Dealing with Cabin Fever

Some decades ago I applied for a job working on an island. A small island.  One with only a couple miles of road. No car needed.  The company provided golf carts. And evidently boats for diving trips just off shore. I had just gotten my open water diving certification and it seemed ideal.

Then someone raised the specter of island fever. I had been snowed in most of a winter in a Colorado ski resort and certainly understood cabin fever but don't we all want to be stranded on an island? Besides I would have thirty days twice a year to go back to the mainland USA. And in a moment of stark awareness I realized I would probably spend every single minute of those 60 days driving.

Driving has been my way of escape since I was 16. No destination necessary. Just hop in the car and drive. I may have even fallen in love with photography because a camera in the passenger seat gave me an excuse to just drive.  But it doesn't take an island or a snow storm to close you into feeling of being penned up. I have recently done it to myself with my scheduling of dog days. So when I flipped the page of the desk calendar and found I had only sparse bookings for doggie vacays in the future I immediately planned a few driving days.

Yesterday was Taos with no reason to spend most of it at the grocery store. Today is off to Eagle Nest and Cimarron Canyon. The leaves should be good in the canyon. The Thrift shop at Eagle Nest has been calling my name for a few weeks. And there is picking up eggs at the farm. Yes, there are fall into winter things I should be doing at home but nothing quite as important as shaking off cabin fever.

The cabin, all 2500 square feet of it has been really confining of late. I blame it on the broken hot water heater and the list of too many things to do on the apartment redo. Every place I walk in it I see things not done that need doing before winter. And like the grasshopper, in the fable, I just want to hop all day and chirp.

The hall needs decluttered so the new hot water heater can be installed. The laundry needs folded, the dishes washed, the plastic taken off the hoop house, the raised beds cleaned up and covered with cardboard, the wood shed made read for the winter stock of firewood. I won't list the things needed done in the apartment. Everyday I go over there to avail myself of a hot water bath I seen some new thing to add to the list like the utility fixture in the laundry alcove and the flooring there. The walls to be painted, the carpet to be torn up for the laminate flooring.

But cabin fever is a serious illness. It has never been dealt with seriously like postpartum depression but it should be. During one severe winter in Silverton, Colorado ten people were killed or committed suicide because the tunnels dug in the snow between the bar and the grocery store and the church were not enough to abate the illness. The story goes that one resident spent his days digging to his car which he alas could not dig out. It was going nowhere but he could at least sit in it and see something other than the walls of his buried cabin even if it was only has dashboard.

So today I am going to medicate my illness by going for a ride in my pickup truck.