Cabin Fever: A Suburban Father’s Search for the Wild (review)

A few years ago, shortly before spring break, several of my college students asked me what I was doing over the break.

“I’m going on a five-day silent retreat,” I replied.

“You’re doing what?!” one of my students asked.

“I’m going to go to upstate New York, to engage in contemplative practice at a retreat center out in the woods. No cell phones, no computers, no texting, not even any reading. And, yep, no talking.”

“No cell phones?” “No talking?” “No talking for five days?” They were incredulous. “Why would you do that?”

“To practice mindfulness, to learn to pay attention, to reflect,” I said.

“You’re crazy, Keith,” they half-joked.

We live in a culture of distraction. Many of us (including many of my students) lead a divided life, one of imbalance, detachment, and disengagement. Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Prometheus, 2008) writes, “Amid the glittering promise of our new technologies and the wondrous potential of our scientific gains, we are nurturing a culture of social diffusion, intellectual fragmentation, sensory detachment. In this new world, something is amiss. And that something is attention.”

Tom Montgomery Fate is keenly aware of this culture of distraction, and honestly admits it is a culture in which he too often finds himself immersed. As Montgomery Fate writes in “Picking Blackberries,” he lives “in between; in between the woods and the megamall, the blue jay and the Buick, the wild and the mundane, the animal and the human.”

Cabin Fever is a collection of 19 personal (and at times intimate) essays arranged according to the seasons. The collection begins in spring and recounts Montgomery Fate’s search or journey to confront this divided life and to learn to be mindful and present: in essence, to learn to pay close and careful attention to the world in which he lives. “Most of [Cabin Fever] is a humble attempt to find meaning in my own ‘travels’ on home ground, from the wilds of suburban Chicago to the woods and farms of southwest Michigan.” If this search reminds one of Henry David Thoreau’s reasons for going to the woods, it should, for it is Thoreau and Walden that serve as Montgomery Fate’s Baedekers along the way.

In Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Thoreau contemplates two new technologies of his day: the railroad, which ran close to Walden Pond, and the telegraph. He is not enamored with either. “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads led to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” So too in “Picking Blackberries,” the collection’s opening essay, does Montgomery Fate contemplate that very same issue, one that Maggie Jackson argues is at the heart of our distracted modern culture: technology.

Montgomery Fate finds himself at his family’s small cabin, built on the farm they share with several other families, carefully observing the beauty of the blackberries that surround the cabin. The blackberries remind him of the other BlackBerry, the ubiquitous “smartphone” that controls (and organizes) many people’s lives. He is tempted to buy one, but is leery of its drawbacks. “As the technology gets smarter and faster,” he writes, “I get dumber and slower, and more distracted.” It becomes apparent to Montgomery Fate that the search to be present and pay close attention best takes place in nature, whether at the cabin (“In Plain Sight,” “Saunter,” “Cabin Fever”), on the beach at Lake Michigan (“Lake Glass”), or in his backyard in suburban Chicago watching birds with his young son (“The Gay Cardinal”).

During the course of the year...