We have become a nation of wimps. "How did Ma Ingalls deal with her period in a dugout?" She dealt with it in the same way, no matter where she lived. They didn't have tampons or sanitary pads. They had a cloth that they had to wash, and she had a stream nearby. I got my period in the days of sanitary belts. Several years later the stick-on pads came out and trash cans were filled with sanitary belts...just as, years before, trash cans were filled with cloth sanitary pads. Someday women will look back on us and wonder how we dealt with tampons and stick-on pads. It's called progress, friends.
I switched to sewn cloth pads in college and never looked back. They breathe, plus I was not filling landfills and saved money. Cloth diapers are not such a big deal either. I loved having a diaper service.
I read those books as a child and loved them. I read them again when my kids were young and saw a whole added layer. They are coming under attack not just for racial issues, but also because Rose Ingalls Wilder became one of the the mothers of the libertarian movement in the United States. Her adopted grandson, Roger McBride, founded the Libertarian Party. Rose was an international journalist.
I sew my clothes, grow food, cook from scratch, etc... and I think these books inspired me to go that direction with my life.
I left the city and moved to a smallish town settled by intrepid pioneers. The kids here are different and take more risks. I was at my piano lesson and a neighbor kid knocked on the door asking to play with one of the sons. He looked like he was about 10. My teacher, the mother, did not know where he was, and after asking around found out he was walking somewhere in the neighborhood. The other little boy went off looking for him.
I told my teacher how happy I was that her kids were running loose. It felt like going back in time. Leaving the city after retirement has helped us so much, we live in a community now.
I don't reach the level of actual expertise, but I read a lot about nineteenth century America.
We have been deluded by simple-minds today who can't think beyond "All white people, evil, all others, victims." Some form of regurgitation of that will get you an 'A' on almost any American history test.
In truth, the Indians, yes, I said Indians, (find me an Indian who gives damn) warred as much or more against each others as against whites. The Comanches were outright terrorists, practicing genocide against whites and other Indians.
The Aztecs were perhaps the most collectively psychopathic culture that has ever existed on this earth. The reason Cortes was able to defeat them with such a small army was because surrounding Indian nations allied with him to destroy the Aztecs.
The French and Indian War was as the name implies. The French and the Indians allied against England. The movie, Young Washington, is worth watching in this regard. I make no claim that it isn't, first and foremost, entertainment. But it is very accurate.
And I never miss a chance to point out that the biggest threat to the Indians were not the Ingalls of America, it was the federal government. Some things never change.
I agree with a lot of what is said here, however, I'm also intrigued by the concept that there's a genetic predisposition to take risks and explore. I read about it for the first time in a fascinating book called Atlas of a Lost World, which explores who the first people to come to the Americas really were - a small portion of the book raises the possibility that these people, especially those who traveled farthest, had an innate predisposition to do so (some evidence being that higher levels of the risk-taking gene are found among the remaining indigenous peoples in South America). Of course, the early settlers of the Americas in colonial times, and people like Charles Ignalls who settled the fronteir, could also have had that gene for risk.
Some people are risk-takers by nature and some are risk-adverse; some are rule-breakers and some are rule-makers (I'm thinking of Michele Gelfand's book); some always want to see something new and some are homebodies and creatures of comfort. There's an unfortunate amount of disdain and rejection by each group of the other, but couldn't these characteristics be very innate, shaped by genetic predispositions and early experiences, and solidified by the time a person is an adult? i.e. a core personality trait, not a moral issue? I agree these reviewers are mistaken to criticize Charles Ignalls for striking out for the horizon - but they might need to be cut a bit of slack, too, as we all have varying levels of risk tolerance.
Love this! There are so many times that I’m out walking in the WI woods and imagining what the forests and prairies looked like 150-200 years ago and then imagining how in God‘s name people had the bravery to conquer the harsh conditions! Especially in the winter. Pa was a real man.
Yes, I think there courage and an adventurous mindset are part of it, but I wonder how much of it also came from plain desperation.
