I've always had a deep fascination with what is quintessentially "American" -- that pull yourself up by your bootstraps, god-fearing, adventuring spirit that used to be represented so frequently in pop culture. (In my opinion, today's American spirit is a little harder to define as we have become so fragmented in our views / beliefs). I also wonder why the appeal of this American image – a lone cowboy standing tall in his dusty jeans and boots, his hat at a rakish angle as he squints off into a distant horizon – has lasted so long. After all, didn’t we create a world of office buildings and air conditioning to prevent all that effort? While I’ve talked before about probably not being able to make the grade in frontier agrarian society, I still find the whole concept wildly appealing and so do the writers Jeannette Walls and Wendy McClure.
Jeannette Walls, more famous for her memoir The Glass Castle, also wrote a true-life novel about her grandmother called Half-Broke Horses. Lily Casey Smith had a wild ride in the American frontier, from living in a mud dugout in Texas and learning to break horses, teaching in rural schools, and working a big ranch with her second husband in Arizona. She was not a woman to look back at her mistakes or to whine about her situation – Lily just packed up her stuff when the going got impossible and got back on her horse thinking of new ways to make her life work, no matter what the effort required. It is obvious that Walls deeply respects her grandmother and sets up her story as a model for what Americans could achieve with a lot more elbow grease.
And yet, rather than make Lily seem like a grunt suited only for work, Walls also gives in to the chance to romanticize the time, to the point where I felt about ready to join in on the long range rides. When Lily does briefly move to town, Walls specifically emphasizes her distaste of the confined world of the ‘burbs and the dissatisfaction that comes from an office job that leaves a worker without a worn body or a satisfied mind at the end of the day.
To get a real sense of Walls’ interpretation and glorification of her forbearers, you need go no further than a reflection “Big Jim” (Lily’s second husband) has about the water he’s collected in his manmade pond:
The water you kids were playing in, he said, had probably been to Africa and the North Pole. Genghis Khan or Saint Peter or even Jesus himself might have drunk it. Cleopatra might have bathed in it. Crazy Horse might have watered his pony with it. Sometimes water was liquid. Sometimes it was rock hard - ice. Sometimes it was soft - snow. Sometimes it was visible but weightless - clouds. And sometimes it was completely invisible - vapor - floating up into the sky like the souls of dead people. There was nothing like water in the world, Jim said. It made the desert bloom but also turned rich bottomland into swamp. Without it we'd die, but it could also kill us, and that was why we loved it, even craved it, but also feared it. Never take water for granted, Jim said. Always cherish it. Always beware of it. (148-9)
Now, granted, I’ve never known a real “cowboy” but somehow I think at the end of a long day they aren’t exactly waxing poetic about their water supply. However, for Walls in a way, that’s the point. Looking back, we can see the beauty of a simpler life where people focused only on the literal “big picture” – survival and sustenance – and found it to be enough.
This “back to the basics” approach is certainly attracting interest in our time. Granted, going green in America has been more about lining the pockets of savvy companies who know how to confuse consumers with all sorts of hippie-sounding labels, but this longing for a simpler lifestyle certainly comes from somewhere.
And that’s where Wendy McClure steps in. Her book, The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie, explores her utter obsession with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life, books, and the world that her writing represents. McClure, along with her incredibly patient husband, spend a year travelling around in “Laura World” and seeing what insights can be culled from seeing the places Wilder lived. Along the way, McClure churns butter, stays in a covered wagon, and buys enough prairie bonnets to show a fresh accessory every day for at least a month.
As McClure sees it, her longing is not necessarily for Laura’s situation itself, but more of what it represents. As she explains:
Sometimes, Laura's World wasn't a realm of log cabins or prairies, it was a way of being. Really, a way of being happy. I wasn't into the flowery sayings, but I was nonetheless in love with the idea of serene rooms full of endless quiet and time, of sky in the windows, of a life comfortably cluttered and yet in some kind of perfect feng shui equilibrium, where all the day were capacious enough to bake bread and write novels and perambulate the wooded hills deep in thought (though truthfully, I'd allow for the occasional Rose - [Wilder’s daughter] style cocktail party as well). All of it was the stuff of my imaginary Laura lifestyle magazine, my own rendition of sweet and simple.
Probably most people who came to visit Mansfield had some version in mind, too. While we could all certainly appreciate the pioneer ordeals, the covered wagons, and the long winters, somehow Sweet and Simple had become our own dream frontier, our Oregon that we'd like to reach someday, always just beyond the horizon. We were looking for it wherever we could. Most of us had no use for someone like Rose, whose Bitter and Complicated life was at least as imperfect as our own. (172)
Probably most people who came to visit Mansfield had some version in mind, too. While we could all certainly appreciate the pioneer ordeals, the covered wagons, and the long winters, somehow Sweet and Simple had become our own dream frontier, our Oregon that we'd like to reach someday, always just beyond the horizon. We were looking for it wherever we could. Most of us had no use for someone like Rose, whose Bitter and Complicated life was at least as imperfect as our own. (172)
In the end, McClure experiences a sort of emotional exhaustion from chasing after this lifestyle. She searches so deeply to find meaning in these houses out in the middle of nowhere that she leaves the last few frontier festivals early because she is simply overwhelmed. However, as in all good books about journeys, in the end she feels Laura has provided her a taste of her own “sweeter” world.
For me, these dreams of a different life, become just that: dreams. We may be able to change our external situation to match the description of the book, but the real “pioneer spirit” is something that must be found not in a historical reproduction or bought off a shelf. Instead, it is discovered, as McClure realizes, in an evaluation of what the American spirit means to each one of us, even if those thoughts are not written out longhand in a cramped little cabin, but typed in a condo in a big city. Both of these books gave me something to think about, but maybe that’s not the point either. To find that spirit, one doesn’t need to analyze or evaluate, but just look with fresh eyes, over yet another horizon confident that a different (perhaps better) life will always be out there.
