"My wandering foot gets to itching..."

This man is Charles Ingalls, right?
Pa is kind and calm and utterly practical.
He is the cornerstone of the Ingalls family.
He takes care of everyone.

I loved Pa when I was a little girl, happily watching the TV series of "Little House on the Prairie." I wanted to be Laura. (Didn’t every little girl? I mean, NO ONE wanted to be fussy, smug Mary, did they? Like everyone wants to be Jo, no one wants to be Beth…c’mon, you can tell me the truth…)

Stuck in the house last week by several feet of snow and without my van, I reread my Little House books, starting with the one in which the Ingalls family moves reluctantly into town from their claim shanty for the winter. Pa reasons that the train will continue to bring supplies into town, so they will spend the long, hard, cold winter snug, warm, and fed, in town. Alas, the almost-daily blizzards trap the townfolk in their houses and prevents the train from getting through – there are starving families and there’s no fuel for warmth, until those intrepid Wilder boys go to buy wheat from a farmer out on the vast, snow-covered prairie. They barely make it back before the impending blizzard, but they do, and their wheat saves the day. Eventually the winter ends, the supply train gets through, and we leave the Ingalls family happily scarfing down salt pork and cornmeal mush (I think my husband would have died of palate boredom as a Little House denizen…he can’t even stand to eat the same meal two nights in a row, let alone for months on end…)

After finishing The Long Winter, I happily started right from the beginning, Little House in the Big Woods. I moved with the Ingalls family from the woods of Wisconsin, to Indian territory in Kansas, to Minnesota and Plum Creek, onward to De Smet, South Dakota. As I happily read through each book, I began to realize something: Pa has some wanderlust going on. Some delusions of grandeur. Some “the grass is always greener…” tendencies.

For example:
When he discovers the government has messed up the boundary lines of his homestead in Indian territory and he will be forced to move, he throws a bit of a temper tantrum and packs up his wife, his children, and their belongings into the covered wagon, and moves the VERY NEXT DAY, lighting out for greener pastures.

Moving to what he himself terms “the land of milk and honey” of Minnesota, he builds a house completely on credit, only to have grasshoppers eat his wheat crops, forcing him to take a job managing a hotel for his sister’s husband. Even then, with money coming in and the family living in town and enjoying the social life and educational opportunities there, he can’t wait to go stake a claim on the prairie in the Dakota Territories.

Money flows through his hands like water: he buys a plow only to abandon it because it’s “too heavy” to move; he trades horses, oxen, and cows like little boys trade baseball cards; and he brags to Caroline of the silk dresses and fine house he will build her, when his ship comes in (in the form of wheat crops). And yet the constant refrain, throughout all the books, is his desire to never owe anything to anyone: he insists they must not be beholden to anyone for even the littlest thing. Being and having good neighbors is all well and good, but all thoughtful deeds or the smallest gesture of kindness must be repaid promptly and in equal measure.

In short, although Laura sees her Pa as the paragon of virtue and knowledge, Charles Ingalls is self-absorbed, delusional, and ever-restless. I started to feel sorry for Caroline, who, like many sensible women, was taken in by a twinkling pair of eyes, a charming manner, and promises of a better life. She makes the best of things, because she has to. She loves him, because he is charming and roguish and lovable. But is he stable? A good provider? The man she should have settled down with and had babies with? Not necessarily. She is uprooted over and over again, along with her children, and lives in sometimes ridiculous and dangerous conditions, because Charles can’t stand to be trapped, to be stuck anywhere, among too many people, for too long.

Charles Ingalls, Ne’er-Do-Well on the Prairie.