Cabin Fever

Cabin Fever might be described as a modern Walden if you can imagine Thoreau married with a job three kids and a minivan. A seasonal memoir written alternately from a little cabin in the Michigan woods and a house in suburban Chicago the book engages readers in a serious yet irreverent conversation about Thoreau's relevance in the modern age. . The author turns Thoreau's immortal statement I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately on its head with the phrase I got married and had children because I wished to live deliberately. Though Fate spends half his time at the cabin this is no world-renouncing back-to-nature paean. Unlike Thoreau during his Walden years he balances his solitude with full engagement in family and civic life. . Fate's writing reflects this balancing of nature and family in stories such as The Confused Cardinal in which a male cardinal feeds chicks of another species and leads to a reflection on parenting; In the Time of Cicadas which juxtaposes his wife's hysterectomy with the burgeoning fecundity of the seventeen-year cicadas coming out to mate; and in a beautiful essay reminiscent of E. B. White's Once More to the Lake in which Fate takes his son to the same cabin his father took him as a child.. In his exploration of how we are to live a more deliberate life amid a high-tech materialist culture Fate invites readers into an interrogation of their own lives and into a new kind of vision: the possibility of enough in a culture of more.