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Cabin Fever, Dontchaknow December, 1999 We got cabin fever No if's, and's, or but's We're disoriented And demented And a little nuts Ach du lieber Volkswagen car (Yodel-lay-ee-hoo) Saur braten viener schnitzel Und a vunder bar (Yodel-lay-ee-hoo) --Muppets' Cabin Fever Song (from Muppet Treasure Island ) Talk about ironies. Here I am living in sunny Los Angeles writing about cabin fever. That's like living in International Falls and writing about breast implants. Cabin fever, as commonly understood, doesn't occur in Los Angeles. It occurs in cold places like Margie, Minnesota, Rhinelander, Wisconsin, and Moosehead, Maine. Where it occurs, it stems from a real or imagined meteorological threat that compels one to stay indoors for long stretches, normally in the winter months. As I show below, the fever stems from a burning desire to get OUT of the house paired with interminable frustration at being rebuffed by the furies and flurries of Mother Nature. According to Michael Earl Lane, ruddy survivor of several New Hampshire winters, "Cabin fever occurs when you decide 'enough is enough!' Thanksgiving and Christmas? There's supposed to be snow, it's romantic. January? It's supposed to be cold, we can deal. February? Alright, middle of winter, but spring's around the corner. March? Spring is in the air! APRIL? They're chasin' nieces in Arkansas, busting squeegee guys in Manhattan, harvesting magic mushrooms in Oregon, and yet you're still looking out your window at six foot snow drifts, ice-glazed roads, stalled cars, frost heaves and foot deep potholes filled with mini-icebergs!" In addition to envy and anger, cabin fever engenders frustration and defeatism, as you end up stuck in your house because it's too much hassle to leave. If there's been fresh snow, you have to deal with salting the driveway and walkway, breaking up the ice, and shoveling off the new drift. It's a project. Then there's the car. Can you even get to your car? Has the lock frozen over? Is the car going to start? Is the car going to make it down the road? Is there black ice? Have they salted the roads? Is the highway cleared? Can you get over the bridge? And we're just talking a two mile drive to the Piggly Wiggly. Once you get to the Piggly Wiggly, the Hinky Dinky or the Kum 'N Go, you encounter four months of sooty black snow drifts piled against curbs and walls. You manage to walk through the ice-filled sloshfests to the front, but then you wonder, "is the store even stocked? Did their deliveries arrive?" Inside, as you examine the selection of wilted cabbage, mealy pink tomatoes, anemic carrots, and bruised Chilean apples, another snowstorm hits. By the time you get back to your double wide trailer, what should have taken a few minutes to pick up some Slim Jims, Bud Lite, and scrapple has become a two hour ordeal, assuming you didn't slide off the road. It's no wonder you slam the trailer door, swearing like Scarlet O'Hara, "I'm never going outside again!" Then, after two weeks of this self-imposed isolation, cabin fever strikes once more. You start to feel like Jack Nicholson from The Shining . You're body looks and feels like hell. You're woozy from overindulging the four food groups (nicotine, sugar, caffeine, and sausage). You need to get out. But every time you get up from your bed, you feel nauseous. Your head aches. Your back aches. Your skin feels so prickly you don't dare wear any wool. You feel BLAH all over, and, what's worse, everything you can think of doing inside has turned stale and yucky. You're sick of reading. Your ambitious plan to study The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Oresteia has devolved into hour-long meditations on Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health , I'm Okay, You're Not , and Diana: Her True Story . You're sick of videos. Your plan to watch all the great films you missed while outdoors during the Ssummer was forestalled when you got to Bob's Land of 10,000 Videos and Bait & Tackle Barn and discovered many others had the same idea before you. So you end up watching Groundhog Day for the fiftieth time because all the other good films are taken. Your ambitious macroneurotic pledge to cook in tune with the seasons, your glorious plans for dropping twenty pounds the Jenny Craig way, have subtly shifted to bingeing on Cheeze-its, Safeway coconut cream pies, and "chudge" (artificially flavored chocolate cheddar cheese fudge). You've completely given up on TV (you can recite every one of those confounded Barney songs). You stopped staring at the wall for hours on end, fasting on brown rice and cheeseballs, and shoveling snow in your bare feet, after you catch your local Zen Master (Lanny, the gas meter guy) stocking up on Absolut at the Liquor Locker. Worst part is that you feel the rest of the country has been there, done that. They're already busy making the mistake of starting a new love affair, watching new grass sprout, bulbs bloom, trees blossom, frogs mating. They're outside in sweaters, not goose down parkas. On the surface, the above symptoms of cabin fever might seem benign. Problems occur when two or more are gathered in one cabin, unable to venture outside because there is ten feet of snow blocking the front door. In Alaska, this commonly results in