I just watched a documentary about how the Pacific Islands were originally settled. It's one thing to go out in the ocean in a little boat if there is another island in sight; a totally different thing if there isn't! Badass!
Rather than bowdlerizing existing literature, if you want to read about Indian life at the time of Laura, turn to Louise Erdrichs’s series The Birchbark House -5 books in the series.
"Modernity has smoothed many of life’s rough edges away. We have been given a pureed version of reality, one in which nature’s variety is blended into uniformity. This way we know what to expect! It’s useful in some things, but even if you appreciate sidewalks, for instance, you can also recognize that trails are beautiful things. Beautiful, and instructive."
Yes. Yes. If you've ever read "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon" -and yes, Stephen King is a deranged political harpy but a good writer as well- you will get to the end of the novel and say Ah ha!
I'm posting a somewhat long excerpt from that 'end'.
"We know what to expect... useful in some things... but even if you appreciate sidewalks... trails are beautiful things... and instructive."
Trisha is 9 years old and has been lost for 9 days in the woods on and off the Appalachian Trail in northern New Hampshire towards the Maine border. She’s far beyond exhaustion and hunger, and now has pneumonia. All she had for those 9 days to accompany her -besides the wild things that lived in those woods- was her Walkman with which she could listen to the Boston Red Sox games. Until the reception faded, and the batteries died. All she was left with then was a voice in her head. (A tale as old as time; Abraham, for one, would agree. [So would Job to a degree]).
*** SPOILERS AHEAD ***
The thing in the woods, whatever it was, kept her company on her journey. Although she dismissed a great deal of what she felt and thought she saw, she never dismissed her sense of what the wasp-priest had called the God of the Lost; never chalked up the clawed trees (or the headless fox, for that matter) to mere hallucination. When she felt that thing (or heard it-several times she had heard breaking branches in the forest as it kept pace with her, and twice she heard its low inhuman grunt), she never questioned the fact of its actual presence. When the feeling left her, she never questioned the fact that the thing was really gone. She and it were tied together now; they would remain so until she died. Trisha didn't think that would be long now. "Right around the corner," her mother would have said, except there were no corners in the woods. Bugs and swamps and sudden drop-offs, but no corners. It wasn't fair that she should die after fighting so hard to stay alive, but the unfairness didn't make her so angry now. It took energy to be angry. It took vitality. Trisha was nearly shot of both.
Halfway across this new clearing, which was no different than a dozen others she had passed through, she began to cough. It hurt deep in her chest, made her feel as if there were a great big hook in there. Trisha doubled over, grabbed hold of a jutting stump, and coughed until tears popped out of her eyes and her vision doubled. When the coughing finally tapered off and stopped, she remained bent over at first, waiting for her heart to slow its fearful pounding. Also for those big black butterflies in front of her eyes to fold their wings and go back to wherever they came from. Good thing she'd had this stump to hold onto or she would have fallen over for sure.
Her eyes went to the stump and her thoughts abruptly ceased. The first to come back was I'm not seeing what I think I'm seeing. It's another Make-believe, another hallucination. She closed her eyes and counted to twenty.
When she opened them the black butterflies were gone, but the rest was the same. The stump wasn't a stump. It was a post. On top, screwed into the gray and spongy old wood, was a rusty red ringbolt. Trisha grasped it, felt the old iron reality of it. She let go and looked at the flecks of rust on her fingers. She grasped it again, flicked it back and forth. That sense of deja vu swept her as it had when she had turned in a circle, only it was stronger now, and somehow associated with Tom Gordon. What ... ?
"You dreamed it," Tom said. He was standing about fifty feet away with his arms folded and his butt leaned up against a maple tree, dressed in his gray road uniform. "You dreamed we came to this place."
"I did?"
"Sure, don't you remember? It was the team's off night. The night you listened to Walt."
"Walt ... ?" The name was only vaguely familiar, the significance of it totally lost.
"Walt from Framingham. The El Dopo on the cell phone."
