A Field Guide to Feelings
Cabin Fever
How compulsion feels from the inside.
I used to live in a cabin, so I should be an expert on cabin fever.
At age nineteen, I emigrated to western New York to live on a remote piece of land, a quarter mile from the nearest neighbor and built that cabin. They didn’t plow my dirt road, so I’d be snowed in for weeks at a time, which was just as well, for the rattletrap vehicle I drove was broken down as often as it was operable. A trip to town was as special as a vacation in Paris. It took years before I realized and could admit that I really didn’t like living in the country, and would much rather be in the city, or at least as much of a city as Rochester, NY, where I am now, can claim to be.
Currently, with every non-essential business closed, due to the pandemic, I might as well still be living in my cabin in the woods. My cabin fever is back, but not nearly as bad as before. I have skills now and can confront the problem at the source before it gets out of hand.
In case you aren’t familiar with the term, cabin fever is that irritability and restlessness you might feel when you’ve been cooped up for too long. It’s otherwise referred to as stir-crazy. Frontiersmen called in prairie madness. The Inuits came down with piblokto when they were in their igloos…
