by Dylan Evans
‘Anyone know how to make clothes?’ I asked one day, as we sat around slurping Agric’s homemade vegetable soup.
‘Animal skins,’ blurted out Agric. ‘We need animal skins.’
‘There are some deer around here,’ said Adam, ‘but the Great Spirit wouldn’t want us to kill them.’
‘The Great Spirit doesn’t want us to get cold either,’ I said.
‘Deer hide would be great,’ said Agric, authoritatively. ‘We could use the hindquarter joint areas to make shoes and mittens and socks.’
‘OK,’ I said, ‘but how are we going to kill a deer?’
‘Dig a hole and put some wooden stakes in it,’ beamed Agric. ‘Nice sharp wooden stakes. And put a snare on top.’
‘Then what?’ I asked. ‘I haven’t got the faintest idea how to skin a deer.’
Agric wasn’t fazed. ‘We’ll figure it out,’ he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and letting out a loud burp. ‘How hard can it be?’
So that afternoon we set about building a deer trap. First we gathered some sticks about twelve inches long and sharpened the ends into fierce-looking points. Then we dug into some wet mud near the stream because Adam said he had noticed deer tracks there, and mud was easier to dig into anyway. The hole quickly filled up with water as we dug further down, and we got spattered with the brown liquid as we pounded the sticks into the earth. Finally, we made a snare from a spare guy rope, and laid it on top of the stakes, tying the other end tightly around a nearby tree. ‘The stakes only help to get the snare tight around the animal’s leg,’ Agric told us. ‘The rope is what’s holding it.’
‘We’d better not fall into the damn thing ourselves,’ I muttered. An image of Adam, knee deep in the muddy hole, his thigh impaled on the tips of the wooden stakes, flashed into my mind. I wasn’t sure this was such a good idea any more.
But I needn’t have worried. No animal ever fell in to our makeshift deer trap, of either the four-legged or the two-legged variety. Every morning I would traipse down to inspect it, half wishing and half fearing to find an exhausted deer vainly struggling to free itself from the ever-tightening snare. And each time I would walk back to the yurts with a sigh of relief, glad I didn’t have to cut the throat of a majestic and dangerous beast. A few weeks later a storm came and washed our little trap away.
Word arrived that Neil Oram had returned from his sojourn in England, and I determined to go back to Goshem to meet the man about whom I had heard so much gossip.
This time, I went on my own. As I drove up the winding road, I began to wonder if I should have brought someone with me. What if Neil saw me as a threat to his pre-eminence, and didn’t like the idea of another eccentric founding a rival community in his sphere of influence?
Rebecca was in the pottery, as if she hadn’t moved since my previous visit. ‘I’ll go and get Neil,’ she said.
A few minutes later, Neil appeared, smiling warmly and shaking my hand. His craggy face was framed by a bushy white beard and an embroidered smoking cap. He wore a faded Barbour jacket and old jeans tucked into yellow boots. His eyes twinkled with warmth and curiosity.
He didn’t seem particularly dangerous, but I was still on my guard.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ said Neil.
The glint in his eye was hard to interpret. Regardless, I could hardly refuse his invitation. So the two of us trudged away from the pottery, past the other wooden buildings, and out into the woods. A few minutes later, we emerged from trees to find ourselves on the edge of a steep slope overlooking Loch Ness. The air was humid, and the sunlight only emerged here and there from the light grey clouds, but the view was breathtaking all the same. It was a beautiful, haunting place, and I could see why Neil had chosen to settle here. It was a world apart, beyond the reach of the law, where Neil ruled supreme over his little band of followers.
Neil asked me about Utopia, and told me how he’d moved to the Highlands in 1968 and squatted on this land, which, according to some ancient law, he now legally owned by virtue of continuous occupation. We discussed classical music, philosophy and poetry. He had a highly cultivated mind, though he wore his erudition lightly, and made provocative, if sometimes obscure, connections between apparently unrelated ideas. It was the best conversation I had had for months.
So we returned, without incident, to the ramshackle buildings that formed the heart of his empire, and Neil made me a cup of tea in the wooden hut where he slept.
