared to mean different things to different people. Some of the homesteader talk I found on the Internet sounded pretty appealing to me—the emphasis on organic gardening and local food production was very much in tune with the Michael Pollan books I'd read. The stuff about one-world government conspiracies—well, not so much. Homesteading was definitely a mixed bag: from what I could tell, people in the online world used the term to describe anything from a home canning hobby to living in an off-the-grid Alaska compound.

So while I sensed that the Ackersons had some decidedly non–Little House reasons for their homesteading lifestyle, I wasn't sure what they were. That was their business, not mine.

Heidi Ackerson was extremely pleasant over the phone. She confirmed that, yes, anyone was welcome to come to the homesteading weekend, as long as they brought food for potluck. I told her why I was interested in coming, what with this Laura Ingalls Wilder hobby I'd developed lately. “I've churned butter,” I said, as casually as I could manage.

“Maybe you can help show everyone how it's done,” she suggested. She explained that at these weekends there were always more people coming to learn than to demonstrate.

“Really? Sure,” I said. This churning business could get me places, I thought proudly. I liked the idea that I could trade on my butter skills in this homesteader economy. Didn't Ma Wilder trade her butter for tin? Or use it to pay the cobbler? Something like that.

Heidi said that weekenders could camp out at the farm, stay in a motel nearby, or even sleep on the floor of their living room, but I figured Chris and I could drive the two hours from Chicago.

“What time does everything start on Saturday morning?” I asked, thinking we could get there by nine a.m. if we had to.

“Well, we usually get started when we get up,” she said. “Between five and seven.”

“Sure!” I said, trying my best to sound unfazed. Well, it
was
a farm. We would have to come out Friday night and set up our tent if we didn't want to miss anything. And I did not want to miss anything.

We arrived early in the evening on Friday, when it was still daylight. It was a tiny place, with just a farmhouse, a low red barn, a couple of sheds, and two small fields. Heidi was coming out of the house as we drove up (I recognized her from online), and she waved at our car.

“You can park over by the tents,” she called. She was in her late forties or early fifties, deeply tan, with shoulder-length brown hair she kept tucked behind her ears in a way that made her look younger.

As we slowly drove in, I could see that the farm had exactly the sort of barnyard one visualizes in children's books like
Charlotte's Web—
teeming with geese and chickens and turkeys. A border collie romped ahead of our car. I could see a large garden beyond the barnyard, and behind it, a meadow. It was even better than I'd hoped.

There were three tents set up already at the edge of the fields, and people had gathered in the yard next to the house, where there were picnic tables and a fire pit. Some were setting up food at the table; nearly a dozen others were sitting in lawn chairs around the fire. A few children were playing on a nearby tire swing. It all looked like a typical picnic except for the two women who were working at spinning wheels. Spinning wheels! All right!

We set up our tent and then joined the group around the fire pit. We introduced ourselves to Samuel, Heidi's husband, who was tending the fire, and then several others whose names I hadn't learned yet. Besides the spinning-wheel ladies, there was a woman in pigtail braids with a big book in her lap, two long-haired guys who were assembling a cooking tripod, two sweet-looking older women in pastel sweatshirts, and a tall, wiry guy with a baseball cap.

“This is our first time here,” I confessed to the group as Chris and I set up our lawn chairs.

“Same here,” said one of the pastel-sweatshirt women. The other nodded.

The guy with the baseball cap spoke up. “But we all came down together,” he said. He motioned to the sweatshirt women and the men by the fire. “Us over here. And then Rebecca here, and Jim over there is her husband, and those are her kids, and then those guys over there by the tents are all with us, too. We came down from Wisconsin.” His name was Ron and he pumped Chris's hand when he introduced himself.

The woman with the pigtail braids was Rebecca. “We're all from the same church,” she told us. “We heard about this on the Internet.”

“So did we,” I said. “We came from Chicago.”

“All the way from
Chicago
?” said Rebecca's husband, Jim.

“It's only about two hours,” Chris explained.

I looked around. Except for Samuel and Heidi and a handful of others (including the spinning-wheel duo, whom I'd spoken with just enough to learn that they were local friends of Heidi's and liked to spin more than make small talk), most of the people were with the Wisconsin group. Like us, they were camping overnight here on the farm.

Heidi explained that more people would be coming on Saturday and Sunday—locals, mostly—but even she and Samuel seemed surprised at the Friday-night turnout. “These Wisconsin folks called me up to make sure we had room for them,” she said. “I said, ‘why not?'”

Some of the Wisconsinites kept to themselves, but the ones who sat near us were friendly. The book in Rebecca's lap was a guide to identifying edible wild plants, and she explained that she'd just been out picking a salad, which sounded impressive.

“So, you came out here from Chicago looking for something . . . different?” she asked me.

“I guess,” I said. “I already know how to churn butter. I even have a churn.” I told her about my fascination with the Little House books.

“That's great,” she said. “That was an amazing family. They could make all their own food and they had everything they needed.”

Well, not everything, I pointed out. “Pa would go out and bring back sugar, right?” I was trying to remember the various going-to-town scenes in the books. “And cornmeal. Oh, and salt pork.” Those were always my favorite scenes, with Pa coming home with provisions wrapped in paper.

“Which book was that?” she said, but she didn't wait for me to answer. “They just had so much
wisdom.
How to raise the livestock, and harvest the honey, and all those things you'd have to know if supermarkets weren't available. It's just such good knowledge.”

I nodded. Rebecca was interesting. Along with her braids she wore a short green sundress, little wire-rimmed glasses, and Birkenstock sandals. She had an even deeper tan than Heidi. She made the kind of eye contact that seemed to search your face as you talked.

We had come just in time for the dinner the Wisconsin group had prepared. Rebecca got up from her chair to serve everyone Styrofoam cups of hot, yellowish tea. It tasted a little like mint tea but with a slightly bitter note.

“It's homemade nettle tea,” she told us. Chris kept blowing on the water of his cup as if to cool it.