Little House In The Red Station Wagon

One summer I saw half of America backwards. A greater poriton of the western United States receded from me at about 60 mph as I read the entire Laura Ingalls Wilder oeuvre from the rear-facing jump seat of a red station wagon.

We started out from Chicago. I grabbed my sister's box set of Little House books so I'd have something to read. By the time we got to Mount Rushmore I'd finished Little House In The Big Woods. The Four Stone presidents were fine and all, but I was disappointed at how small they looked from the observation deck; on TV and the movies they always appeared much bigger.

Deadwood, South Dakota, however, was an interesting town. Hey, is that the same Deadwood as the TV show? Either way, it had the grave site of some famous Western outlaw or hero, I forget who now. Maybe Wild Bill Hickcock? Someone like that. We went to a Safeway there and got a bunch of grapes which we ate in the town square as I started Little House On The Prairie.

Back in the jump seat, I skipped Farmer Boy because I didn't want to leave the Ingalls family and started On The Banks Of Plum Creek. That got me through most of Montana and Wyoming, at which point we stopped at Yellowstone National Park. Eh. We saw Old Faithful, and again I was not impressed. Much ado about nothing, really, yet there we sat with about 20 other people waiting for a bit of water to issue forth. Next.

I was well into By The Shores Of Silver Lake when we got to San Francisco. This was the middle of the summer, and it was like 48 degrees. We'd crossed the Golden Gate Bridge in the fog, and thus I saw nothing of the bay or bridge. Laura was beginning to annoy me, however. Why couldn't she go blind? Oh well.

I enjoyed Fisherman's Wharf, and even bought a magic trick at a shop there (The Pull Apart Dove Box Vanish... it took almost half of the money I'd budgeted for the trip, but no matter). There was a lock-picking set, too, but it was too expensive ($20) so I had to pass. All the seafood looked great, but of course my step dad is even cheaper than me, so we didn't get to try any of it.

A few hundred miles and The Long Winter later, we were in Los Angeles, or rather Anaheim, where we finally got to sleep in real beds at the home of our uncle and aunt. I'd never heard of Anaheim before outside of people on game shows who were occasionally from there. Everyone was from some California town on game shows when I was growing up in the 1970s. I used to envy Californians because they got to go on game shows.

While there my mom, dad, and I also went to Universal Studios while my sister chose to go to the beach with my cousins. To this day she thinks she was gyped. She whines about these things, but did she ever have to help paw in the wheat fields or carry heavy pails of water to maw so she could make the morning biscuits like Laura did? No. So shaddup.

Back in the jump seat, we were off to San Diego as I started Little Town On The Prairie. The Ingalls family were really starting to wear thin on me by this point, but I carried on. San Diego had nothing really to offer other than Sea World, so off we went to view various aquatic mammals debasing themselves for a few pieces of herring. However, we did get to go to MEXICO while we were there (It was only later that I realized that Tijuana hardly counts as Mexico). I bought a really tasteful leather belt there; it wasn't gaudy or anything. Really.

We drove through Needles, California when it was 117 degrees Fahrenheit, and we had no air conditioning. But I didn't mind; after all, the folk who lived in the Little Town on the Prairie didn't have AC, either. I finished that book as we got to the Grand Canyon.

The Grand Canyon? Eh. Again, TV and movies had built it up in my mind. I base most things on what I learned on TV... usually The Dick Van Dyke Show, but that's a post for another day. For the Grand Canyon, however, it was of course The Brady Bunch. And guess what? We didn't get to ride down into the canyon on donkeys. This disappointed me to no end. I at least wanted to throw a rock into the big hole, but I couldn't as I seem to remember signs saying specifically that you couldn't do this. The Grand Canyon hates 11 year old boys.

I read most of These Happy Golden Years and The First Four Years as I saw New Mexico, Texas, Arkansas, and southern Illinois recede from me during the next few long days. I didn't read all of these last two, however, since the covers made them look dull and "girlie". I wanted to read about making your own smoke house, not about early marriage life. Who needs that?

We finally got home and I put the Little House books back in my sister's room. Someday I'll have to read Farmer Boy, but it won't be the same if I'm not reading it while traveling backwards in a station wagon.