THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022 25
Covid, people have used the term “cabin
fever” to refer to their going stir-crazy
in their apartments. But technically, to
catch genuine cabin fever, you should
be in a cabin. Lacking that, you need
a huge amount of unoccupied land-
scape all around you, like what the Rus-
sian scientists had in the Antarctic. (Or
seascape—you can also catch it in the
cabin of a boat.)
I
think about Albert Johnson because
sometimes I sympathize with his
antisociability (but not his violence).
In my early thirties, forty years ago, I
moved from New York to an A-frame
cabin in the woods in northwest Mon-
tana. For the first eleven months, I lived
there by myself. I walked on old log-
ging roads and up and down foothills
and fished for small brook trout in
marshy ponds. I tried to write a novel.
I did not know one person in the en-
tire state. My social life consisted of
calling friends in other parts of the
country on the phone. I didn’t like it
that my phone was on a party line. The
neighbors, who lived in bush cabins
not nearby, and whom I had not met,
would pick up and need to use the
phone, and I would have to hang up.
So I took to making my calls early in
the morning or late at night.
A friend who lived in Manhattan
had a phone number that happened to
be one digit different from the num-
ber for a phone-sex line, a coincidence
that annoyed him. Guys who hoped
for a conversation at two-fifty a min-
ute used to misdial his number at all
hours. After a while my friend devel-
oped a strategy of putting the callers
through a lot of paperwork. He told
them that before he could connect them
he had to fill out a form. He asked for
their name, date of birth, height, weight,
occupation, etc. Then he would move
on to “So what kind of car do you drive?”
and get into the details of that—year,
model, engine size. Finally, becoming
bored, he would hang up. I thought I
would call and pretend to be a phone-
sex caller, and when he started to put
me through the rigmarole I would turn
the tables somehow.
My cabin was about twenty feet by
fifteen—bigger than the Mad Trapper’s
but not big. The phone, affixed to the
central supporting beam, which was a
peeled and varnished log, had an ex-
tra-long cord that could reach wall to
wall. I dialled my friend’s number. No
answer. I figured he must be away. It
was about 4 a.m. in New York, 2 a.m.
in Montana. I kept the phone to my ear
while I poured myself another drink,
built up the fire, made something to eat.
The phone rang and rang. I liked to
think of it sitting there, ringing, all by
itself in that empty apartment twenty-
four hundred miles away. I must have
let it ring for forty minutes. Suddenly
my friend picked up, in no mood to par-
ley. “O.K., shithead!” he said.
He had been asleep and hadn’t
wanted to climb down from his loft bed
and deal with the phone, so he put a
pillow over his head. Eventually, the
ringing got to him. We then talked about
one subject and another, the night wore
on, and when I hung up it was starting
to get light.
I didn’t notice what a weird thing
that was for me to do. What happens
with cabin fever is that you become
weird and don’t know it. Fortunately,
my friend did not hold it against me.
Next to the cabin I had a woodpile of
tamarack logs, with a galvanized roof
overhead to keep them dry. I used to
set an empty quart Coors beer bottle
on a log, about head-high, and then
walk fifteen paces, turn, and throw a
stone at the bottle as hard as I could.
About ninety-seven per cent of the
time I missed, but it was satisfying when
I didn’t—the explosion of amber glass—
as if I’d just won a classic old-time duel.
I had to stop when I realized I was re-
distributing the stones from the drive-
way to the woodshed.
A big excursion for me was to drive
to the town of Kalispell, some twenty
miles away. I was writing on a brand
of paper called Potlatch. Such an in-
teresting name for copy paper—Pot-
latch. I ran out of my first ream of it,
and when I was buying more at an
office-supply store in Kalispell I told
the salesperson about potlatch—how
it was a Native American word that
meant a kind of party in which a chief
or even just an ordinary person gave
away stuff to other members of the
tribe. “Giveaway” is a rough translation
of the word into English, I told the
salesperson. The potlatch was a system
for showing status and spreading the
wealth downward, I said. As I looked
at the reaction on the salesperson’s face,
it sank in that I was not in a normal
frame of mind.
My then ex-girlfriend was living in
Sarasota, Florida, and we got back in
touch. She had no phone and made
calls from a pay phone near her apart-
ment. I wrote the number of the pay
phone on the beam next to my phone.
One afternoon, I decided to fly down
to Sarasota and propose that we get
married. I picked up my phone to let
her know I was on my way, and dialled
the number of the pay phone. It was
half a block from her apartment, but
she happened to be walking by at that
exact moment. She heard it ringing
and answered it. (Later, when our kids
were small, we took them to Sarasota
to see that pay phone, and they couldn’t
have cared less.) We were married in
the town of Ferndale, Montana, and
rented a bigger house, on the side of a
mountain, next to the boundary of a
national forest.
That house had begun as a cabin,
or a dugout. The man who owned it
could afford to finish only the base-
ment at first, so he had dug into the
side of the mountain and made five
rooms, and he and his wife and two
kids lived there until he could afford
to do the rest. By the time we moved
in, the original basement dwelling was
vestigial and empty, and we lived above
it, on the first floor. The woods came
right up to the house. The owner had
once shot a black bear, legally, from a
side door. In that part of Montana, you
can go for months without seeing the
sun. By midwinter, the snow berm
alongside the gravel road up to our
driveway was taller than I was. On the
main road, several miles from our house,
the snow berm had deer feet and other
body parts sticking out of it. Deer got
run over all the time on that road, and
sometimes the plows just scooped them
up with the snow.
The road ran through the valley of
the Swan River. Intersections along it
were few. At one of them, an A-frame
bar called the Junction provided the
only place to stop for miles. It had a big
gravel parking lot, in which local tough
customers got into scrapes. There were
shootings nearby. One gray winter day
my wife and I could not stand another
