The Truth About Cabin Fever

For most people "Cabin Fever" is merely a touch, a dollop if you will, of restlessness during the long dark of winter. Would that it were so. True Cabin Fever is a severe infection, brought on by the painful proximity of another person who once alleged to be a bosom companion, the Ranch dressing of your salad days, the fellow who could always finish your sentence. Now, as the hours crawl by, each with sixty measured steps, back and forth to the sound of his jabber, you realize what a fiend he is and how long the sentence must be.

If you can just last through another day of his inane chatter -- as if any proper angler would ever use a 5X tippet for a #6 Muddler -- you deserve the laurel for hardiness. His fool theory, presented for the fiftieth time in the same nasal tone (oh, yes, he says he has a head cold) positing that brown trout will be inherently more difficult to catch as the water clarity of their stream increases. Foofaraw! I don't even answer most of the time, sending him a glower instead. He should now have a great collection of glowers, ranging from seasonably mild in December, to monumentally scornful in March. I sent them, but they don't register, he nattered on.

It was not always so. When I began to build my log cabin in September, Al's presence was re-assuring; it was just an old friend, a comfort and a help. Occasionally, we would disagree about something over tea at night, as the Svea howled under the hemlock that was my kitchen. He didn't even share my tent in October, a good thing as it was small. In fact, until the second week in the cabin in late December, with snow three feet deep outside, I was barely aware of Al as anything other than a pleasant voice and an expert at pancakes. Then the logs started to dry.

I'd built my cabin with vertical spruce logs 7'3" long. It was pretty tight when I built it; I chinked it with oakum driven in with an improvised caulking iron.

I woke up that December morning and looked outside; which was suddenly not difficult because half the chinking had fallen out of the dry logs overnight. Snow was swirling gently through the cracks. That was when Al spoke for the first time at length. It started with advice, took a right-turn at admonitions, and accelerated into straight-away complaints. Half an hour later, as I stood on snowshoes outside, moving from log to log, the fallen oakum coiled over my arm, Al was on a rip.

The next day Al informed me that the floor was too cold; the coffee too hot; I snored (still unproven); but that if I listened to him, all would be well. I didn't listen. I ground my teeth so loud, avalanches started on a nearby hill. I deliberately stomped about the cabin whenever possible, rattling the sheet-metal stove and causing the oil lamp to tip precariously. I would turn the air intake down on the stove, then, when enough wood gas had built up inside it, open the top quickly, then close it. In 3.5 seconds, the stove would explode, sending the pie-plate top clattering and causing Al to shriek in alarm. I put pine needles in his tea; hid the toilet paper in the outhouse; sang a song of which I knew only one verse; spilled salt in his porridge. Once I spent three hours hopping in place and humming tunelessly. Nothing would stop Al's inane chatter. The dead squirrel on his pillow went unnoticed. He replaced the leg I sawed off his chair without a hitch in his monologue. When he tripped over an innocent piece of snare wire I left on the path and fell in the brook, it just made him more loquacious.

By late March, the start of mud season. I knew that Al was absolutely starkers. I can say no more, grief consumes me. Yet I hope that this short portrayal of Al's precipitous plunge into madness may serve as a lesson for all anglers and outdoors-people -- Cabin Fever is very real.

© 2006 Reed F. Curry