She started to remember. "And then the stars fell."
Tom nodded.
Trisha walked slowly around the post, never taking her hand off the ringbolt. She looked carefully at her surroundings and saw that she wasn't in a clearing at all, not really. There was too much grass-the high green grass you saw in fields or meadows. This was a meadow, or had been once, a long time ago. If you ignored the birches and the bushes and let your eye see the whole thing, you couldn't mistake it for anything else. It was a meadow. People made meadows, just as people planted posts in the ground, posts with ringbolts on them.
Trisha dropped to one knee and ran a hand up and down the post- lightly, mindful of splinters. Halfway around it she discovered a pair of holes and a twisted ring of old metal. She felt below it in the grass, found nothing at first, and dug deeper into the wiry undergrowth. Down there, caught in old hay and timothy, she found something else. Trisha had to use both hands to rip it free. It turned out to be an ancient rusty hinge. She held it up to the sun. A pencil-thin ray fell through one of the screwholes and put a brilliant pinhead of light on one cheek.
"Tom," she breathed. She looked toward where he had been, leaning back against the maple with his arms crossed, thinking he would be gone again. He wasn't, though, and although he wasn't smiling, she thought she saw a hint of a smile around his eyes and mouth. "Tom, look!" She held up the hinge.
"It was a gate," Tom said.
"A gate!" she repeated rapturously. 'A gate!" Something made by humans, in other words. Folk from the magic world of lights and appliances and 6-12 Insect Repellant.
"This is your last chance, you know."
"What?" She looked at him uneasily.
"It's the late innings now. Don't make a mistake, Trisha."
"Tom, you-"
But there was no one there. Tom was gone. Not that she had seen him disappear, exactly, because Tom had never been there in the first place. He was only in her imagination.
We have become a nation of wimps. "How did Ma Ingalls deal with her period in a dugout?" She dealt with it in the same way, no matter where she lived. They didn't have tampons or sanitary pads. They had a cloth that they had to wash, and she had a stream nearby. I got my period in the days of sanitary belts. Several years later the stick-on pads came out and trash cans were filled with sanitary belts...just as, years before, trash cans were filled with cloth sanitary pads. Someday women will look back on us and wonder how we dealt with tampons and stick-on pads. It's called progress, friends.
I switched to sewn cloth pads in college and never looked back. They breathe, plus I was not filling landfills and saved money. Cloth diapers are not such a big deal either. I loved having a diaper service.
I read those books as a child and loved them. I read them again when my kids were young and saw a whole added layer. They are coming under attack not just for racial issues, but also because Rose Ingalls Wilder became one of the the mothers of the libertarian movement in the United States. Her adopted grandson, Roger McBride, founded the Libertarian Party. Rose was an international journalist.
I sew my clothes, grow food, cook from scratch, etc... and I think these books inspired me to go that direction with my life.
I left the city and moved to a smallish town settled by intrepid pioneers. The kids here are different and take more risks. I was at my piano lesson and a neighbor kid knocked on the door asking to play with one of the sons. He looked like he was about 10. My teacher, the mother, did not know where he was, and after asking around found out he was walking somewhere in the neighborhood. The other little boy went off looking for him.
I told my teacher how happy I was that her kids were running loose. It felt like going back in time. Leaving the city after retirement has helped us so much, we live in a community now.
Rose Wilder Lane was her married name.
I don't reach the level of actual expertise, but I read a lot about nineteenth century America.
We have been deluded by simple-minds today who can't think beyond "All white people, evil, all others, victims." Some form of regurgitation of that will get you an 'A' on almost any American history test.
In truth, the Indians, yes, I said Indians, (find me an Indian who gives damn) warred as much or more against each others as against whites. The Comanches were outright terrorists, practicing genocide against whites and other Indians.
The Aztecs were perhaps the most collectively psychopathic culture that has ever existed on this earth. The reason Cortes was able to defeat them with such a small army was because surrounding Indian nations allied with him to destroy the Aztecs.
