Cabin Fever

In college, we would leave campus and drive a few hours north of Boston into the backwoods of Maine and spend the weekend at my friend’s cabin that, while equipped with electricity and running water and most of the creature comforts that had become necessary to our winter of 2005 survival, lacked two major components: television and internet. So, in the backseat of my used Saturn, we wrapped a towel around an oversized plastic container with a matching bottom, a little metal bowl and a big sack of grass. We sat around the kitchen table drinking glasses of aggressive red wine and took hits off the gravity bong, allowing the plumes of smoke to overtake the lofted cabin and lull us all into a quiet, post-adolescent thoughtfulness, the herbal smell dissipating only days later when we packed up our possessions—the plastic-cut jugs, the empty bags of grass, the wine bottles and corkscrews and university sweatshirts, the video camera with philosophical-leaning footage of questionable taste—, loaded them back into the Saturn and drove off with the headlights on bright, our eyes twinkling and our lungs darkening in the dusk.