by Dylan Evans
I would later find this dual role increasingly hard to manage as the experiment progressed. In trying to be simultaneously participant and organizer, I would end up being neither. It would prove to be one of many contradictions pulling me in opposite directions, causing me to oscillate at ever greater frequencies, until finally everything flew apart. Like Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, I would be ‘within and without’, unable to immerse myself completely in the daily activities because I would be fretting about logistics, and unable to plan properly because I would be called over to help carry some wood or chase after an escaped pig.
Of course I would inevitably play some kind of leading role. But I didn’t want to be a charismatic figure, let alone a dictator. I wanted to blend into the background, and watch what happened.
Or did I? Was there perhaps some secret desire to be a kind of guru or cult leader, some unacknowledged form of megalomania?
6. SCOTLAND
I didn’t really have to sell my house to fund the experiment. I could have rented it out and moved back in after my sojourn in Scotland was over. With less money to blow on ill thought-out acquisitions that quickly fell into disuse – like the pathetic little solar panel that only generated enough electricity to power a single light bulb for a couple of hours a day – I could probably have done the experiment for a fraction of what I eventually spent.
Nor did I have to give up my job. If I’d asked for a sabbatical, or taken unpaid leave, I would have had a job to go back to when the experiment was over. But deep down, there was a part of me that wanted to dispense with any safety nets, and cut off any possible avenue of retreat. So it wasn’t enough even to quit my job; I had to make a big show of condemning the whole academic system, which would make it hard to get another job in any university in the UK. In an interview for the Times Higher Education Supplement in April 2006, I complained that there was ‘a ridiculous amount of bureaucracy and frustration’ at most universities. ‘People don’t have excited looks on their faces anymore.’
All of the interesting, creative people who really inspired me were getting old, I said, and there didn’t seem to be any younger people in academia with the potential to take their place. ‘As you look further down the age spectrum, you get less and less evidence of thinking outside the box and being zany,’ I moaned. ‘It’s not because they are any less intelligent, it’s just that it’s all dictated from above. There’s no real time for academics to do the creative brooding.’ I decried ‘the lack of autonomy and everything pinned on learning outcomes. I don’t know why academics feel the need to ape this audit culture that has come into universities from the business world.’ There was a real mood of pessimism, I pontificated, without the slightest suspicion that I might be projecting my own feelings onto the rest of my colleagues.
My heroes, I went on, tended to be on the margins of academia, like the philosopher George Santayana. ‘His creativity went up dramatically when he left academia,’ I said; ‘I would love to be like that.’
As another journalist noted when she interviewed me for The Times at around the same time, there was ‘a strong whiff of burnt bridges’. And I could see that too, even then. I was setting fire to those bridges deliberately, driven by a mixture of excitement for my project, and scorn for the life I was leaving behind.
My friend Caroline said she would miss visiting me in my Cotswold cottage, and I invited her to come over for one last weekend to say goodbye. She asked if she could bring a friend with her, and the two of them arrived one sunny Saturday afternoon in May.
Caroline’s friend was called Bo. She was in her thirties, and tall, with shoulder-length straight hair dyed blonde. I had met her once before, several years previously, apparently, though I could barely remember it.
I felt instantly attracted to Bo, and over the next few weeks I visited her in London several times. As we grew closer, we began to wonder what would happen to our relationship when I left for Scotland. This was not something I had anticipated. I had broken up with my previous girlfriend just before going to Mexico, and I had always imagined myself doing the Utopia Experiment as a single man, without the encumbrance of a partner to care for. Now, however, the idea began to form in my mind of inviting Bo to come with me. So what if she had kids? Maybe her son, who was ten, would stay in London with his father, and Bo would just bring her six-year-old daughter with her to Scotland.
I had visions of the three of us living together in a yurt like some rustic Mongolian family. Instead of a single man at the heart of the experiment, there would be a couple with a small child, a microcosm of the new society that would emerge from the ashes of the old.
When my last day at work came, my colleagues held an informal meeting to say goodbye and wish me luck with my new venture. I had only discussed my plans with one or two of them, but word had spread, and some had no doubt read the interviews in the newspapers in which I damned academic life and scorned the lack of creativity in my peers. They were remarkably forgiving of my haughtiness; one of them even baked a cake.
We gathered in a nondescript meeting room in the engineering building at 11 am and Janice, the head of department, made a few remarks.
‘We’ll be sad to see you go,’ she said, in a kind-hearted tone of voice. ‘You’ve certainly livened the place up.’
There were a few smiles as someone passed round coffee and cake.
‘We clubbed together and bought you this as a going-away present,’ said Janice, and held up a thick warm fleece. ‘We figured you’d need it up there when the winter sets in.’
