Cabin Fever: A Suburban Father's Search for the Wild

A modern Walden--if Thoreau had had three kids and a minivan--Cabin Fever is a serious yet irreverent take on living in a cabin in the woods while also living within ourhigh-tech, materialist culture.

Try to imagine Thoreau married, with a job, three kids, and a minivan. This is the serious yet irreverent sensibility that suffuses CabinFever, as the author seeks to apply the hermit-philosopher's insights to a busy modern life.

Tom Montgomery Fate lives in a Chicago suburb, where he is a husband, father, professor, and active member of his community. He also lives in a cabin built with the help of friends in the Michigan woods, where he walks by the river, chops wood, and reads Thoreau by candle light.

While he divides his time between suburbia and the cabin, Fate's point is not to draw a line between the two but to ask what each has to say about the other. How do we balance nature (pickingblackberries) with technology (tapping BlackBerrys)? What is revealed about human boundaries when a coyote wanders into a Quiznos? Can a cardinal protecting chicks from a hungry cat teach us anything about instincts andparenting? Fate seeks a more attentive, deliberate way of seeing the world and our place in it, not only among the trees and birds but also in the context of our relationships and society.

Aseasonal nature memoir, Cabin Fever takes readers on a search for the wild both in the woods and within ourselves. Although we are often estranged from nature in our daily lives, Fate shows that we canrecover our kinship with the earth and its other inhabitants if we are willing to pay attention.

In his exploration of how we are to live a more deliberate life amid ahigh-tech, material world, 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.

From theHardcover edition.

"Cabin Fever is "Thoreau applied" to the 21st century — a suburban father's honest exploration of how to live a more deliberate and attentive life within a high-tech, material culture"--

\Tom Montgomery Fate is the author of five books, including the collection of essays Beyond the White Noise and the spiritual memoir Steady and Trembling. His essays have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Orion, Iowa Review, Christian Century, and many other publications, and they often air on National Public Radio, Public Radio International, and Chicago Public Radio. He is a professor of English at the College of DuPage in Illinois, where he lives with his family. His cabin is in southwest Michigan.

Deliberate life : a search for balance — Picking blackberries : nature and technology — In plain sight : vision and revision — Fathers watching sons : windows and mirrors — Saunter : reason and instinct — The gay cardinal : love and instinct — Cabin fever : alone and lonely — In the time of the cicada : patience and passion — Mushrooms : love and sex — Lake glass : childhood and parenthood — A box of wind : nature and religion — Trimming trees : self-reliance and self-destruction — Constructing truth : wood and word — Falling apart : death and birth — Coyotes at the mall : predators and prey — The art of dying : art and activism — Cougars in the corn : facts and truths — A familial darkness : desperation and deliberation — Travelling at night : seers and seekers — Slow pilgrim : walking and praying.