The French and Indian War was as the name implies. The French and the Indians allied against England. The movie, Young Washington, is worth watching in this regard. I make no claim that it isn't, first and foremost, entertainment. But it is very accurate.
And I never miss a chance to point out that the biggest threat to the Indians were not the Ingalls of America, it was the federal government. Some things never change.
“We have been given a puréed version of reality…” Nice!
I’ll never understand the need to remake an already classic show. I’ll pass.
I agree with a lot of what is said here, however, I'm also intrigued by the concept that there's a genetic predisposition to take risks and explore. I read about it for the first time in a fascinating book called Atlas of a Lost World, which explores who the first people to come to the Americas really were - a small portion of the book raises the possibility that these people, especially those who traveled farthest, had an innate predisposition to do so (some evidence being that higher levels of the risk-taking gene are found among the remaining indigenous peoples in South America). Of course, the early settlers of the Americas in colonial times, and people like Charles Ignalls who settled the fronteir, could also have had that gene for risk.
Some people are risk-takers by nature and some are risk-adverse; some are rule-breakers and some are rule-makers (I'm thinking of Michele Gelfand's book); some always want to see something new and some are homebodies and creatures of comfort. There's an unfortunate amount of disdain and rejection by each group of the other, but couldn't these characteristics be very innate, shaped by genetic predispositions and early experiences, and solidified by the time a person is an adult? i.e. a core personality trait, not a moral issue? I agree these reviewers are mistaken to criticize Charles Ignalls for striking out for the horizon - but they might need to be cut a bit of slack, too, as we all have varying levels of risk tolerance.
Love this! There are so many times that I’m out walking in the WI woods and imagining what the forests and prairies looked like 150-200 years ago and then imagining how in God‘s name people had the bravery to conquer the harsh conditions! Especially in the winter. Pa was a real man.
Yes, I think there courage and an adventurous mindset are part of it, but I wonder how much of it also came from plain desperation.
I just watched a documentary about how the Pacific Islands were originally settled. It's one thing to go out in the ocean in a little boat if there is another island in sight; a totally different thing if there isn't! Badass!
If you like Pa Ingalls, you will LOVE Per Hansa from Giants in the Earth. Fabulous frontier novel! Like Little House for adults.
Rather than bowdlerizing existing literature, if you want to read about Indian life at the time of Laura, turn to Louise Erdrichs’s series The Birchbark House -5 books in the series.
"Modernity has smoothed many of life’s rough edges away. We have been given a pureed version of reality, one in which nature’s variety is blended into uniformity. This way we know what to expect! It’s useful in some things, but even if you appreciate sidewalks, for instance, you can also recognize that trails are beautiful things. Beautiful, and instructive."
Yes. Yes. If you've ever read "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon" -and yes, Stephen King is a deranged political harpy but a good writer as well- you will get to the end of the novel and say Ah ha!
I'm posting a somewhat long excerpt from that 'end'.
"We know what to expect... useful in some things... but even if you appreciate sidewalks... trails are beautiful things... and instructive."
Yes, oh yes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Trisha is 9 years old and has been lost for 9 days in the woods on and off the Appalachian Trail in northern New Hampshire towards the Maine border. She’s far beyond exhaustion and hunger, and now has pneumonia. All she had for those 9 days to accompany her -besides the wild things that lived in those woods- was her Walkman with which she could listen to the Boston Red Sox games. Until the reception faded, and the batteries died. All she was left with then was a voice in her head. (A tale as old as time; Abraham, for one, would agree. [So would Job to a degree]).