Everyone chuckled, but not in a mean way. They seemed more concerned and puzzled than scornful. But I scoffed at their doubts and, to show them I was both aware of the difficulties that lay ahead, and determined to overcome them, I read out a short extract from The Blithedale Romance. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel was inspired by his experiences at Brook Farm, where he lived for seven months in 1841. The short extract I read out contrasted his expectations of rural bliss with the dreary reality of life in the community:
While our enterprise lay all in theory, we had pleased ourselves with delectable visions of the spiritualization of labor. It was to be our form of prayer and ceremonial of worship. Each stroke of the hoe was to uncover some aromatic root of wisdom, heretofore hidden from the sun. Pausing in the field, to let the wind exhale the moisture from our foreheads, we were to look upward, and catch glimpses into the far-off soul of truth. In this point of view, matters did not turn out quite so well as we anticipated. It is very true that, sometimes, gazing casually around me, out of the midst of my toil, I used to discern a richer picturesqueness in the visible scene of earth and sky . . . But this was all. The clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored and turned over and over, were never etherealized into thought. Our thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish. Our labor symbolized nothing, and left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the evening. Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise.
I, of course, was far too knowing to fall prey to the same disillusionment. I would show my colleagues how unfounded their concerns were. I was prepared for the hard times ahead. Indeed, I was looking forward to them. They would strengthen my body and enrich my mind. My thoughts would not become cloddish. I would succeed where Hawthorne had failed.
By July, I was finally ready to embark on my journey. My house was sold. I’d quit my job. Most of my worldly possessions had been sent up to Scotland and were now piled high in an old shipping container that sat in a muddy field next to what would soon become Utopia.
Only a few of my most precious things remained, and they easily fitted in my car. Some documents, a laptop and, of course, my cat – Socrates. Like most cats, Socrates was not particularly fond of cars, and I had decided that it would greatly assist him in enduring the long drive if he could chew on a Valium. My vet had even given me a bottle of pills for the purpose – marked animal Valium, perhaps to deter me from stealing a few
for myself.
After an hour or so of driving, I stopped to check on Socrates. I gently prised open the lid on the cat-box, which was wedged in between some clothes and a suitcase on the back seat, only to see a wide-eyed cat staring back at me with a mixture of anxiety and recrimination. Clearly, one Valium was not enough for this robust feline, so I gave the trusting animal another pill, and continued on my way.
An hour later, I stopped again. Socrates was still wide awake, and looked pissed off with his continuing confinement. Even so, I wasn’t sure whether it would be wise to give him a third Valium. I wanted to help him sleep, not kill him. But the thought of the poor beast having to put up with eight or nine more hours in this small cage overcame my qualms, and I gave him a third pill.
When I stopped for lunch, and checked on Socrates again, he was out cold. A little too cold, in fact, for my liking. Panicking, I began to prod him, in the hope of triggering some sign of life. Nothing.
‘Shit,’ I thought. ‘I’ve killed my cat.’
But Socrates wasn’t dead. He survived the journey in relatively good form, though he was rather confused when we finally arrived to find no sign of his former abode. When I pitched my little tent down by the river and brought him inside, he sniffed haughtily at the canvas walls before making a dash for the door. If the category ‘home’ existed in his feline ontology, this was clearly not an example.
What a miserable reward for five years of loyal service! In my old stone cottage Socrates had lived a life of quiet luxury. He would be waiting for me at the front door when I got back from work each day, and lie stretched out like a dog by the fireplace in the long winter evenings, his black fur so hot you could barely touch it. At night he would sleep on my bed by my feet, and climb out of the roof window onto the old stone tiles whenever he fancied a spot of hunting. To go from that to a windy tent in the Scottish Highlands must have come as a terrible blow.
I’m not sure he ever forgave me. Even when we put the yurts up, and installed old cast-iron stoves inside them, he rarely came to visit. Instead, he would hang around the potato shed that became our kitchen and dining room, which at least had stone walls and felt a bit more like a house. Or he would vanish for several days at a time, perhaps to seek refuge in a farmer’s house a few miles away, only to reappear with the same look of reproach on his face, as if to say, ‘Why, oh why, did you ever take me away from my lovely old house in the Cotswolds, and bring me to this god-forsaken place?’
When I got up that first morning and emerged from my tent, blinking in the early sunshine, I felt a sudden rush of joy. As I stood and looked around me at the little clearing by the river, I could picture a glorious future lying ahead of me in Scotland. Soon there would be two yurts here, and a campfire, with rustic wooden benches arranged round it. In the evenings we would gather here to eat our supper as the fire blazed and some pot bubbled away. We would swap stories about the day’s work, and then raise our minds to higher things, no matter what Hawthorne said. We would integrate our daily experiences into the collective story we were telling about life after the apocalypse, and picture ourselves as hardy but happy survivors.
More yurts would eventually spring up, and woodpiles, and rows of vegetables, and fencing to cordon off an area for the pigs. Our bodies would grow strong from the physical labour and our minds refreshed by the natural surroundings, far away from the cities we’d left behind. Maybe there would even be some children running around, playing happily amidst the bracken and the trees.
And at the centre of it all, unassuming but indisputably wise, would be me, the founder, loved and revered by my fellow utopians. My yurt would be bedecked with homemade woollen carpets and fleece blankets. And perhaps Bo would be there too, sharing the yurt with me, the two of us a source of inspiration to the rest of the group, the original couple, a symbol of the love and harmony that would pervade the whole community.
