The Utopia Experiment

by Dylan Evans

  As I snuggled into my sleeping bag, I thought I heard a wolf howl in the distance. I sat upright and strained my ears, but all I could hear was the faint rustling of the leaves in the breeze. There had been calls for the reintroduction of wolves to the Scottish Highlands in order to deal with the expanding population of red deer, but the sheep farmers strongly objected. I listened a while longer, then decided it had been a figment of my imagination, and lay down again to sleep.

  But then I heard it again, clearer this time, and louder – the distinctive sound of a wolf howling. Suddenly, I was afraid. The idea of wild animals prowling around outside my tent as I slept was not particularly appealing, and I began to wish I was nearer to the campfire, which was probably still smouldering. I decided to gather up my sleeping bag and move back to the fire, where we had just eaten supper.

  As I emerged from my tent, though, the true source of the sound became apparent. The clouds had dissipated, and in the dim moonlight, that now cast an eerie glow over the clearing in the trees, I could just about make out the silhouette of a man. From the shape of the hat, I recognized Adam, standing upright by the river, his head tilted backwards, as he let out another long, bloodcurdling howl.

  7. AGRIC

  The Scottish Highlands have long been a place of refuge for dropouts, refuseniks, and hippies. The Utopia Experiment was far from the only alternative community, even in our little corner of north-east Scotland, and I was curious to visit some of our kindred spirits. I was especially keen to visit Goshem, set up by Neil Oram in the late 1960s.

  I had only come across Neil a month before moving to Scotland, at a music festival near Yeovil, where I heard him give a bizarre talk in a teepee to a small audience of languid hippies. When I later told some of my fellow festival-goers that I had just heard him talk, their eyes widened. ‘Wow!’ they chorused, in slightly awed tones, ‘Neil’s been on the scene for years, man.’

  Curious to find out more, I recounted this story several times during my first weeks in the Highlands. The reactions here were rather different: some people were slightly suspicious, others were downright hostile. None of this made sense to me; Neil had come across as an eccentric but harmless chap when I had heard him talk at the festival. And when I emailed him to ask if I could visit his little community, his reply had been positively friendly. When I tried to probe a little more deeply as to what made everyone so wary, some muttered darkly about a self-styled guru who presided over a cult in the hills above Loch Ness, but I found this gossip hard to believe.

  Nevertheless, I confess I did feel slightly nervous when I set out to visit Goshem with Adam one bright morning in early August. We drove to Drumnadrochit, a small town on the north side of Loch Ness, and then turned onto a narrow track that wound up the side of a steep hill overlooking the loch. We parked in a small gravel-lined bay at the top and walked across a narrow wooden bridge into Neil’s compound.

  The path led to a wooden building with a garish sign displaying the single word: ‘Pottery’. Beyond it stood other wooden structures of variable age and solidity, where I guessed the denizens of Neil’s retreat lived. Adam and I nosed around a little, but the place seemed deserted. We headed back to the pottery and found the door was ajar, so we went in. Tastefully arranged on the shelves were handmade plates and cups, colourfully painted and glazed. Adam was immediately drawn to a large teapot on a stand in the centre of the room. As he was admiring this object, a beautiful woman in her thirties came in through another door. Her short hair was dyed blonde, and her blue eyes sparkled as she greeted us.

  ‘Hi, I’m Rebecca,’ she said.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, ‘my name’s Dylan. I saw Neil speak at a festival in England a couple of months ago. I’ve just moved up here, and I thought I’d pay him a visit.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she replied. ‘I’m afraid Neil’s not here at the moment.’

  Neil, it turned out, was back in England at another festival. Rebecca was holding the fort on her own, the other members of Neil’s rather depleted community having tagged along with him. I was disappointed, but Rebecca was very welcoming and showed us around the pottery, while I gently tried to glean more information about Goshem.

  Rebecca had been living here for the past eighteen years, she said; all her adult life in fact, ever since she had first met Neil and come under his spell. But despite this rather sheltered existence she seemed perfectly friendly and not at all weird, so when we left an hour later, I was still unsure whether the dark stories circulating about Neil were true or just gossip run wild. I decided to return as soon as possible to find out.

  Another community within striking distance of Utopia was Findhorn. Founded by three English eccentrics in a trailer park in 1962, the community is now home to more than four hundred people and has an international reputation. When I visited the place with Adam, a few days after going to Goshem, I was struck by the contrast.

  The infrastructure was impressive. Beautifully made wooden houses in all kinds of shapes and colours nestled among luxuriant shrubbery, all kitted out with an array of green accoutrements – solar panels, wood pellet stoves, turf roofs and compost bins. In the distance several huge wind turbines were visible, generating so much electricity that a surplus was regularly exported to the National Grid.

  But as we listened to our enthusiastic guide, the all-pervasive influence of the founders’ bizarre spiritual ideology became increasingly apparent. The founders were originally told that nothing would grow in the harsh soil of the trailer park, the guide informed us, but they were nevertheless soon producing enormous vegetables. The appearance of these mighty cabbages was now a central part of Findhorn mythology, and attributed to supernatural causes, rather than to the substantial amount of horse manure that was donated by a local farmer. To this day, new arrivals at Findhorn are given careful instructions in how to speak to plants and ‘tune into their higher overlighting spirits’.

