Alaska’s shotgun divorces are rare here in northern Michigan, but our fever can still take alarming forms. Now that we’ve passed February and begun the brutal home stretch, my friends and neighbors have begun exhibiting a variety of symptoms:
– dragging the canoe into the living room, setting it on sawhorses, and spray-painting it yellow.
– signing up for intensive but ultimately fruitless online courses in The Great Books, Spanish, and astronomy.
– engaging in all-night internet and Facebook searches for people not seen in 30 years.
– cooking nonstop all weekend to produce, package, and freeze fifteen gallons of white chili, forty stuffed peppers, a stack of personal-pan pizzas, and a dozen batches of chocolate brownies with walnuts, then going to bed Sunday night with an intense sugar buzz and dreaming about trains going over cliffs.
– reviving hobbies abandoned in childhood: Ham radio, soapbox derby, clipping clothes for paper dolls from magazines, hand-painting toy soldiers organized by the wars they fought in, Monkeys trading cards arranged artfully around perimeter of bedroom mirror. Then abruptly abandoning them again.– inventing deadly new cocktails like the Bloody Monday, Instantaneous Annihilation, Gut Bomb, and What, Me Worry?
– drinking the above-mentioned cocktails while sending emails of apology to everyone they ever wronged.
– dressing the dog in sweaters and socks and filming its hilarious antics for distribution via YouTube.
How about you? Any symptoms yet?
Wow, cabin fever sounds ever so much more interesting than a plain old cold. I was congratulating myself on not suffering cabin fever this winter, but maybe I took the wrong path through the snow.
Maybe the fact that you are following a path through the snow has prevented cabin fever from taking hold. My own preventative medicine has always been to get outside as much as possible — though it’s tough to do when you’ve got a cold!
Actually, I agree with Timothy Egan’s January essay in the NYT asserting that creative people get more done during the season of long, dark nights. As he puts it:
“…we settle under a blanket of sullen sky, something stirs in the creative soul. At the calendar’s gloaming, while the landscape is inert, and all is dark, sluggish, bleak and cold, writers and cooks and artists and tinkerers of all sorts are at their most productive.
At least, that’s my theory. As a lifelong resident of a latitude well to the north of Maine, I’ve come to the conclusion that creativity needs a season of despair. Where would William Butler Yeats be if he nested in Tuscany? Could Charles Dickens ever have written a word from South Beach? And the sun of Hollywood did much to bleach the talents out of that troubled native of Minnesota, F. Scott Fitzgerald.”
I’m working against deadline on a detailed painting right now. The gray skies, just-below freezing temperatures, and sheets of ice left over from Tuesday night’s sleet/snow storm are all my allies in getting this painting done. I don’t want winter to go on forever, but a good long solid dose of it is a tremendous benefit for working through my painting and writing pipeline.
Egan’s essay can be found at:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/the-longest-nights/
Beautifully said, Steve. It’s been the same for me. Most of my most creatives and sustained bursts of work all these years has been from January 2 until the opening of trout season — in the season of dark and snow (and fireplaces, and soup on the stove, and rosy-cheeked kids tracking snow inside).
In the last month I’ve read two extremely dull, poorly written books on soil science from cover to cover, ordered way more seeds than I need to feed a family of two for a year, looked for, found and organized my hastily-put-away-after-last-years-disastrous-yield maple syrup equipment, read a book on how to configure protein rations for feeder pigs (with little success in developing a clear plan of action) and thankfully, skied 20 kilometers a day on great snow.
For me, the biggest risk of losing it comes after the snow has melted and sap has stopped flowing, but before things start growing up out of the ground. Every trip outside results in pounds of red clay stuck to the muck boots, and hundreds of ticks stuck to the dogs. April really is the cruelest month.