I Propose A New Definition For The Phrase "Cabin Fever”
Whoever wrote the dictionary should have invested in the occasional road trip.
I recently came across a thought-provoking headline that read, “One great sentence can launch a whole story.” In my case, it isn’t a sentence. It’s the phrase, Cabin Fever. I’ve spent far too much time mulling over the dictionary definition.
NOUN:
“a state characterized by anxiety, restlessness, and boredom, arising from a prolonged stay in a remote or confined place.”
That definition did not compute for me, and therefore, I propose an official change to the dictionary definition of cabin fever.
The phrase should be, “Stuck-in-the-same-condo-for-7-years” fever.
I have never met a cabin that made me feel anxious and irritable by sitting inside it for extended periods. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Cabins make me never want to return to my real home.
There’s no fever at home. Just slabs-of-drywall-mania.
I want some log walls and a fireplace. I want a wooden staircase that leads to an A-frame loft, where my writing studio should be located. And I want all that while sipping hot cocoa from a moose mug nestled between my palms, which may or may not be wrapped snugly inside Canadian maple leaf mittens.
And, of course, this lifestyle would be carried out in sweatpants and a flannel lumberjack coat seven days a week. Being stuck indoors at your real home is nowhere near the same as re-wilding yourself in a cabin in the woods out in nature.
Winters in Canada
Temperatures in my neck of the woods typically bottom out in the -35 Celsius range. Add the windchill, and that number looks more like -45. I’ve heard that once you hit -30, Fahrenheit and Celsius no longer matter.
If it’s got to be -35 degrees, I want it to be authentic, kind of like I’m earning my right to survival by adding another log to the fire rather than turning up the thermostat. Let the record show that I’m genuinely grateful for the luxury of having a furnace, but it severely lacks any type of cabin charm!
But this? This is real charm.
Yoho Chalets, Golden, British Columbia
Yoho Chalets, Golden, British Columbia
You don’t even have to go all Grizzly Adams to enjoy a cabin nowadays.
You just have to open your internet browser and hit up Airbnb. I bet almost everyone lives within driving distance of a hidden cluster of cabins, whether in the mountains or on a lakefront.
The ones I’m showing here have full kitchens, hot showers, pre-chopped firewood, and yes, even Netflix that you can enjoy while sprawled across a moose on your bed up in the loft.
But the best feature about these particular cabins? Shelves full of board games! Can you imagine meaningful interaction with the humans you’re cabin-ing with rather than plugging into something electronic? It’s almost unheard of!
Yoho Chalets, Golden, British Columbia
Cabin-dwelling isn’t just for antisocial introverts.
When I stayed at Yoho Chalets (pictured in every photo), nearly all twenty cabins on site were occupied. One of the biggest surprises was learning that everyone else staying there had flown in from different parts of Canada to visit a place I could drive to in three hours.
It was a bit shocking to realize that foreigners (Eastern Canadians who speak French) flew 4000 kilometres across the country to sit inside a log cabin nestled in the Rockies.
What does that tell you? It tells you that the dictionary guys need to get the hell outside and invest in a road trip or a flight once in a while. It’s not cabins that people are irritated by… it’s their own homes!
Each evening, unshaven, fleece-hoodie-wearing humans would emerge from their cabins like clockwork around 7 p.m. to light up firepits in their front yards. It seems we had an unspoken rule that dusk was campfire and marshmallow time.
That’s when I’d make the effort to walk through the property waving at strangers as if I owned the place, and getting to know my fellow wild-heads.
We all showed up for S’mores, coffee with Baileys, and the hearty feeling of knowing we paid for the privilege of “roughing it.”
Funny how we do that, isn’t it? Pay good money to dress like bums and stink like a forest fire, yet we still feel more accomplished than we do after an 8-hour work day.
THIS is what Cabin Fever really means.
And I’m here for it because everyone should have the luxury of existing where time doesn’t matter unless it’s firepit time.
To me, cabin life is a privileged life. My family has summertime lakefront property with several small cabins plopped around it. Aside from the main house, the rest are just pre-fab wooden garage packages erected in the woods. VOILA…cheap cabins sans heat. We use wood and potbelly stoves to stay alive when it's chilly.
We use outhouses for toilets, a generator for hot water, and we have to put actual effort into making morning coffee. No button pushing involved.
Cabins are places where our teenage boys grew up, taking the time to sit and play cards with their grandma, or have floating dock wars to see who's the last man standing. They ran around shooting pellet guns at paper targets on trees instead of shooting real guns at real people.
It’s where adults make candle holders out of driftwood and do the physical work of paddling a canoe…all in the name of a thing called LEISURE.
And bacon. Even vegetarians eat bacon at the cabin.
I guess my point is this…if you’re going to suffer from cabin fever, it’s best to do it at an actual cabin.
I’d love to hear about your relationship with cabins. Do you have such a relationship? If not, would you consider it or are you not the ‘roughing it’ type?
Drop a comment below!