*** SPOILERS AHEAD ***
The thing in the woods, whatever it was, kept her company on her journey. Although she dismissed a great deal of what she felt and thought she saw, she never dismissed her sense of what the wasp-priest had called the God of the Lost; never chalked up the clawed trees (or the headless fox, for that matter) to mere hallucination. When she felt that thing (or heard it-several times she had heard breaking branches in the forest as it kept pace with her, and twice she heard its low inhuman grunt), she never questioned the fact of its actual presence. When the feeling left her, she never questioned the fact that the thing was really gone. She and it were tied together now; they would remain so until she died. Trisha didn't think that would be long now. "Right around the corner," her mother would have said, except there were no corners in the woods. Bugs and swamps and sudden drop-offs, but no corners. It wasn't fair that she should die after fighting so hard to stay alive, but the unfairness didn't make her so angry now. It took energy to be angry. It took vitality. Trisha was nearly shot of both.
Halfway across this new clearing, which was no different than a dozen others she had passed through, she began to cough. It hurt deep in her chest, made her feel as if there were a great big hook in there. Trisha doubled over, grabbed hold of a jutting stump, and coughed until tears popped out of her eyes and her vision doubled. When the coughing finally tapered off and stopped, she remained bent over at first, waiting for her heart to slow its fearful pounding. Also for those big black butterflies in front of her eyes to fold their wings and go back to wherever they came from. Good thing she'd had this stump to hold onto or she would have fallen over for sure.
Her eyes went to the stump and her thoughts abruptly ceased. The first to come back was I'm not seeing what I think I'm seeing. It's another Make-believe, another hallucination. She closed her eyes and counted to twenty.
When she opened them the black butterflies were gone, but the rest was the same. The stump wasn't a stump. It was a post. On top, screwed into the gray and spongy old wood, was a rusty red ringbolt. Trisha grasped it, felt the old iron reality of it. She let go and looked at the flecks of rust on her fingers. She grasped it again, flicked it back and forth. That sense of deja vu swept her as it had when she had turned in a circle, only it was stronger now, and somehow associated with Tom Gordon. What ... ?
"You dreamed it," Tom said. He was standing about fifty feet away with his arms folded and his butt leaned up against a maple tree, dressed in his gray road uniform. "You dreamed we came to this place."
"I did?"
"Sure, don't you remember? It was the team's off night. The night you listened to Walt."
"Walt ... ?" The name was only vaguely familiar, the significance of it totally lost.
"Walt from Framingham. The El Dopo on the cell phone."
She started to remember. "And then the stars fell."
Tom nodded.
Trisha walked slowly around the post, never taking her hand off the ringbolt. She looked carefully at her surroundings and saw that she wasn't in a clearing at all, not really. There was too much grass-the high green grass you saw in fields or meadows. This was a meadow, or had been once, a long time ago. If you ignored the birches and the bushes and let your eye see the whole thing, you couldn't mistake it for anything else. It was a meadow. People made meadows, just as people planted posts in the ground, posts with ringbolts on them.
Trisha dropped to one knee and ran a hand up and down the post- lightly, mindful of splinters. Halfway around it she discovered a pair of holes and a twisted ring of old metal. She felt below it in the grass, found nothing at first, and dug deeper into the wiry undergrowth. Down there, caught in old hay and timothy, she found something else. Trisha had to use both hands to rip it free. It turned out to be an ancient rusty hinge. She held it up to the sun. A pencil-thin ray fell through one of the screwholes and put a brilliant pinhead of light on one cheek.
"Tom," she breathed. She looked toward where he had been, leaning back against the maple with his arms crossed, thinking he would be gone again. He wasn't, though, and although he wasn't smiling, she thought she saw a hint of a smile around his eyes and mouth. "Tom, look!" She held up the hinge.
"It was a gate," Tom said.
"A gate!" she repeated rapturously. 'A gate!" Something made by humans, in other words. Folk from the magic world of lights and appliances and 6-12 Insect Repellant.
"This is your last chance, you know."
"What?" She looked at him uneasily.
"It's the late innings now. Don't make a mistake, Trisha."
"Tom, you-"
But there was no one there. Tom was gone. Not that she had seen him disappear, exactly, because Tom had never been there in the first place. He was only in her imagination.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
N.B.
This novel was made available for free, in pdf format for download, by the author some years ago. It is not pirated.