Free The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure Page B
Authors: Wendy McClure
north along the river before crossing back over. The landscape had suddenly changed once we reached the river, going from gently rolling farmland to high rock formations and craggy hills. It was an overcast day and everything felt wonderfully raw, as if the river and the ice and the wet, chilly weather had been gnawing at this part of the world for a few hundred years. I couldnât see anything that looked like my imaginary Big Woods, but I liked it out here.
The river was still mostly frozenâsome stretches of it that we passed were gray mosaics of water and broken ice; in other places there were ice fishermen out on the surface. We crossed back into Wisconsin and turned onto a winding two-lane road with a sign that said Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Highway.
I asked Chris if the sign meant I could start geeking out now.
âNow?â he said. âWhat do you mean ânowâ?â
You have to hand it to Pa Ingalls for knowing how to pick his homesites. Whether it was due to luck or his aversion to population density, the guy clearly had a knack for settling in small towns that stayed small. I would find over the course of all the trips that none of the homesites were in any danger of becoming lost amid urban renewal or suburban sprawl.
According to the highway sign, Pepin had a population of 878 people. On the map, the town grid appears as just a few cross-hatched lines along the shore of Lake Pepin, which shows up as a bulge in the Mississippi River between Wisconsin and Minnesota.
From all my reading about Lake Pepin, I could tell you that it had been formed just past where the Chippewa River feeds into the Mississippi, where the smaller riverâs delta made the water back up and widen. Water skiing, of all things, was invented on the lake in the 1920s. Maybe the best thing about Lake Pepin is that it has its own lake monster. Dubbed âPepie,â it was first spotted in 1871, with initial reports describing it as âthe size of an elephant and rhinoceros, and [it] moved through the water with great rapidity.â Itâs one of only three known lake monsters in existence, next to the Loch Ness Monster and âChampâ of Lake Champlain in Vermont. (And do you know who was born only fifty miles from Lake Champlain? Almanzo. Whoa!)
I know all this is very impressive, especially in the realm of freshwater lake enthusiasm, but Lake Pepin might be best known to most of the world as the place where, more than a hundred and thirty years ago, a little kid picked up too many pebbles.
It happens in Chapter 9 of Little House in the Big Woods, where four-year-old Laura fills her pocket with lake pebbles at the shore while the family is visiting town. And then, when Pa tosses her back into the wagon, the heavy pocket rips off her dress and she cries. For me, reading that scene never fails to bring on a brief, scalding instant of recognition in recalling exactly what it was like to be a tiny little kid, your whole sense of being so lumpy and vulnerable that the smallest things were everything, and the everything could be so unspeakably wonderful, and the wonderful could be snatched away in an instant, leaving a big ragged hole in your universe just like the one in Lauraâs dress.
Now Lake Pepin was in sight, a glimpse of pale between the buildings along the highway.
âI want to pick up pebbles on the beach,â I said. âA whole bunch of them.â
âOh, thatâs not going to end well,â Chris said, because I had just made him read Big Woods before the trip.
Most of the town was perched on the side of the hill facing Lake Pepin, though the visitorâs center and the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum were along the highway. They were closed for the winter, and as we drove down the hill into the rest of the town, we could see that Pepin was a lakefront vacation town in off-season mode, with a handful of brightly painted cafés and a dockside restaurant, all
The river was still mostly frozenâsome stretches of it that we passed were gray mosaics of water and broken ice; in other places there were ice fishermen out on the surface. We crossed back into Wisconsin and turned onto a winding two-lane road with a sign that said Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Highway.
I asked Chris if the sign meant I could start geeking out now.
âNow?â he said. âWhat do you mean ânowâ?â
You have to hand it to Pa Ingalls for knowing how to pick his homesites. Whether it was due to luck or his aversion to population density, the guy clearly had a knack for settling in small towns that stayed small. I would find over the course of all the trips that none of the homesites were in any danger of becoming lost amid urban renewal or suburban sprawl.
According to the highway sign, Pepin had a population of 878 people. On the map, the town grid appears as just a few cross-hatched lines along the shore of Lake Pepin, which shows up as a bulge in the Mississippi River between Wisconsin and Minnesota.
From all my reading about Lake Pepin, I could tell you that it had been formed just past where the Chippewa River feeds into the Mississippi, where the smaller riverâs delta made the water back up and widen. Water skiing, of all things, was invented on the lake in the 1920s. Maybe the best thing about Lake Pepin is that it has its own lake monster. Dubbed âPepie,â it was first spotted in 1871, with initial reports describing it as âthe size of an elephant and rhinoceros, and [it] moved through the water with great rapidity.â Itâs one of only three known lake monsters in existence, next to the Loch Ness Monster and âChampâ of Lake Champlain in Vermont. (And do you know who was born only fifty miles from Lake Champlain? Almanzo. Whoa!)
I know all this is very impressive, especially in the realm of freshwater lake enthusiasm, but Lake Pepin might be best known to most of the world as the place where, more than a hundred and thirty years ago, a little kid picked up too many pebbles.
It happens in Chapter 9 of Little House in the Big Woods, where four-year-old Laura fills her pocket with lake pebbles at the shore while the family is visiting town. And then, when Pa tosses her back into the wagon, the heavy pocket rips off her dress and she cries. For me, reading that scene never fails to bring on a brief, scalding instant of recognition in recalling exactly what it was like to be a tiny little kid, your whole sense of being so lumpy and vulnerable that the smallest things were everything, and the everything could be so unspeakably wonderful, and the wonderful could be snatched away in an instant, leaving a big ragged hole in your universe just like the one in Lauraâs dress.
Now Lake Pepin was in sight, a glimpse of pale between the buildings along the highway.
âI want to pick up pebbles on the beach,â I said. âA whole bunch of them.â
âOh, thatâs not going to end well,â Chris said, because I had just made him read Big Woods before the trip.
Most of the town was perched on the side of the hill facing Lake Pepin, though the visitorâs center and the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum were along the highway. They were closed for the winter, and as we drove down the hill into the rest of the town, we could see that Pepin was a lakefront vacation town in off-season mode, with a handful of brightly painted cafés and a dockside restaurant, all