Ian Frazier, writing in The New Yorker about cabin fever, recalls a time, forty years ago, when he lived in the rural isolation of northwest Montana:
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 interesting name for copy paper — Potlatch. 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.Jeez, that sounds like me on an ordinary day. It’s just the sharing of useful information. But I can hear my kids in the background — “Dad! Stop!”
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An interesting article. As well as Albert Johnson, the legendary Mad Trapper, there was another Albert of the Northwest Territories, Albert Faille, who apparently didn’t suffer cabin fever, but was obsessed. His life was immortalized in this 1962 film: Nahanni, https://www.nfb.ca/film/nahanni/
That looks interesting. Thanks, Jim.
Interesting associations are fun! Sometimes when I do the NYT xword I add snippets, as with TSUNAMI the other day ( MEGA was added as a prefix....I thought it unnecessary.) My 7th grade English teacher had been a child living in Hilo onthe Big Island when it was devastated by a tsunami. Only her father and grandmother and she herself survived, while her mother and two small brothers perished. (She was Japanese-American. The coming summer she was to be married...in an arranged marriage. The year was 1960.)
And that stuff can always be shared.
It’s a great gift to have teachers who reveal themselves as people with lives beyond the classroom. When I was a kid in elementary school, it was a big deal to learn a teacher’s first name.
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