Archive for July 13th, 2009

On the last day of our Minnesota sojourn, we were invited to join my brother and his family on Lake Washington, which has a long family history as a recreation center, going back to our original immigrant ancestor, Louis Linder, who had a vacation house built there back in 1880 or so, when you had to drive a horse and buggy to get out there.

These days, of course, you take the car and get on a motorboat. Fortunately for us, the weather was excellent. All week long, it had been barely warm and had rained, it would seem, ever night, testing our camping mettle.  At the lake the main activity was to get in the motorboat and speed around at up to 50 mph, which I felt was a little fast, especially when riding in the nose of the boat, although the lake was almost like glass.

Most of the afternoon we spent on an activity called “tubing” which has, apparently, largely replaced waterskiing as the entertainment used by people who want to be pulled behind boats. My brother had a large “tube” (really, it was an inflatable raft, bright red, with handles on it so you could lean with the motion of the raft or cling for dear life, as the occassion warranted). The tube would accomodate three children or two adults comfortably. While I watched Angelo on the beach, my brother ran the boat up and down the lake, pulling kids on the tube, swiveling side to side, speeding up, slowing down, all to their great delight.

They simply could not get enough of this game. Finally, however, I had had enough. “This is not fair, the kids are having too much fun,” I said. I want to try tubing,” I told Nick. “Dean, will you go with me?”

Dean, perhaps, did not actually want to get on the tube, but neither did he want to be seen as the kind of guy who would not do it, either, I assume, so he put on a lifejacket and climbed onto the floating mini-boat with me.

“Keep the nose up when the boat starts, or you’ll go underwater,” Nick yelled and fired up the engine.

The experience of being pulled by a boat through the water is an exhillirating one, more and more so as you get used to it and begin to think that you are actually relatively safe. “What can happen to you out in the middle of the lake?” my brother asks philosophically. Of course, this is the guy who lit off all those illegal fireworks in the backyard earlier this week, so one does tend to think his safety standards are not the most rigorous on earth. On the other hand, you can make life almost perfectly safe, but unbearably boring by worrying about things, and as we rode the tube around the lake, I laughed and laughed. Finally after years of doing boring stuff like washing dishes and keeping children clean and safe, I was out on the lake, riding a tube, having some real excitement.

I looked over at my better half. He was giving the “thumbs down” I want to get off signal. Well, fine. If he didn’t want to do this, I knew I could get my kids to ride with me. “Vince, Brand,” I called and they came down to ride the tube. Then I rode with their younger sister,  Joanna — who is incredibly light so the tube just skimmed across the water, and she also fell off twice. Then I had to go for the Big Kahuna. My brother.

“Come on, Nick, you come out here on the tube.”

Nick tried to get out of it. After all, he explained, we were here for the kids, and the guests, he was just the boat driver.

“I came all the way out here to Minnesota, and I want you to go tubing with me.”

It appeared he was afraid to ask his wife to drive the boat so we could ride. “And Dad wants to go home,” he told me. “I just don’t know.”

“Come on, Nick, you’re going on the tube with me.”

“Oh come on.”

“I’m gonna tell Dad on you.”

So, he had to come out and ride. His wife Jill, of course, didn’t look like she minded at all as she got behind the wheel. In fact, she appeared to be looking forward to it. Nick seemed worried. “She can be vicious,” he said. “We better watch out, this is going to be a wild ride.”

The lake started going by at a very fast pace, combined with some sharp turns and ‘catching air’as we flew from one side of the wake to the other. Nick didn’t seem phased as Vincent snapped away with the camera. Finally, on one particularly tight bend when the J-Force got to be too much, Nick let go. I did not, not because I wasn’t ready to get off but because I was afraid to be left in the middle of the lake while to boat came around.

We came back and went to pick him up. “All right, what a ride!” he exclaimed as he got on for the second round, coordinating Jill to drive us past the shore  for a dramatic dismount from the tube in front of the place where Dad was sitting. The boat powered up, we whipped around the lake one more time, and then, right as we passed my father’s chair, Nick said “Now!” and we both let go at the same time.

