A blaze swept over our northern slope last month, the effect of a monstrous wind and inattention on a not-quite-dead trash fire. With buckets of water filled from the pond, the feeble trickle from a rubber hose and mad running about, we extinguished it before it crossed the fence. But it left blackened stumps and ash where there was once a garden, and this rainy season we must plant from scratch.
It’s not a tragedy. New leaves are already fluttering on some trees, and after two rains a carpet of green will shamelessly roll over the ash. As always, I am reminded of a book. In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie”, set in the 1800s, the Ingalls family battled a prairie fire. It is unforgettable, the scene in which Ma, Laura and Mary, in their long skirts, fight an impossibly greater force using just buckets of water. It is so central to memories of the book that every year, outside the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, a prairie fire is staged for hundreds of fans seated in lawn chairs to watch bonneted actors battling the blaze.
I can understand their fascination. Most American families prepare for fire by keeping emergency numbers handy by the phone and a red extinguisher mounted on the kitchen wall. Children are taught to wrap a wet towel around their faces, drop to the floor and crawl out. Their job is not to put out the fire. So when they watch a family in hand-to-hand combat with the elements, they return to another America.
The Ingalls faced many struggles in Kansas. They settled by mistake on tribal land, built a log house, planted their seeds, and then faced eviction. With their crops close to harvest, the family left Kansas to start all over again. In the sequels, it was grasshopper plagues, hard winters or scarlet fever that beat them down. Yet, they moved on to the next frontier.
As a child, I was reassured by the new bolts of calico and the family bonds that seemed to make up for their hard lives, but I sometimes wondered why the Ingalls didn’t give up and go home. Now, on this acre that is a frontier to me, I am closer to an answer. Pioneers were not all ambitious to conquer a new world. Some of them just submitted cheerfully to its caprices. But that new world was enchanting. At some point it became home. And pioneers such as Wilder had to tell us how that happened.
The night of the fire, after it was all over, I walked down to the pond in the clear moonlight. The wind had died. I touched each fallen branch to make sure it was cool and would not again catch fire. As I nudged aside one branch I saw a tiny, moving train of white grains. The ants were carrying their eggs to a new nest. The ashes still held life, and life was moving on.
anantharaman.bookwise@gmail.com