divorce. However, as I explain in my slanguistic tome, "How to Talk American" (Houghton Mifflin), the definition of "Alaska divorce" is "killing one's spouse." Things don't get so extreme in other cold American climates. For instance, the vicious cycle of envy, desperation and defeatism that characterizes cabin fever in other states doesn't occur in Minnesota. Here, come Winter, the state's taciturn Scandinavian residents simply turn even more taciturn. "Been ice fishin'?" "Yup." "Any size to em'?" "Yup." There's such a stoic quality to Minnesotans during cabin fever season it's hard to tell if someone is suicidal, fratricidal or enlightened. In fact, whatever horrible calamity does happen here between the winter months of October and May, your average Minnesotan won't let on about it. Every life situation is handled with the same equivocal Minnesota informality. "I understand Sven was out snowmobiling and it turned over and crushed him and his two kids." "Yup." "Well, heck, you were Sven's best friend. How you holdin' up there, Bob?" "Can't complain." Keep in mind that Bob would give the same response even if he'd won the lottery. "Can't complain" is actually a densely loaded Minnesota code word, meaning that Bob could complain and probably would complain if complaining wasn't such an extreme gesture. Things get so dramatically bleak here, the safest course is not to make a big deal out of anything , even if the Vikings win the Super Bowl. You see this in Minnesota vocabulary. "We're about to get some flurries" means we're about to have a blizzard. "That's different" means I vehemently oppose your idea. "I'm going up north" might mean you are going three hundred miles north to the Canadian border, or about sixty miles north to a tiny one-wall igloo on one of Minnesota's 14,000 lakes, where Minnesotans ostensibly go in Winter to do a little ice fishing, though, according to former resident, Marcia Schlesinger-Dolphin, it's actually where Minnesotans go to get silently sloshed. There's a good reason that "Minnie-Sober" has more treatment centers per capita than any other state in the Union. If you had to sum up the Minnesota mind-set in one word it would be "conservation." Conservation of energy, resources, emotions, leftovers, speech and restaurant tips. The harsh and long winters put Minnesotans in bunker mode all year long. Here, cabin fever isn't a phenomenon that creeps up on ya in February; it's hot wired into your very soul. You see this in all aspects of life, including fashion, where prudence, preparation and practicality (the three pillars of Minnesota life) rule. For a Minnesota gal, high fashion is owning a big Coach purse (so you can hold all the Minnesota essentials--flashlight, jumper cables, flares, engine block blanket). Because, as every Minnesota gal knows, winter is real, it's here, and we're ready for it, by golly. "Have a little lunch?" In neighboring Wisconsin, the German influence is more profound. As in, "come from out the yard in, I tink a storm snow is pulling up." Many "Sconnies" still remember those never-ending winters back in the Old Country. Cabin Fever in Germany is called "Fruhjahrsmudigkeit"--literally, the lethargy of early year, a typical mixture of weltschmerz, boredom, tiredness, and bad temper that in June momentarily dissipates when the first twinklings of a pale sun obscured by heavy smog fumes from the autobahn show on the sky the color of "kruppstahl," then turn into "sommermudigkeit" or summer fatigue due to high ozone concentration in the air, followed by a heavy winter depression that sets in when the leaves turn in late September. Not surprisingly, a string of maladies strike Germans every year around February when the excitement of the Christmas season and the effect of mega liters of "gluhwein" (mulled cider, lots of spices) with its stench of lukewarm puke, and the pleasures of "Christstollen" (a sugar lump camouflaged as a cake with frosting on the outside), have all worn off, and the days are still distressingly short, and there's no "zigeuner" (gypsy), "scheinasylant" (asylum-seeker faking a reason to enter the country), "zecke" (left-wing bums, squatters, and Socialists) or "penner" (homeless person) to kick around anymore, and there's STILL no concrete plan to take back Alsace-Lorraine. Usually, this time sees the worst of the winter weather--cold, windy, with little or no sun. People feel miserable and tired, and all sorts of ills are blamed on "Fruhjahrsmudigkeit," such as forgetfulness, bad tempers, unfitness, and weakness for American-made television. Various counteractive remedies appear in the press, such as 12 Easy Steps to Combat Fruhjahrsmudigkeit and Weltschmerz 1. Gather kinder and play Turk-For-a-Day 2. Drink another gluhwein and tell homophobic jokes around a nice cozy "stammtisch" (a table reserved for a group of pals who meet there once a week) 3. Get rid of the "Fidschis" (all Asians stem from the Fiji Islands in the twisted geography of right-wing East Germans) 4. Watch more "Musikantenstadel," a Germanic folk music show on TV. 5. Reenact the Sack of Rome 6. Get rid of the Poles. After all, the weatherman just said that an icy influx of Polar air is responsible for the bad weather. 7. Re-mount deer antlers on living room wall. 8. Get rid of the damn "Ami" (American) tourists, who swarm all over our beloved Nuremberg, where law and order once ruled supreme. 