It was a great end to a great day. As we pulled ourselves out of the water, Vince seemed to feel he didn’t like his Mom stealing the finale. The kids didn’t want to quit, in fact, and Vince said he thought more tubing would be a great idea. “You know what would be really great?” he asked me. “Tubing across the Gulf of Mexico.”

My son thinks big like a Texan, I guess. Let’s just hope he never gets the backing to actually try that particular mission. I must have some Minnesotan still in me, because like the generations of my family that have come here for sport, I felt Lake Washington was just about right.

The other day we went to see the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Walnut Grove, Minnesota. A good hour and a half drive away from where we were staying, we worried about making the trip, but in the end, no other good ideas presenting themselves, we took off in mid morning, after dropping the two oldest boys off at my brothers house, where they could play video games all day instead of enrich their minds. Although I did believe they would derive some benefit, possibly, from seeing the prairie home of the famous American author, I also wanted to enjoy it myself, and knew that having them around could very well preclude that entirely.

The museum, standing out in s small town set among the fields of corn and soybeans, turned out to be very well developed. It included a display of family pictures and books, a large gift shop, and some mementos from the TV show, which I skipped as I

1. Didn’t watch the TV show,
2. Don’t believe in TV shows as a reputable artistic medium (Exception: Star Trek TOS) and
3. Was irritated at the TV show for widely departing from the book, which is said to be more rather than less a factual history, and as such moved the Wilders into a type of fiction I feel the author may not have intended.

Elsewhere on the complex, an old farmhouse offered interpretive exhibits of settler life, the churning of butter, and very fine hands-on room with dresses and petticoats to try on, real slates, which were drawn on not with chalk but with another piece of slate, creating a thin white line, and an organ which ran on foot pedal power complete with simple music that I and Dean were able to play, from our long-ago piano training. Outside, a life size replica of the dugout the Ingalls Family lived on, which you could actually go into, and another full-size building replicating the wood plank house that Pa Ingalls built on the Minnesota prairie, was memorable.

The Ingalls dugout site. Off to the left is the grove of plums.

The real find for true fans of the book, however, is the Ingalls Dugout Site. Located on private land owned by the Gordon family ($4 a person entry charge) you can see the beauty and potential of the Ingalls Dugout site, walk around on mown trails and paths, see the indentation on the ground where the dugout was, with two paths going down to where the door would have been, just as was illustrated by Garth Williams in the original book, By the Banks of Plum Creek. Here you can see the plum grove that is mentioned in the book, the tablelands that Laura describes, and the creek itself, which babbles sweetly. The height of the corn the Gordons are growing on the property testifies to the ultimate value of the land here, bringing poignancy to the Ingalls family’s decision to move on.

I stopped for a moment by myself to listen to the creek as it bounced over a submerged rock, and think about the author and her lost childhood, symbolic, perhaps, of our own childhoods so long ago. A pioneer girl had played here, I thought to myself, when the land was scarcely ceded by the Indians – the Dakota War of 1962 had been only eight years before – and medical care, technology, everything had been rudimentary. What brought them out here, I wondered?

Kids walk down the path in a scene which recalls the Garth Williams illustration of the book, On the Banks of Plum Creek

They were dreamers, the Ingalls family. Though they knew how to build many implements and tools and how to survive in a wild country, ultimately, if you follow the number of removes and trail of surrendered and sold and abandoned farms, you come to realize that they were somewhat impractical in their decisions about where to homestead. “My father was no businessman,”  Laura Ingalls wrote much later. Her decision to romanticize her father’s memory in the books appears more and more studied as one visits the sites and reads, as I did begin to do as soon as we got in the car to go back, her biography.

For example, in Little House on the Prairie, Pa emphasizes that another settler family had their horses stolen because they didn’t have the sense to keep a dog around. Pa would never sell their brindle bulldog, Jack, according to the story. But in reality he did just that, trading the dog to go along with a pair of horses.

I think this over. If Pa was not really so practical in real life, where did the characteristics of sober management come from? Perhaps Pa’s wisdom as it appears from the books came from … Almanzo, Laura’s husband? Whatever the answer to this and other Ingalls Wilder conundrums, the value of visiting historic sites is to lead to reflection and make one think, lead to further studies and enrich the mind, and the Walnut Grove homesite of the Ingalls family definitely gets an A+++ for that purpose.