Magnus Goes North With Summer, Day 7

Monday June 2

The wind ‘freshened’ in the night. I got up and was getting dressed and starting the coffee, when I felt the motorhome bounce. Aha, I thought—Ed’s getting up.  A few minutes later, when I was ready to leave, he’d still not appeared. But when I opened the door and nearly had it blow off its hinges, I knew the cause.

All day long, a strong wind was blowing out of the north with gusts up to 25 mph. Not pleasant. Since there was a chance of rain in the afternoon, I chose to go to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in the morning and then jog in the afternoon.  (Bad choice, by the way.)

But first we tried to drive to the campground on the shore of Lake Henry, which would have taken us down the narrow passage between Lake Thompson and Lake Henry that Laura wrote so eloquently about.  Water, tall grasses, and wild birds…she gives a little sigh and explains that it’s because she’s thinking how sad it is that how things leave when people come.

Ain’t that the truth. We couldn’t even drive to the campground from our direction, because we ended up in a row of lakeshore houses and a ‘private road’ sign.  You could access it from the other direction, but we didn’t have time or inclination to drive ten miles out of our way and come back.

No matter. The wild things were gone. But the beautiful water and grasses were still there, with a smattering of birds. We saw blue-winged teal, killdeer of course, goldfinches, and a lots of Yellow-Headed Blackbirds.

 

Not a new bird for me, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen one.

On to De Smet. We went to the house in town first, and that was a good thing. There was a 1-1/2 hour tour that took you to the surveyor’s house, a recreation of the original De Smet school, a recreation of the Brewster school where Laura first taught, and the house that Pa built for him and Ma to live out their last years in. Laura had moved to Missouri by then, but Mary and Carrie lived there for a long time.

The surveyor's house

 

The schoolhouse foreground, the surveyor's house (white) background 

The Brewster School

Twist of hay for burning (lower left)

Laura's hand-drawn map of how close they came to walking away from town in a blizzard

Stairs to the attic in the surveyor's house

The tour guide was awesome. I need to note that on the website somehow. She told me a whole bunch of stuff I never knew and even more than that. Wow. There’s a whole lot of history there and we barely scratched the surface of it.

Stupid me had put in a pair of old contact lenses that—I think—were the loaner pair I was given when I got my prescription. They felt bad at first and went on feeling bad, and by the time Ed and I got to the starting place for the tour, the left one was was killing me.  I was able to swap it out with one that I’d been carrying around in my bag for several years. Nice to know that those contacts in the bag finally came in useful. 

Note: need to check that there’s an extra pair of right contact lenses in there, too.  I checked that there was a left lens.

The tour. Well, it was cool. Hard to describe what it’s like seeing things that you read about sixty years ago. When I started first grade, the teacher read from one of the books and we loved it much. So when I learned to read, it wasn’t long until I found them in the library and read them all. And read them again. And again. It was my happy place.

Reading the same books over and over didn’t seem to rot my brain, although my brother frequently told me it would.

Funny, though—when we first went to the surveyor’s house it seemed freaky to me that it was located in town, near first street by the railroad tracks.  But it was supposed to be by Silver Lake, which was at least a mile away! And that was a good instinct—it had been moved from its original location. I would have loved to have seen Silver Lake, but it had been drained and didn’t seem worth the trouble.  All the ducks and geese had gone somewhere else.

And that’s pretty much the whole story of how it felt to see De Smet and the buildings--it’s nothing like what it used to be.  There are trees all over now, but I know from history that when they lived there in 1880 or so there was only one tree that they called The Lone Cottonwood. It stood out on the prairie and made a landmark for travelers.

But now you have to find the right angle to look out over the prairie to get a view that doesn’t have trees in the distance.  And I know that the tallgrasses—the big bluestem and grama grass and indiangrass—are mostly gone from the horizon. I’m told they persist in diminished quantities in the edge rows of fields and along the railroad tracks.  A lot of the sloughs remain, but many more of the lakes are drained and converted to farmland. I bet it’s boggy and substandard.

(BTW, the map says that Silver Lake is a waterfowl production area now. Whatever that is.)

After that we drove out to the Ingalls Farm. They had a huge gift shop, but you could tell that it was managed for money money money, not history. We chose not the take the tour.

The prairie where the Ingalls Farm was:

At the end of the day Molly and I took a long walk down to the beach area beside the lake and the marshes just outside the park, when we’d walked with Ed earlier but saw nothing.  Although Merlin heard a pheasant. There were a few people fishing and some kids on bikes.

On the way back I noticed that along with the killdeer, there was a very pale colored bird on the beach.  I got it in the binocs and took a careful look at it.  Another one showed up, too, and the first one crouched down in the rocks and disappeared. But I got a really good look at them. It was clearly some sort of plover and only had one ring around the breast and looked totally different from a killdeer.  It was about 8:30 pm but not at all dark yet.

When I went back, I looked at the book and realized they were Piping Plover!!!  And an endangered species, at least in The United States, with only about 10000 of them  known to be present.

I reported it on ebird.  Very excited!