9. Form coalitions with Green Party members in neighborhood 10. Eat more "saumagen" (good eternal Chancellor Kohl's favorite dish-- the innards of a pig--steamy hot and foul) 11. Cover yourself in fat and felt and roll around in the snow, ala Joseph Beuys 12. Make a prank call to the Kremlin and demand repayment of debt by midnight tonight on threat of Blitzkrieg 2001 Given that Wisconsin is located in the more democratic and politically correct melting pot of America, many of those Old World remedies are actively discouraged. Instead, reporters in Wisconsin urge Sconnies to try more innovative American-style remedies for cabin fever: 1. Run around the block naked with a Styrofoam cheesehead on your noggin'. 2. Go on a long, painful, and ultimately fruitless meditation retreat, where you live on pine needles and beef jerky. 3. Walk around the basement intoning, "It rubs the lotion on it's skin, it does so whenever it's told. Now it places the lotion in the basket....Don't you hurt my dog, lady!" 4. Launch a surprise attack on Minnesota. Sconnies actually don't use the term cabin fever. They talk more in terms of cabin influenza, cabin epidemic, cabin plague. If you were raised in a femmy climate like we have in most of California, and ask a Sconnie what winter is like, your question will be met with dark knowing laughter. It's like the subtlety of a Zen koan, you just won't grasp the depth of such laughter until you have vivid memories of living through several rural Wisconsin winters yourself, including the memory of wearing bomber caps and muk-luks for Halloween, the memory of the Wisconsin Shuffle (a series of baby steps which keep one from crashing to the ice), the memory of the bleak unending white emptiness that would give even a Tibetan monk pause, and, naturally, the delusional images of Hawaii whenever the snow truck sands your driveway, and the third degree burns from one too many visits to Sherrie's Tanning Shack. Of course, there is a serious, even deathly, side to cabin fever. In fact, it has a medical name. It's called Seasonal Affective Disorder (or SAD). Recent research suggests 10 million Americans suffer from it. According to medical experts, the standard symptoms of SAD are depression, random outbursts of violent behavior, excessive sleepiness, social withdrawal, feelings of inadequacy, an odd disinterest in Presidential peccadilloes, and, if you're the slight bit Swedish, suicide. Medically speaking, the symptoms associated with cabin fever are thought to be caused by the brain's reaction to the lack of light or by a marked imbalance in levels of serotonin. One standard remedy is high intensity light boxes. According to the November/December 1998 American Health for Women, light boxes are "literally rectangular boxes, about two feet tall and 1 1/2 feet wide, with a translucent glass front. Inside are several fluorescent tubes that cast large amounts of light. "Patients sit in front of the box, placed on the breakfast table or on their desks, for anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours a day." According to American Health for Women, light boxes allegedly regulate your "circadian clock," maybe cure your depression, but they can also fry your cornea, not to mention your house. So, let's say, you're like most people, and aren't suffering from debilitating depression, but just have a bad case of the winter blues. Outside of controversial medical remedies and unconventional folk remedies, are there other more down-to-earth solutions to cabin fever? Rockabilly aficionado, Clay Patch, lived in the Upper Midwest through seven winters. His Cabin Fever coping strategies are worth emulating: 1. Get yourself a one-speed Schwinn bike (this will not seem preposterous to those outdoorsy Minnesotans who bike in any weather). It's so heavy it goes through snow perfectly, and it's so slow you won't freeze your keester off; 2. Go sledding (good way to get exercise, it's something to anticipate, and Minnesotan Bobby "Don't Worry, Be Happy" McFerrin swears by it); 3. Get out and volunteer. Clay Patch took a position as a Greenpeace canvasser. Generally, cold climate states like Minnesota are more tolerant (see Jesse "the Steroid-enhanced Body" Ventura and The Artist Currently Known as Symbolina), so the sight of a Greenpeace canvasser is not likely to provoke Lief into getting out his shotgun. In fact, canvassing in the dead of winter is a great sympathy ploy: "Oh you are so BRAVE (stupid) being out in this weather... let me write you a check." To put the cold in perspective, Clay Patch also recommends winter wilderness camping. "The last time we went was over Martin Luther King weekend. We dragged sleds 10 miles into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and camped on Blue Whale Lake. We scraped the snow away from the ice to build a campfire and erected the parachute. It makes a great winter shelter. But because you are sleeping on ice, you have to sleep on two sleeping pads, inside two sleeping bags, one of which better be a mummy bag, otherwise you're screwed. Suffice to say all this work is useful to keep your dumb ass warm. You cannot sit still for long in minus 10 degree days, even if the sun is shining." After a weekend of such frigid