Little House on the Prairie: Chapter 1

"A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin. They drove away and left it lonely and empty in the clearing among the big trees, and they never saw that little house again."

The Big Woods are becoming very crowded. Sometimes they can hear a rifle shot that isn't Pa's. The path beside their house is becoming well traveled, with a wagon creaking past almost every day. Pa is ready to move on. The wild animals will not stay in a land so choked with people.

One dark morning, Grandma and Grandpa, all the aunts and uncles, and all the cousins gather around a wagon all packed with things from the little house. It is still winter and the air is cold, but Pa and Ma load the girls up and head off to Indian country. They have to get across the Mississippi before the ice breaks up.

It is a long way to Indian country. They must ride in their bouncing wagon across Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, and into Kansas. Laura gets very tired of riding in the wagon, but they keep on, day after day, following the wagon tracks across the prairie.

Thoughts:
It certainly took a special breed of men to be pioneers. And it took an even more special breed of women to agree to go with them! If it had been me when Pa came and made his case for uprooting the whole family to go on a perilous journey so he doesn't have to listen to anyone else's rifle, I think I would have beaned him with a cast iron skillet. But it wasn't me, and so the West was won.

"One day in the very last of winter Pa said to Ma, "Seeing you don't object, I've decided to go see the West. I've had an offer for this place and we can sell it now for as much as we're ever likely to get, enough to give us a start in a new country."

I just love this. "Seeing you don't object." To uprooting the children, leaving behind every convenience you'd managed to scrape from the wilderness, drag your family across five states, and expose them to untold dangers. No, I'm sure Ma didn't object. Men can be so clueless sometimes; he probably thought the silent treatment was consent. But Ma loved Pa enough to go with him.

They had to face a large peril right at the start of the trip. Lake Pepin, a wide spot on the Mississippi River, had to be crossed before the ice broke up. It was late in the season, and there was absolutely no guarantee that their heavily loaded wagon wouldn't go crashing through the ice, drowning all of them on their first day of travel. Obviously they made it or the book series would have been a whole lot shorter, but nerve-wracking much?

Maybe it's because I'm especially not fond of drowning, but this particular experience really jumped out at me. The risk the Ingalls family took, the suspense of a mother not knowing if her decision would cost her children their lives---it's very gripping. So it was a natural for me to pick it for the blog.

Of course I don't have any scary lakes to cross, and I wouldn't cross them if I did (I lack the true pioneer spirit remember!), but I do have the place where the road flooded last spring. It's still underwater and now frozen over. Since I walked the thing while it was still liquid, I knew that it never came over my waist. Still, I felt precautions were in order. A good pioneer expects the unexpected...but doesn't that make it expected? Hmmmmmm.

Life jackets would have been nice, but since I didn't have any on hand, I went with the next best thing---inner tubes. I felt they added a jaunty aspect to our appearance, but certain sensitive teenagers disagreed. Oh, well, no ice time without 'em, so we suited up to the tune of murmured grumbles.

"Pa drove the wagon out onto the ice, following those wagon tracks. All around the wagon there was nothing but empty and silent space. Laura didn't like it. But Pa was on the wagon seat and Jack was under the wagon; she knew that nothing could hurt her while Pa and Jack were there."

The ice seemed thick, but we've had several warm days in the last week which added an authentic aura of risk to the whole endeavor. As authentically risky as one can be over waist-deep water and with an inner tube around one's middle. Hey, if we fell in we could get a cold, you know...

The sun was just setting, casting the whole scene in a golden glow as we made our careful way along the path. The water plants from last summer were still poking through the ice to mark the roadway, but even without them we could still tell where the road was. Over the road was a comforting opaque whiteness that dropped away into a sinister midnight blue on either side.

It is always longer to cross that section than it looks from the shore, whether you're worried about prowling pond slime monsters in summer or catastrophic ice collapses in winter, but eventually we made it and paused for a triumphant photo on the other side. Then we headed back across to try it again, this time on ice skates.

"Laura hadn't thought about it before, but now she thought what would have happened if the ice had cracked under the wagon wheels and they had all gone down into the cold water in the middle of that vast lake.

'You're frightening somebody, Charles,' Ma said, and Pa caught Laura up in his safe, big hug.

'We're across the Mississippi!', he said, hugging her joyously."

We had a great time, had some laughs, and created a fun memory in peaceful and beautiful surroundings, but that's kind of the key point. We only did it for fun; the Ingalls family did it for real and the stakes were a lot higher than getting their feet wet. I can't imagine being that brave (or foolish, depending on your point of view), but I'm glad that people did have that kind of courage, the courage to try new things and places.