The Wilder Life (34 page)

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.