Travelling by the Book
January 2013
The course of my life was set when I was seven or eight: my maternal grandparents took my older sister and I on an epic pilgrimage to retrace the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Starting from Laura’s birthplace in Pepin, Wisconsin (Little House in the Big Woods) we followed the family’s path through various historical locations in Minnesota and the Dakotas. In a rusty motorhome packed with cheese sandwiches and fierce devotion, we visited museums, amateur re-enactments, and full-scale outdoor theatre productions of the tales. We travelled from the big woods to the prairie, and from the banks of the Plum Creek to the shores of Silver Lake. After pretending to endure the long winter to make it back to the little town on the prairie, we again enjoyed the happy golden years of the Ingalls family and then shyly envied the romance of the Wilders’ first four years.
The Little House books are fiction but were based on the recollections of Laura’s pioneer childhood in the American Midwest of the late 19th century. To my sister and I—and many Little House fans, I’d guess—Laura was absolutely real, and our reverent visit to the collapsed prairie dug out that was ‘possibly’ the family’s home and our quiet tears at the family dog Jack’s ‘probable’ grave were more proof that the Ingalls family had shared our land and water. As Wisconsin girls, both Laura and I had lain awake at night fearful of the owls and wolves in the woods, just like both my sister and I now wore matching prairie dresses our mother had made for the trip. We were the same.
Living through the Little House books nurtured a love of reading that has stayed with me. Growing up within a Pentecostal Christian family, my siblings and I were shielded from much of popular culture: television, movies and music were monitored and often vetted. My grandmother pre-read any book she considered giving to us, prayerfully checking the text for themes and ideas that might harm our carefully protected worldview. But I was always a voracious reader and allowed, unlike some of my church friends, to read practically whatever I wanted from the library. As a child, I did not consciously seek out books that challenged our Christian beliefs—I disliked profanity and abhorred violence— but many of the books I read presented a different world than the one that I knew: a world where authority was questioned, other religions existed as options, and sexual relations were not governed solely by the Bible.
While my grandmother read the Bible in its entirely every year—and my youth pastor did as well, in different languages in which he wished to minister— I struggled to make it through my daily devotions. I’ve certainly read the complete scriptures more than once and memorised great swaths, but the parables and psalms had to share my reading time with perhaps-telling favourites. I loved A Little Princess (1905) by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and its maudlin story of the seemingly-orphaned Sara Crewe struggling to find herself and her family while exiled at Miss Minchin’s Boarding School. Another favourite, The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner (1924) explores the life of four orphaned siblings living in an abandoned boxcar in the forest until they are rescued by their grandfather. My most beloved book was Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960) by Scott O’Dell which relays the true story of an Indigenous girl living alone and by her wits on a Pacific Island in the 19th century. As a child in the early eighties, my reading preferences were decidedly old fashioned and seem to reveal a lonely girl yearning for even more isolation.
I decidedly avoided the books that raised titters among my classmates including Virginia Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic series, everything by Stephen King, and anything with any satanic mentions of witchcraft or wizardly activities. (In a different generation, Harry Potter would never have been a friend of mine.) Admittedly, I did check out and read some of the books rumoured to be naughty, including Judy Blume’s frank discussions of puberty and sex in Forever and Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. Standing in between the modest stacks at the library, I even peeked into the coming-of-age tale, Go Ask Alice. I thought this was a story so dirty, its author wasn’t willing to be named—and I wasn’t willing to have my name written onto the circulation card waiting at the back of the book.
Although my reading was limited by what I thought acceptable to my family and church, I read almost everywhere: in bed when I was supposed to be sleeping, at the lake when everyone else was fishing, even in the van during long family vacations. I pushed the boundaries of tolerability by reading Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy while we visited Yellowstone National Park, looking up from my elves and dwarves to briefly acknowledge geysers and moose. In high school, I remained in an advanced placement English class that fellow church members had abandoned due to controversial discussions regarding challenging books like The Grapes of Wrath and War and Peace.
My reading provided an escape, a way of traveling and visiting other lives and worlds. Of course, I didn’t always understand those people and their ways: as a young child, I convinced my mother to make me a water-chestnut sandwich—which I enthusiastically ate—while trying to recreate Paddington Bear’s watercress. But I loved peering outside my rather restricted world, past the trees and farms and into a world of cobblestone sidewalks and talking bears. And it was this aspect of my reading that I could see would become a problem. During a particular devout period in high school—years filled with youth rallies and summer mission trips that included street corner proselytising in Chicago and volunteering in orphanages in Guatemala—I identified books as a distraction from God and attempted to curb, or at least direct, my reading habits. Perhaps predictably, I failed: after I graduated high school, my undergraduate years at private evangelical colleges saw my major change from international missions to English literature.
By this time, in my early twenties, I had realised that the world was a different place from what I had understood it to be as a child. For the slide was in motion: now my reading ensured relentless exposure to concepts — evolution, feminism, postmodernism — that seemed to directly contradict my carefully crafted and guarded worldview; I started to question more. And after I immigrated to Australia, I started to write—surprisingly, stories from the place and worldview I thought I had left behind. With the publication of Sufficient Grace in 2012, I am on the opposite side of the page: I have written recollections and imaginings of my home, changing many things and leaving some things the same. Folks can now read the story that came to me through my years of living in the woods with the scriptures and the hymns as friends—just like Laura. Reading brought me through my childhood and from a place so far away; reading returns me to my home.
Amy Espeseth is the author of Sufficient Grace (Scribe $29.95).
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