Cabin Fever

Harriet Beecher Stowe said, “Never give up, for that is just the place and time the tide will turn.” She made it big with the first installment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the age of 40. She did not seem to have writing rejections before that. But she could have been referencing the anti slavery cause she supported. In her lifetime slavery was eventually abolished although negative repercussions reverberate even today. Uncle Chris’s Cabin is a story Harriet could appreciate. Chris Erickson lives in the New Jungle, a Seattle homeless camp in a Park near the intersection of the I-5 and I-90 freeways. Over the last three years he has spent three dollars (for nails) constructing a 25 foot deep wooden cabin with scrap materials. He has a porch, plexiglass windows, and a forklift pallet fence. Today the city will remove the cabin and sweep the rest of the encampment as has been expected for some time. Scott Greenstone has already been chronicling the story for the Seattle Times so I missed my opportunity to author Uncle Chris’s Cabin. I am not giving up though. I am writing Uncle Geoff’s Cabin about my relegation to the main cabin while favored air travelers lounge in first class.

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