Prairie Life is Hell

Everyone who's reading "Little House in the Prairie" out loud to their 7 yr old, stand up. Okay, I see both of you. Can I just say, what the hell?? We got to the end after Pa drove the wagon out to the desolate prairie, stopped the wagon, unloaded the fam, looked around at the millions of miles of NOTHING and said "Yep, let's build here."

Then they spend a YEAR where Pa builds the entire house without a Lowe's anywhere in sight. He whittles his own NAILS. He builds a door. He puts a roof on, using actual trees from down by the river. He shoots all their food. (They do eat a whole lot of cornbread and salt pork.) When he's finally gotten the family living indoors, he then decides to build the barn. Nothing really, just some half ton logs piled on top of each other in a square shape. That he chopped down, cut up, notched like giant Lincoln Logs and then stacked up using his arm muscles. By himself. And then played the fiddle at the end of the day like Yippee.

How Pa is not dead in the first twenty minutes, I have no idea.

Then he dug a well. And built a chimney with heavy stones. The thing Lilly liked best was that he got actual glass windows. He picked those up in Independence. Along with candy sticks. Finally the part I could understand, the picking up of.

Okay so after all this, toward the end, Pa realized the house was built maybe a little too close to the Indian path, which he didn't see because those Indians are stealthy and leave no path, but his dog Jack keeps standing in the path and barking like an asshole at all the Indians until one of them levels a gun at him to get rid of him, and then Jack has to be chained to the barn for the rest of the book. Yes, there are no neighbors for ten thousand miles (except for Mr. Edwards down by the creek), and the dog needs to be chained up. That must've felt bad for Pa when he realized, oops, shoulda put the house over THERE. Where there's also nothing.

So then the house is all built, the barn is cool, they survive Indian war cries and wolves and a panther who screams like a woman on fire in the middle of the night, oh and the actual prairie FIRE which narrowly misses their house, Pa is like the prairie superhero. He finally buys a plow (why he didn't MAKE a plow...)and he's plowing and Ma and Laura and Mary are planting seeds, and they're finally going to have vegetables and the next day Pa is talking to the neighbor and looking mad.

He comes into the little house and tells them well, they have to move. They're 3 miles over the line into Indian territory. Soldiers are going to move them out. But he's not going to wait. They'll leave tomorrow.

What? There's Laura, 6 years old, 5 pages to the end of the book, in this cool house her dad built out of the WOODS, finally secure in a place, and oops, sorry Laura. The next day they pack up, leave everything, give their cow away and head somewhere else. And we all know the Indians don't end up with that land anyway.

Pa? Dude, why? He made a place, he gave us a promise with his straining muscles and his building of impossible things, that this place was for real, this was going to be our life. He didn't just take us out to eat. He built the restaurant. He staffed it with his sweat. And then in the end, he screwed up. All the effort for nothing.

Lilly and I sat in the dark next to our electric lamp, in the house that who the hell built, not us, on our raft bed, and stared as Pa packed the family in the wagon and drove off. Laura looking back as her little house on the prairie became a dot and then became nothing at all.

I'm kind of wanting to divorce Pa right now. All he does is play the fiddle and build stuff in the wrong places so that we have to leave again. We had to leave the WELL. You can't dig a well and then take it with you.

I'm not sure why it's so shocking. I knew the Little House books are a series, it isn't Little House in the I Stay Here Forever and Nothing Happens. I think next she ends up living underground in a dirt hut or something. I read all these books as a kid and loved them and remember nothing. I guess I'm just bummed for Laura. I wanted to see what her life was going to be like with all that waving prairie grass, and the creek nearby and the threat and thrill of the Indian camps nearby. I wanted to see her find out all the secrets of this place, and hear her insights and feel her experience as she grew up. She gave us such a strong sense of place, she set us up for that, and then she just yanked the rug out from under us. I know it's just a book for us, and she actually lived it, but how could you set us up, Laura? We loved that place with you. You laid us out on the prairie and we saw the sky and we built that house with you. We lived through that prairie fire, we dug the trench and filled it with water and kept the fire away. And now they're moving on, and the little house is becoming a dot and then gone, and what happens if everything you work for is nothing, and all that safety, where you know everything, and everything belongs to you, what if in the end it is just a dot, and then gone the next day. Don't do this to me, Laura.

Pa is just a bumbling guy with some incredible arm muscles, who had these kids and this wife and built his house and his whole life in the wrong place. Twice so far. And we're just standing there, with Laura's wide eyes on it all, at 6 years old, watching all these random mistakes and discoveries that I guess is just life. Maybe a dirt house underground is also good. It's just not what we were expecting.

But turning off the light and laying in bed, Lilly and I are both thinking the same thing. We're missing the blowing grasses because Laura made them important. We're missing her little life because she was safe there. There's so much we don't know. Prairie life is hell.