I gathered some sticks and made a small fire by the river. I had brought some basic provisions to keep me going for the first few days, and I treated myself to a breakfast of bacon and eggs. Then I set about clearing a place for the yurts. It was warm and sunny, and scything the bracken and nettles was tiring, but once the area was clear, I started work on a wooden platform for the first yurt. The pieces for the two yurts Adam had made in Hereford were already stacked up in the potato shed, having been brought up by a friend in the back of his van a week before. Adam was due to arrive the following week, and I wanted everything to be ready for us to put up the yurts as soon as he got here. I had no idea how to assemble the bundles of sticks that would soon become our homes.
It took a week of hard work, and the help of a local builder called Keith, to finish the platforms, and when they were done I took a day off to go salmon fishing. It was the last day of the season, and some friends of Romay had invited me to join them early one morning on the Moray Firth. When I arrived at 6 am they were already out on the water, two in a rowing boat, and two others perched on a cairn (a pile of rocks) in the water, holding the other end of the net. Romay’s friend George had kindly left a pair of waders for me in the boot of his car, so I slipped them on and waded out to the cairn – well, part of the way, as it got a bit too deep, so George had to row over and take me the rest of the way in the boat.
This kind of fishing is called net sweeping, and it involves standing around in the water for long periods of time looking for any trace of fish. You can spot them by the way the surface of the water changes colour or texture. When you catch sight of the fish, the people in the boat row back in a semi-circle to drag the net around them. And then everyone on the cairn hauls in the net.
In over four hours of fishing we caught three grilse. Grilse are the first salmon of any generation of smolts to return as adults, having spent one winter at sea, growing from a few ounces to small adults of several pounds’ weight. Three might not seem like much, but apparently it wasn’t such a bad catch. Some days, George told me, they would return home with nothing. It wasn’t like this a decade ago, he said, when the waters were full of fish. But now a combination of over-fishing and the growing seal population (which had exploded since the seals had been declared a protected species a few years before) had reduced the fish stocks to very low levels.
George suggested that he might be able to take a few volunteers from the Utopia Experiment out fishing with him next summer. I thought that sounded great, and hoped there would still be some fish left to catch when the time came.
Adam arrived the following day. When I met him at the bus station in Inverness, he was wearing a brown felt trilby with a feather stuck in the hatband, a sleeveless, fur-trimmed sheepskin jacket and black leather shorts worn over long red cycling pants. His bizarre apparel and flamboyant gestures drew puzzled stares from the other passengers milling around him. I ushered him into my car as quickly as possible and sped back to Utopia. I could almost see the rumours spreading among the citizens of the Highlands, whisperings about a weird stranger in their midst, soon to be followed by other misfits, all bound for a shady settlement founded by an eccentric Englishman.
Adam was impressed by the two platforms I had made, and said we could start putting the yurts up right away. We spent the next few hours gradually coaxing the lattices of hazel sticks into place and binding them together with nylon cords, before covering the structure with the blue canvas that Adam had stitched together so expertly. The whole process took a lot longer than I had anticipated, and by late afternoon we had only managed to put up one of the yurts. Even then it still needed a few adjustments so that it would fit snugly on the platform I had built, which was slightly smaller than it should’ve been.
After sleeping in a small tent for the past week, the yurts would be sheer luxury, I thought. I could even stand up when I was right in the middle. But rather than sharing the yurt with Adam, I decided to let him have it to himself for his first night in Utopia.
Adam was grateful for this gesture, but insisted that this was not ‘his’ yurt. Although it
would be the place where he slept, he said he didn’t feel a strong sense of ownership. If other people wanted to use it, or sleep there, that was fine by him. But, as I would discover many times during the course of the experiment, Adam’s noble words were not necessarily in keeping with reality. An hour later, when I crawled into the yurt to have another look, I noticed something odd to one side of his sleeping bag. An incongruous collection of coins, candles, animal bones and discoloured photographs had been carefully arranged on a piece of driftwood. This, Adam informed me, was his shrine. But it was also evidently a marker of territory.
The fluid approach to ownership and usage that Adam espoused was something I hoped might develop over the course of the experiment. It was, I imagined, probably closer to the way our hunter-gatherer ancestors thought. But I wondered if this would be hard when most of us come from a society that encourages people to make sharp distinctions between ‘mine’ and ‘yours’ from early childhood.
That evening, we celebrated Adam’s arrival and the completion of the first yurt with a delicious stew of beans and tomatoes that we cooked over an open fire. The sun doesn’t set until very late in the Highlands in summertime, but by the time we finally went to bed it was quite dark, and I had to find my way back to my little tent with the aid of a torch. I wondered how I would manage when all the batteries had run out, and all the torches were broken, as would be bound to happen sooner or later after civilization collapsed. Would I carry around a flaming stick, like a Viking, or would my eyes become better at seeing in the dark? Or would I simply stay inside my yurt and temporarily relinquish control of Utopia to the creatures of the night?