‘So how are you going to fund Utopia?’ he asked.
‘I’m using the proceeds from selling my house,’ I said.
Neil’s eyes widened in surprise.
‘Are you paying for everything yourself? Don’t your volunteers have to contribute anything? You are feeding them, housing them, all out of your own pocket?’
I nodded, puzzled by Neil’s focus on the financial side of things.
Neil shook his head. ‘It sounds like you are buying friends,’ he said.
I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but he had a point. It did rather smack of desperation. And it wasn’t even a good deal. For the volunteers weren’t my friends at all. They were my lab rats, mere material for my experiment. Or robots, perhaps. But what did that make me? Was I a scientist, doing real research? Or was I some kind of sociopath, callously playing with people’s lives? The more I thought about it, the more I worried it was the latter.
8. WINTER
By September the days were getting noticeably shorter and the sky was increasingly overcast. Whether due to the lack of light, or to the weeks of hoeing and digging, I was beginning to feel weak and tired and lonely. I wasn’t eating properly either; by the time I stopped work for lunch I was usually too tired to cook, and there were too few of us to organize a cooking rota, so I would end up simply eating a few slices of Agric’s homemade bread, which was delicious, but nowhere near enough to keep me well fed. I began to lose weight.
As my mood darkened, the thought that Bo would soon be joining me became sweeter. Over the course of the past few months our relationship had evolved into something more substantial. She had paid me a couple of visits and we had gradually developed plans for her to come and live with me in Utopia.
I had originally envisaged sharing a yurt with her and her daughter, but the idea of raising a young child in such primitive conditions proved unpalatable to Bo, so we eventually decided that I would rent a cottage for them not far from the experiment. The problems with this plan were as obvious to my friends as they were imperceptible to me. Romay in particular would often try to warn me that the experiment would require every ounce of my energy and attention if it was to succeed, and that the presence of a girlfriend – not to mention a young child – would be a serious distraction. But I wouldn’t listen. I was still filled with a feeling of invincibility.
As autumn wound on, I came to think of Bo less as someone I could save – from London, from the collapse of civilization – and more as someone who could save me. I mistook my exhaustion and neediness for the pain of separation. I looked forward to seeing her with a kind of feverish longing, and imagined that everything would be right again when she finally arrived.
In late September, a few days before my fortieth birthday, Bo drove up from London with her daughter. I was waiting at the little cottage I had rented for them a few miles away from Utopia. It was a pretty basic affair, with a kitchen, bathroom and living room downstairs, and two bedrooms upstairs, but I had tried to make it as cosy as I could. Bo was exhausted but happy, and after she had put her daughter to bed, we lit a fire in the open fireplace in the living room. It felt strange to be back in a house again after spending so many evenings outside, or sheltering in my yurt, but it was nice not to have to worry about the wind or the rain. We opened a bottle of wine and drank a toast to this new chapter in our lives.
‘I’m so glad I’m finally here,’ said Bo.
‘I know!’ I said, savouring the first wine I had tasted for months. ‘Let’s throw a feast to celebrat
e your arrival and my birthday! I’m going to kill one of the pigs and roast it whole!’
Bo chuckled and looked at me with a faint air of scepticism.
‘Do you know how to kill a pig?’ she asked.
‘My friend Todd said he would help out whenever we needed him,’ I replied.
Todd had lived in the Highlands for over thirty years. He was short and wiry, with deep blue eyes and a short brown beard, and seemed to possess the full range of skills required to survive in the wilderness. The following day, on Todd’s advice, I moved one of the pigs into another pen, out of sight of his compadres, a few days before the fateful hour, so he would be used to his new surroundings and thus not be anxious when we were about to kill him. We had named him Fatso because he had put on more weight than any of his companions.
On the appointed morning, Todd came over with his rifle. I went and filled a bucket with scraps for the pigs as usual, and when Fatso stuck his head in it, Todd pointed his gun at the unsuspecting animal’s brain, the muzzle half an inch away from his skull, and pulled the trigger. Fatso closed his eyes and fell over, and some blood ran out of his nose. His body twitched for ages.
