I think about Albert Johnson because sometimes I sympathize with his antisociability (but not his violence). (Or seascape-you can also catch it in the cabin of a boat.) Lacking that, you need a huge amount of unoccupied landscape all around you, like what the Russian scientists had in the Antarctic. But technically, to catch genuine cabin fever, you should be in a cabin. During Covid, people have used the term “cabin fever” to refer to their going stir-crazy in their apartments. The Mad Trapper’s behavior indicates a case of cabin fever, and an eight-by-ten-foot cabin in the remote Canadian Northwest would be a good place to get it. Not much dynamite was required, because the cabin was eight feet wide by ten feet long. Before the chase began, the Mounties dynamited his cabin, so he couldn’t go back to it. Books and movies have told his story and looked into the mystery, but it remains unsolved. He is sometimes called the Mad Trapper of Rat River. The man called himself Albert Johnson, but that probably wasn’t his name, and nobody knows where he came from. He killed one Mountie when a group of them briefly caught up with him, and finally died in a shoot-out after a bush pilot who had been tracking him from the air radioed his location to pursuers. He shot one of them through the door and later escaped, on foot and on snowshoes, eluding capture for more than a month, crossing a range of mountains and covering maybe a hundred miles in the middle of winter. That winter, Native people in the region complained that he was disturbing their traps, and four Mounties journeyed the eighty miles to his cabin by dogsled to investigate. His not having acquired a trapping license from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Fort McPherson seemed strange, because people who lived out where he did mostly trapped furs for income. Entwined today with Covid is the age-old mental malady called cabin fever.Ī man whose real name nobody knows showed up in Canada’s Northwest Territories in the summer of 1931 and built a cabin on the Rat River, a tributary of the Peel, deep in the bush. Savitsky and Beloguzov were early victims of a soon-to-be-global complaint waiting up ahead, in 2020. Covid would not appear for another fourteen months, but the planet somehow knew it was heading for a period of lockdown that would drive people crazy. With the story of Savitsky and Beloguzov, everyday news coverage slipped into prophetic mode. The newsgathering business is connected to the world’s unconscious and also to surface reality. In retrospect, the facts of the case are less important than the global shiver of the story itself. A Russian judge later dismissed the case against Savitsky, who had no previous record. A stabbing did seem to have occurred at Bellingshausen Station. Checking online, including on Russian sites, I could find no solid source for the detail about Beloguzov giving away the endings of books. The Post cited, as its source, a story in the Sun, the British tabloid. The story went around the globe instantly. Petersburg, arrested him, and charged him with attempted murder. Beloguzov was flown to a hospital in Chile, where he recovered. Savitsky was reading books from the library to pass the time, and Beloguzov kept telling him the endings finally, Savitsky snapped and stabbed Beloguzov in the chest with a kitchen knife. At the isolated station, run by Russia’s Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, the two men had been together for many months. Crime is uncommon on that continent, but what made this one even more unusual, according to the Post, was that the one scientist, Sergei Savitsky, had attacked the other, Oleg Beloguzov, for giving away the endings of books. On October 31, 2018, I read a story in the New York Post about a Russian scientist who stabbed another Russian scientist at a research station in Antarctica.
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