  All this claptrap disgusted me, but Adam was entranced. ‘What if the same thing happens at Utopia?’ he whispered, his eyes twinkling with hope. ‘In forty years’ time, they might be taking people on tours just like this, telling stories about us!’

  The thought of going down in history as the founder of some kind of spiritual commune was frankly appalling. I was adamant that Utopia would be a secular community. That didn’t mean religious people would not be allowed to join, of course; merely that we would studiously and steadfastly avoid giving any official sanction to any religious viewpoint.

  The idea of religious neutrality proved to be the first sticking point with Adam. I was becoming alarmed by his increasingly frequent references to the ‘Great Spirit’ and other New Age-sounding concepts. I would soon learn this was a fundamental part of Adam’s identity, but at the time it surprised me since I hadn’t noticed it in our previous encounters. Had I unconsciously filtered out these references when we first met? Or had Adam carefully edited his manner of speaking so as not to scare me off? His frequent hypocrisy testified to a damning lack of insight – he would insist that all property was to be held in common, for example, but squirrel items of food away in his own yurt for his own personal consumption – but at times he could also be a wily bugger.

  I decided to deal with the problem by sitting down with Adam one afternoon in August to figure out some basic rules for Utopia. But all I succeeded in doing was to open a can of worms.

  We started by discussing our policy regarding visitors. We would welcome the occasional curious person, but we didn’t want strangers continually traipsing through our little experiment. I knew Adam felt the same about this as I did, and I hoped that it would be easier to tackle the question of religion after we had established some degree of consensus.

  ‘I’m not sure about the language you’ve used in framing some of the rules for Utopia,’ I ventured.

  My strategy didn’t pay off. I could see Adam’s back stiffen.

  ‘What do you mean?’ He eyed me suspiciously.

  ‘Well,’ I star
ted, then paused, wondering exactly how to put this. ‘Take the phrase “Great Spirit” for example.’

  Adam’s face darkened.

  ‘When we were discussing the rules for meetings,’ I continued, ‘you suggested that people should “speak from the Great Spirit, and not from the ego”. I think that way of putting things could alienate people who don’t believe in the existence of a Great Spirit. It would be better if the rules for Utopia were expressed in terms that are religiously neutral.’

  Adam wasn’t at all happy with this suggestion. For him, the reference to the Great Spirit was essential if we were going to avoid selfishness and create a real sense of community. But I reminded him that the idea of religious neutrality had been central to the Utopia Experiment since its inception.

  ‘Remember what I wrote on the website?’ I asked.

  Adam said nothing.

  ‘About how the Utopia Experiment would be open to people of all religions and none? About how there wouldn’t be any official ideology? To see if people with different beliefs can all get along? I don’t want this place to be another Findhorn. It’s hard to live there if you don’t share their wacky beliefs about talking to plants.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with talking to plants,’ said Adam, sulkily.

  ‘OK, maybe not,’ I said, ‘but I don’t want anyone to feel bad just because they don’t believe plants can talk, or don’t believe in God, or the Great Spirit. Can’t we find a way to rephrase that stuff?’

  ‘I don’t see how.’

  ‘Well don’t you really mean that people should try to consider the good of the community before their own interests, and speak with the interests of the community at heart rather than their own private concerns?’

  ‘I guess so,’ said Adam.

  But that wasn’t really what he meant at all. As I would later discover, he had merely beaten a tactical retreat. In his mind, the Great Spirit was still very much alive, hovering above the experiment, and speaking exclusively through Adam.

  In view of my growing misgivings about Adam, it was a relief when the second volunteer arrived. Agric had been the first person to apply for the experiment after I posted my brief announcement online. I had learned a lot from him and about him over the course of our hefty email correspondence since then, but this was the first time we had actually met. He pulled up around midday in his battered old Volkswagen camper van, packed with plants, gardening gear and other assorted implements. With his wispy white hair and impish expression, Agric seemed like another character out of Tolkien: if Adam was a deranged version of Gandalf, Agric was like a hobbit on speed – always fidgeting with something, or scampering over to some new activity with a mischievous grin on his face.

  He seemed delighted to be here, and chatted excitedly as we walked down to the yurts together.

  ‘Parts of the site are bigger than I expected. The stream area is a bit more wooded than I thought, too – and there are plenty of rowan trees for making rowanberry jelly. The land available for growing crops is flatter than I thought, which is good, but we’ll have to move those pigs!’

  The pigs, which Romay had kindly provided, were currently camped on the bit of land that Agric wanted to plant with a wide variety of crops: garlic, onions, Jerusalem artichokes, broad beans, spring cabbage, kale, mizuna, shallots and winter lettuce. I hoped that the pigs would soften up the ground in preparation for sowing the seeds.

  Adam heard the chatter and poked his head out of his yurt. He smiled a broad grin and came out to give Agric a big bear hug, and the three of us sat down to make a fire and boil up some water for a cup of tea. Of course, there wouldn’t be tea in Scotland after civilization collapsed – long-distance trade would take years to reestablish – but we told ourselves that we still had a stash of teabags left over from before the crash.