I felt sick. I had been pretty blasé about the thought of killing Fatso in the previous few days, but now I realized it had all been a sham, and that I had actually been dreading it. I tried to put on a brave face as I helped Todd carry Fatso’s body into the potato shed and string it up. We stuck a big metal hook through each hind leg, ran some rope through the hooks and over a lintel, and pulled hard until Fatso was dangling face down. Todd cut Fatso’s throat, and when all the blood had run out into a bucket, we took the body down again and laid it out on a big table. Then we covered it in hessian sacks, and for the next few hours we poured pan after pan of boiling water on the carcass to loosen up the bristles. But no matter how much water we poured, we couldn’t shave them off with our knives, so eventually we gave up and burnt them off with a blowtorch.
Finally, when the last bristles were gone, we stuck a big spit right through Fatso’s hairless body, so it went in through his arse and came out of his open mouth. Then we threaded loops of heavy-duty twine through Fatso’s back all the way down the length of his spine, tying it tightly to the spit so he wouldn’t flop around as we turned it. We each grabbed hold of one end of the spit and lifted it onto the stakes we had driven into the ground either side of the fire pit. We had lit the fire while we were shaving Fatso, and now the wood had burnt down to glowing red-black embers that gave off a flameless smoky heat. For the rest of the day, Todd kept the coals alive, feeding the fire pit now and again with new embers from another fire that was fed in turn with fresh blocks of wood. Every ten minutes or so we would turn the spit a little, to ensure Fatso got a nice even tan all over, until darkness had fallen.
Todd sliced deeply into the body to check it was thoroughly cooked, and when he nodded his head in approval I piled in the remaining coals, to raise a final blast of heat. When Fatso’s skin began to crackle and bubble and blister, Todd peeled off a little and handed it to me to taste. It felt strange to be eating the animal we had cared for those past few months, and fed that very morning, but it was delicious, and the crackling melted in my mouth.
‘Thank you, Fatso,’ I whispered, and called everyone over to join us.
Soon we were all sitting round the fire pit in a big circle, tucking in to succulent pieces of pork and crunchy bits of crackling, and big hunks of freshly baked bread, all washed down with some red wine that Todd had brought with him. Next to me sat Bo, looking much more relaxed than when she had arrived, with her daughter beside her, her clothes caked in dirt and pig fat smeared round her mouth. Agric was deep in conversation with Todd, quizzing him on the finer points of butchery. Romay had joined us too, and had a big smile on her face, relieved to see that the experiment seemed to be going so well. Adam was lost in his own thoughts, seemingly savouring every morsel of the meat, having declared that the Great Spirit had given him a temporary dispensation from his holy commitment to vegetarianism.
I sat back and closed my eyes. I could feel the warmth from the coals on my face. What a wonderful way to end the summer and celebrate my fortieth birthday. Bo was here, and the experiment was off to a good start. Two yurts now stood proudly by the river alongside an open-air wooden platform that Adam had built without knowing quite what it was for; it now served as a place to cook and eat lunch. The pigs had done a good job of preparing the ground for Agric’s vegetable patch, and we had begun to renovate the potato shed – which for some reason we all now referred to as the Barn – with the intention of turning it into a kitchen, dining area and general indoor workspace.
I smiled to myself and thanked my lucky stars for saving me from civilization, and bringing me to this wonderful wild place. All my autumn blues had faded away, and I was happy again. Now Bo was here, I would be able to face the winter ahead with renewed strength and enthusiasm.
In October we had some of the heaviest rainfall and strongest winds that the Highlands had seen for many years. At one point the chimney pipes blew off both the yurts – but that was the worst of the damage, and it was easily fixed. I was very pleased that the yurts had survived such extreme weather. If they could survive that, they should be robust enough to last throughout the experiment.
The winds also brought down some big branches from the older trees. A couple of them blocked the path leading down to the yurts, and it took three of us to drag them out of the way. They made excellent firewood; I spent an hour or two every day sawing them into blocks and then splitting the blocks with an axe. Chopping wood was fun, even though I soon discovered there was an art to it that I was far from mastering. It was in those moments, when I swung the axe in the cold autumn air, that I felt happiest at Utopia, not just because of the satisfying thwack that came when the axe cleaved the block right down the middle, but also because I could finally believe I had left my academic life far behind me, and transformed myself into a strapping backwoodsman.