asceticism, there's not a chance of catching cabin fever in a four-walled Edina, Minnesota home. Of course, the most common way that "Sconnies," "Minnie-soh-tans," Michiganders, North Dakotans, Alaskans and any cold--or sunless--climate American deals with Cabin Fever is to simply get their butts out of the cabin, load into that Fleetwood Bounder RV and head to Texas, Florida, Mexico or Quartzite, Arizona, where they join other "snowbirds" at month-long Good Sam Jamborees. Now happily ensconced in America's "Sunbelt," these joyous northern "Escapees" get together to play lawn bowling and drink gin and tonics on the Astroturf lawn, with frequent exclamations about how "the RV lifestyle" has renewed their "zest for life!" The men spend the first few days talking about the route they took to get there, while the ladies discuss ways to decrease that corn-fed spread. And both spend many hours discussing Ed and Zelma's multilevel Internet marketing scheme and trading winter war stories. Of course, what's left out of this whole discussion is the fact that some of the behaviors attributed to cabin fever are perfectly natural responses to winter. After all, come January, many animals sleep more, do less, and are irritable if disturbed. It's called hibernation. Half the battle with cabin fever is accepting it's Winter: you're supposed to slow down. What's more, there's a very positive upside to living through such unfathomably cold weather. As Barton Sutter writes in Cold Comfort: Life at the Top of the Map , "it keeps the riffraff out." In closing, I have to confess I misled you a bit at the start. Cabin fever doesn't just occur in cold climates. Cabin fever occurs all over America. In Seattle, locals deal with Cabin fever by smiling a lot, and, when that fails, drinking even stronger lattes (though they wouldn't want to totally quash the brooding angst that comes from living beneath the eternal "grey lid"--after all, the dreary Seattle weather did give birth to the city's signature grunge-soaked sound). In nearby Portland, Greg "the Big Hairy Man" McMickle simply bought the neighboring house and painted it a bright Texas Rose, so he could have lots of reflected yellow light streaming into his house on those inevitably grey Portland days. In New York City cabin fever is known as co-op fever, and comes on in late January. It can linger as long as three weeks, during which time the hyperkinetic New Yorker slows down to a pace approximating that of a Pakistani cab driver. During this annual hibernation, New Yorkers talk less, sleep five instead of four hours a night, momentarily entertain Florida as a viable place to live, and seize this golden opportunity to renew deeply twisted sexual liaisons with the shrink. Unfortunately, the electrically-consumptive rush on tanning salons spawns a plague of brownouts. Come mid-to-late February the hyperkineticism is back with a vengeance, as the somnolent New Yorker rises from his mild depression to shriek, "Gedouttahere with this cockamamie cabin fever crap!! Do I look like I got time to sit around and stare at a tanning light?! Fehgedaboutit!" Peppering discussions with renewed use of the F-word, the average New Yorker proves fully capable of curing any and all winter blues, thankyou very much. Rural Mainers don't have cabin fever either. They have trailer park fever, best cured by drinking even more Nasty Gansett beer. In fact, we have our own version of Cabin Fever right here in sunny L.A. It occurs every April, after the excitement of the Academy Awards has worn off. It's a time when we sulk by the pool inside the fortress of our gated community, not even driving the few blocks to Ralph's, Trader Joe's, and Koo Koo Roo, refusing to see our agent, image consultant, handler, or acupuncturist, refusing even to go to auditions, to do lunch, to do facials, film openings, astrology readings, our Cabala study group, our Sex & Fame Addicts Anonymous meeting, our weekly tantric massage, not even letting the Mexican gardener come in and clean the pool or trim the hedges. It's a time when we sit back in stone cold silence, our Nokia cell phone turned off, our Jamba Juice and Balance Bar still on the table, as ghetto birds swirl overhead, drive-bys echo across the street, and our giant, murderous SUV sits idle in the shop. We sit there, well, we actually recline there, stuck in our own sun-drenched L.A. cabin fever, realizing another year has gone by and still, STILL!!, we haven't won an Oscar. The standard remedies for this uniquely L.A. form of cabin fever are legion: take another overpriced scriptwriting workshop, change one's name to something more bratty and upper crust like Parker Posey, take up yoga, hire a personal trainer, try another facelift, another tummy tuck, liposuction, breast augmentation, Xanax, Zoloft, and, of course, rehab. Though for true Los Angelinos there is a solution more elemental and profound. It appears without will or warning, when early one fine morning, during the height of L.A. cabin fever, you are suddenly lifted from your bed by some unseen force. You dress simply, and drive to the top of the Angeles Crest. From there, high above the desert basin, long before the silence gives away to tumult, you sit down on a rock...close your eyes...and dream of snow. |
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