26 THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022
minute up there on the side of the
mountain, and we drove down to the
Junction to get a drink. Bars are not
meant to be seen by daylight. The rus-
tic, bare-wood décor looked so defeated
in the dreary afternoon. I ordered a Jack
Daniel’s and a beer, and my wife or-
dered a Scotch. After another round or
two I asked the barmaid how business
was. “Not great,” she said. “Just a few
cabin-fever drunks.” (“Like you,” she
did not say out loud.)P
assed down to me through my fam-
ily is a letter written by my four-
greats grandmother Sally DeForest
Benedict, whose husband, Platt Ben-
edict, built one of the first permanent
dwellings in the town of Norwalk, Ohio.
In the letter she talks about being ter-
rified that Indians would attack one
night when she was by herself with her
children. She begins her story, “Two
miles from any neighbor, our little cabin
stood ...” No attack occurred, and to
me it seems that she didn’t have rea-
son to be so worried. An Indian had
stopped by the cabin, drunk but not
unamiable, looking for her husband.
The visitor then slept for a while in
front of the fire, woke up sober, and
left. She thought he would return with
his brothers and kill them all: “The
riches of a Kingdom would not repay
me for another such night of anxiety.”
Cabins out in the woods breed that
type of scary thought. You start seeing
things out of the corner of your eye.
She and her husband were Episco-
palians—starchy folks from Danbury,
Connecticut, even if at first they and
their children slept on the cabin’s dirt
floor. From what little I know of them,
the family did not go in for tent-meet-
ing religious revivals. (Episcopalians
are sometimes called “the Frozen Cho-
sen.”) Frontier people were more likely
to belong to the Methodists, the Bap-
tists, the Disciples of Christ, and other
even livelier persuasions. At the time,
the upsurge of religious enthusiasm
called the Second Great Awakening
was sweeping across the frontier like a
crowd doing the wave at a baseball
game. Families that had been by them-
selves for months on end, trying to
make a go of little farms in the woods,
convened once or twice a year at tent-
meeting religious revivals, or campmeetings. Sometimes many thousands
attended these gatherings, which were
themselves deep in the woods. At the
camp meeting you could let out all that
pent-up cabin fever.
The entire assembly sometimes
seemed to lose its mind. Talking in
tongues was just the start. When the
preachers (often there was more than
one) summoned the spirit, row upon
row of people flung themselves to the
ground and screamed and wept and
prayed. In holy transports, women flung
their heads back and forth, and their
long hair fell loose and whipped around.
Preachers exhaled at the ends of words:
“ We -ah shall-ah praise-ah the-ah
Lord-ah”; camp-meeting preaching
was a special, hyped-up style. Then,
having been brought back to Jesus, peo-
ple sometimes laughed a joyous laugh
known as “the holy laugh,” or even emit-
ted what was called “the holy bark.”
During the breaks, the food was deli-
cious—hams and baked goods and
other special dishes prepared in ad-
vance—and there was plenty of it. After
a good camp meeting the attendees
said they slept like babies. The new,
personal Jesus of American religion,
the one who “walks with me” and “talks
with me” (as the hymn says), was in-
vented at camp meetings by frontier
sufferers of cabin fever.D
. H. Lawrence once defined the
American soul as “hard, isolate,
stoic, and a killer.” I don’t know about
“hard,” “stoic,” or “killer,” but the “iso-
late” part is right. The isolation that’s
out there at large in the continent sets
American stories in motion. Huck Finn,
trapped in the cabin where Pap, his
drunken father, has confined him, says,
“And how slow and still the time did
drag along.” He sits there, alone, saw-
ing at a section of one of the cabin’s
bottom logs. The book really begins
when he saws it through and pulls the
piece away and sets himself free. His
enormous freedom afterward, when he’s
on the raft, is more spacious for his hav-
ing previously been locked in Pap’s dread
cabin. It’s connected also to his travel-
ling in the company of the unfree Jim,
who eventually will be betrayed, cap-
tured, and locked up alone in a cabin
himself, from which he is freed in the
final and not-good part of the book.
Henry David Thoreau had incipient
cabin fever but didn’t recognize it. New
England-like, he channelled it into
utilitarian and literary purposes. John
Greenleaf Whittier’s “Snow-Bound,” a
long work about people who tell one
another stories when a blizzard keeps
them indoors, became that rare thing,
a best-selling poem. It was published
just after the Civil War, when being
stuck inside could seem like fun again.
Stephen King’s novel “The Shining”
took cabin fever all the way to horror.“
A
nd how slow and still the time
did drag along.” The main dif-
ference today is that the computer
makes you feel both less lonely and
lonelier. Online distraction comes into
your cabin or wherever and entertains
and wracks you, and then you go cra-
zier than you would have otherwise. I
now live in a house on a busy street in
a New Jersey suburb, and during the
worst Covid days the shut-down world
was so quiet, and the street so empty,
that the neighborhood seemed like a
ghostly Thornton Wilder town. Two
reminders of the plague were the red
blinking lights of ambulances going si-
lently up and down the street—sadly,
seventy-nine people in the town have
died of Covid—and the high-pitched
scream of motorcycles speeding on the
empty pavement, usually late at night.
Motorcycle and other vehicle accidents
increased across the country during the
pandemic, despite the over-all reduc-
tion in vehicle miles driven.
In my few trips into New York, I was
surprised at how close different parts
of the city are to one another when
there’s no traffic. But driving was not
fun, because the occasional madly speed-
ing vehicle meant that being in a car
going forty-five was like sitting parked
and motionless in the middle of a high-
way where cars were going fifty. They
would come hurtling into the rearview
mirror and blaze past. A man I know
whose job description is “violence in-
terrupter”—he tries to intervene in dis-
putes and keep people from shooting
one another—told me that shootings
and stabbings went up during the pan-
demic because young men isolating in
their apartments saw insults directed at
them online, seethed to the combustion
point, and came out ready for a fight.