Agric and I put up some more fencing to make a new enclosure for the pigs so we could move them off their old, well-dug area, which we planned to use for our first vegetable garden. When we had finally succeeded in moving them, however, we found the ground was still soaked after the heavy rains and too wet to plant. So we had to dig another bit of ground nearby without the help of our porcine friends. Digging was not nearly so much fun as chopping wood, and I soon grew weary of it. There were lots of stones in the soil, and it was a thankless task to pick them all out, but Agric was patient and tireless, and would carry on turning the clods of earth long after I had given up. By the end of the month, the patch of land was finally ready to start planting our winter crop.
We sowed broad beans, garlic, onions and shallots. Meanwhile, Adam worked alone on a little heart-shaped herb garden down by the yurts. I wasn’t sure whether the herbs would grow outdoors throughout the winter months, but there was no dissuading him. He planted sage, parsley, lemongrass, rosemary, oregano, mint and thyme. In the middle he drove a wooden stake with a sign declaring it to be the Heart Garden, the sacred heart of Utopia. Nearby, at the base of a tree, another sign read: ‘The Mighty Oak – King of Utopia’.
‘What on earth is that all about?’ I asked, one afternoon, when the rain was falling so heavily that we had been forced to take refuge in one of the yurts.
‘We must honour the oak trees here,’ replied Adam, gravely. ‘They could be our last hope.’
‘How come?’ I asked, not following his gist at all.
‘It’s the perfect wood for boat building,’ he replied. ‘We can cut planks and bend them with steam.’
‘That sounds like a lot of work,’ I said. ‘But maybe we can try it later on.’
‘I think we should start soon,’ said Adam. ‘Look how hard it’s raining.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, scratching my head. ‘I don’t see the connection.’
Adam paused a minute before replying. ‘Climate change!’ he exclaimed. ‘G
lobal warming. There’s going to be a lot more water around. Sea levels are rising. We’ve got to have a plan B, in case Utopia gets flooded.’
‘You mean like a lifeboat or something?’ I ventured.
Adam shook his head solemnly. ‘Not a lifeboat,’ he said. ‘An ark. We’ve got to build an ark.’
I blinked, dumbfounded by this radical proposal.
‘You mean like in the Bible?’ I spluttered.
‘Precisely,’ said Adam, without batting an eyelid. ‘We can have it ready and waiting, so when the sea levels rise, we can all get in and let the tides carry us away.’
‘And are we going to collect breeding pairs of all the local fauna?’ I smirked, wondering how far he intended to take the biblical analogy.
‘Of course not! There won’t be space for all of them. But we should definitely take a few pigs.’
He paused for a moment, lost in thought. Then he nodded, as if agreeing with a suggestion from the Great Spirit.
‘The pigs will show us the way,’ he said.
In November I left for a few days to attend the Free Thinking Festival organized by the BBC in Liverpool, where I spoke in a debate about the future of civilization. One of the other panellists was my old friend Nick Bostrom, who had introduced me to the Unabomber the year before.
During a coffee break, Nick asked me a question that has stuck in my mind ever since: ‘How likely do you think it is that something like the imaginary scenario you are acting out in Scotland might really come to pass in the next ten years?’ I paused for thought. ‘Give me your answer as a percentage,’ Nick added, crucially. I thought a bit longer, and finally declared that I thought that the chance of such a thing happening within the next ten years was about 50 per cent.
Nick looked shocked. Not even the most pessimistic scientists thought things were that bad. In his 2003 book Our Final Century, the astronomer Martin Rees put the chance of a major global catastrophe this century at 50 per cent. Assuming the risk is more or less constant during the whole century, the chance of such a catastrophe happening in any given decade works out at just under 7 per cent. That was an order of magnitude less than my 50 per cent estimate. To put it the other way round, my estimate of 50 per cent for the decade implied a 99.9 per cent chance of such a catastrophe happening this century, which made Rees look positively sanguine by comparison.