Town Breathes Easier as Frozen Dead Guy and His
Festival Stay Put
Cabin
fever is bad enough when it involves one person. However, when an entire town gets it, the
cure seems to involve beer and a bizarre celebration.
The
higher the altitude, the deeper the snow, the more frantic the treatment and
cure. Aspen, when I lived nearby, held
and annual ski & splash event, complete with bikini-clad women
competitors. The participants would ski
down a ramp and the upslope at the bottom would launch them rather like the “ski-jump”
bow of a Russian aircraft carrier. Once
airborne they had a limited amount of time to perform some acrobatic entry into
a tank of water, adjust their garments, and surface to applause of a well-oiled
audience.
Of
course, that was decade ago and the response to cabin fever may be dealt with
in some other manner.
There
are winter’s end behaviors that are measured and productive – fly tying, ice
fishing, cooking huge pots of chili; and those that are not – bar brawls,
domestic disputes, and television-driven “spring breaks.”
Extreme
cases of cabin fever don’t even require a cabin. A trapper’s shack, a cave, a wagon bed each
has famous proponents – Alferd Packer and the Donner party are prime
examples. Beyond acts of desperation,
such extreme cases are also know for reams of journal entries more or less
intelligible, mountains of bad poetry, plays, and poorly-written books that
despite their lack of merit have become known as “old Classics.” It is safe to assume that the writers,
diarists, and poets mentioned above were well lubricated with some form of
anti-freeze that lasted through the cabin fever season. The alternative is just too horrid to consider.
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