  ‘We can make allowances for a few small pleasures, providing they fit with the scenario,’ said Agric.

  ‘Sure,’ I nodded in agreement. ‘But there are limits. We can’t just buy a crate of wine every week and tell ourselves that we keep finding well-stocked cellars in the abandoned farmhouses nearby. That would be rather implausible.’

  Agric chuckled. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be making our own wine very soon.’

  Adam grimaced. ‘I don’t think we should allow alcohol,’ he said, sternly. ‘This should be a pure place, for pure souls.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Adam!’ chirped Agric, amiably. ‘We’ll need an occasional drink to survive the apocalypse!’

  It didn’t take me long to realize that Agric was a fully committed doomer. For him, the scenario we were acting out at the Utopia Experiment was not just a collaborative fiction; it was preparation for the real thing. He could always back up his gloomy prognostications with lengthy discourses on the economy, climate change and, of course, peak oil. He’d even devised a scale for classifying different degrees of disaster.

  At level one, collapse would involve a series of short-term interruptions to electric, gas and water supplies. Most of the basic infrastructure would be undamaged, and the financial system would remain intact, but many businesses would cease operation, leading to significant unemployment. It would be a crisis greater than anything experienced in the developed world in the last fifty years, and perhaps even worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s. It would be less locally devastating than severe floods or earthquakes, but much more widespread.

  At level two, the international financial system would begin to creak at the seams, but it wouldn’t collapse entirely. People would have to survive a few weeks or even months without regular access to gas, water and electricity, and shops would run low on food. Mortality rates would surge, reducing the population by up to 10 per cent, unless widespread lawlessness broke out, in which case more people would die, especially in areas with high population density.

  At level three, much of the physical infrastructure would break down, and money would lose its value, but most critical damage could probably be repaired within a few months, or at most a couple of years. Developed countries would experience a huge reduction in their populations of up to 50 or 60 per cent. It would be like going back a hundred years, to the early twentieth century, but most important knowledge would probably be preserved.

  Things get progressively worse with higher levels of collapse. By level five, which was the scenario we were attempting to simulate, the global population would be down by around 90 per cent, to less than a billion people. At level six, we would be down to only a hundred thousand, and we would all be living like hunter-gatherers again. By level seven there would be no people left at all. In Agric’s words, the ‘human experiment’ would be ‘terminated’.

  The detail in which Agric had worked all this out fascinated me. There was a kind of grim pleasure in looking at such awful things so clinically, a feeling of staring disaster bravely in the face.

  Nevertheless, there was also something that worried me about the precision in Agric’s taxonomy, a kind of certainty about it all that smacked less of science than prophecy. A rash of books about global warming by some very eminent scientists had persuaded me that a belief in looming catastrophe was not necessarily a sign of insanity, but all the same, I couldn’t help wondering if there were other factors, besides rational argument and empirical evidence, that lay behind Agric’s conviction, and my own. In particular, I wondered why he seemed so cheerful when he charted the different levels of collapse. There was always a glint in his eye whenever he floated ideas about the likely date for the coming apocalypse, and it didn’t seem to spring from the utopian idea that life after the crash would be more natural and healthy.

  Eventually, it dawned on me that Agric was in the grip of what might be called ‘Noah syndrome’ – the smug anticipation of being able to say ‘I told you so’, when disaster finally arrives. It certainly makes it easier to endure the mocking glances of the majority, who view your preparations for the end of the world as the acts of a madman, if you can picture yourself sailing awa
y in your ark as their heads sink beneath the waves. The idea that you see things as they really are, unlike the deluded masses, has an obvious attraction.

  On the other hand, if Agric was so sure civilization was about to collapse, why hadn’t he sold his house yet, like I had? Over the course of the next year, Agric would come and go, making the long drive up to Scotland from his home in Slough, and then back again after a month or so in Utopia. Before each journey south, he would declare that this time he would put his house up for sale and finally embrace the nomadic lifestyle he had been anticipating for so long. But he never did put it on the market. Perhaps, after all, he wasn’t really as certain as he made out. Maybe he was just hedging his bets. I, on the other hand, was all in.

  For almost the whole time I was in Utopia, I wore the same pair of faded blue combat trousers. They grew progressively baggier – and even more faded – as I helped Agric to clear the stones away from what would become our vegetable patch, and lost the extra pounds I had put on in the previous few years. Within a week of his arrival, Agric’s clothes were as dirty as mine, and it was hard to tell by looking who had been here longer. Adam was never that clean to begin with, and the three of us would probably have smelled rotten, too, were it not for the fact that the pungent aroma of wood smoke clung to our clothes and masked every other odour.

  We washed our clothes occasionally in the stream, which removed the mud but never seemed to erase the smell of wood smoke, and dried them in the sun, which blazed uncannily throughout most of August. I tried to imagine what it would be like when the winter set in and the rain lasted for days on end. Where would we dry our clothes? Would we even bother to wash them at all? And what would we do when our clothes began to fall apart?