by Dylan Evans
Whenever I have looked back on the experiment since then, I have often recalled Nick’s incisive question, and my overconfident answer. The nice thing about Nick’s question was his insistence that I put a number on my estimate. He didn’t let me get away with some vague expression such as ‘quite likely’. And as a result, I could see all the more clearly how wrong I was. The British economist John Maynard Keynes famously said that he would rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong. But here, the precision that Nick had demanded of me forced me to own up to my error in a way that vagueness never would. It betrayed the extent to which what had started out in my mind as an exercise in collaborative fiction had already become an insurance policy against a global disaster that I was increasingly convinced was imminent.
In December we killed another pig, but this time we didn’t throw a feast. This meat would have to last a lot longer, and keep us going throughout the rest of the winter. Todd came over again and showed us how to butcher the animal. Once the head was removed, the carcass split open, and the outer layer of fat and skin removed from the hams, we left it hanging in the Barn to chill in the cold night air. Meat should never be cut up and cured until all the animal heat is out, Todd explained, and he promised to return the next day to help us with the salting and curing.
The following morning Todd came back with a fearsome set of instruments. He sawed, sliced and peeled the carcass into increasingly smaller pieces, often asking one of us to hold it steady as he did so. Agric was always very happy to volunteer, which spared me the gruesome task. Adam looked on disapprovingly. The Great Spirit had insisted he return to his strict vegetarian diet, and now forbade him from even touching meat.
Within a few hours the once proud animal was reduced to neat piles of bacon, chops, ribs, hams, and a couple of buckets of scraps – one containing lumps of fat, and the other, trimmings for making sausages. We then proceeded to salt the meat, taking handfuls of the coarse crystals and massaging them into the surface of the cold slimy pieces of pork as our palms became as sticky and glistening as the meat itself. We planned to build a cold room by digging an underground pit, but that would have to wait until more volunteers arrived. For now, we just left it in the coldest end of the Barn, as far away from the kitchen as possible. We had nailed up some sheets of plywood to form a thin dividing wall so the smell of the cured pork wouldn’t stink out the rest of the Barn, which was now where we spent most of our time during the day, whenever we weren’t chopping wood or feeding the pigs.
But that was not the end of the pig process. There remained one more step before we could safely leave the meat in storage over the rest of the winter months, and that was to smoke it. Todd had built us a cold smoker for precisely this purpose, and he brought it over a few days later for our final lesson in meat preservation. It was an odd-looking contraption, which Todd had welded together from bits and pieces of old metal containers and painted matt black to finish. Two boxes were connected by a single tube about the same size as a toilet roll. The first box was smaller than the second, in which we hung the hams and bacon from a couple of thin horizontal poles. We made a fire in the first box, and the smoke then passed through the tube into the second box and gradually infused the meat that was hanging there. This was called ‘cold smoking’, Todd informed us, because the meat didn’t hang directly over the fire, as in hot smoking, but sat in a separate container, thus absorbing the smoke but not the heat.
Todd had brought some little bags of woodchips with him from a variety of trees: oak, hickory, apple and cherry. He soaked some of the cherry woodchips in water and then scattered them on the fire. Within a few minutes they were steaming and spitting and giving off a sweetsmelling smoke. We kept this going for about four or five hours, by which time our mouths were watering with anticipation. Most of the meat would go straight into storage, but we couldn’t resist trying some right away.
It did not disappoint. The meat was dry but chewy, salty but with a smoky sweetness. We thanked Todd for teaching us and for the cold smoker he had built, and gave him some bacon and ham in return. The rest of the meat we hung in the cold end of the Barn to keep us going for the rest of the winter. But it didn’t last as long as we hoped. Compared with the trouble of going fishing or hunting for roadkill, it was always much easier to raid our precious store of pork and simply throw some of it in the oven. And within a week or two it was all gone.
Snow doesn’t tend to settle on the Black Isle. Indeed, some say the place derives its name from the fact that, viewed from a distance, the dark earth stands out in winter against the whiteness of the surrounding countryside. Closer up, you can see that there is in fact a light dusting of snow, like the faintest trace of icing sugar sprinkled on plum pudding. And that is enough to transform the place into something out of fairyland.
The earth was hard and solid, a welcome relief from the sloshy mud that we had trudged through during the previous months, but the trees were now bare, and provided no protection against the fierce wind that seemed to blow right through our clothes as if we had none, no matter how many layers we wore. The only way to keep warm was to keep active, by chopping wood or carrying water or tightening the ropes on the yurt. Or to stoke up the stoves, tie down the canvas flaps that served as doors, and take refuge inside the yurts for hours on end, until your muscles cried out for exercise, or your bladder could wait no more.
But there was also work to do on the Barn. We rescued an old Rayburn from a derelict cottage and set it against the back wall. It had two hotplates and one small oven, and burned wood. It also had a back boiler for heating water, so we plumbed in a header tank to feed it, and a storage cylinder to keep the hot water that rose up the pipe from the boiler. We had to make sure the header tank was continually topped up, which meant frequent trips to fetch water from the stream, but the effort was worth it for the luxury of hot water on tap. It wasn’t enough for a bath, and we didn’t have a bathtub anyway, only a barrel that we had sawn in half and which was rarely emptied of the fetid water we occasionally stepped into to rinse ourselves down. But it made all the difference when it came to washing the dishes, especially after making porridge.
Cleaning the cold sticky oatmeal off the pan and bowls had been a thankless task in ice cold water. The glue just seemed to stick harder, clinging to whatever implement you used to scrape the pan, and then sticking to the thing you used to scrape that, so that you only succeeded in transferring the muck from one item to the next. We didn’t have detergent either, since apparently that had all run out when civilization collapsed, and we couldn’t use rags, since we had a limited supply of them and didn’t want to clog them all up with glutinous sludge. In the end we’d got used to a thin layer of slime covering the pans and bowls. But now we had hot water on tap, and could actually get the pans shining clean again. I had never been so happy to do the washing up.
Hard though it was to live in such primitive conditions in wintertime, it felt authentic, and satisfying, and wholesome. It was what I had dreamed about all those months while I put in place the plans for Utopia, between coming back from Mexico and heading up to Scotland. But there was one thing I hadn’t foreseen, and that was Bo. She was living in the little cottage I had rented for her, and I would head over to see her every day or two, and then I would stay the night. I felt pulled in opposite directions, torn between my desire to spend time with Bo and my wish to tough it out in Utopia, to see if I could weather the whole winter in such rudimentary conditions. Whenever I was at Utopia I would worry about Bo, and whenever I was with Bo I would feel like I was cheating, sneaking off to a warm cottage while Adam shivered in his yurt, or Agric chopped wood. They never said a word. Indeed, Agric would tell me to go and spend time with Bo, that she needed me, and he could cope just fine without me. I felt guilty, and I longed to feel the cold with him, to suffer and rejoice in the harsh simplicity of it all.
But when I awoke in the cottage, I never felt such gratitude for a hot shower, and as that steaming water cascaded over
my body, I would think about how wonderful technology was, and how in days gone by only kings and lords would have had the pleasure of regular hot baths, and how this little shower was the mechanical equivalent of a dozen servants, who would have worked and sweated for hours to collect the firewood, to heat large cauldrons of water, to race upstairs with steaming buckets, to fill the king’s tub. And when I got back to Utopia an hour later, to find Adam still frozen into his sleeping bag, and Agric shivering as he tried to light the Rayburn, I would feel very grateful that I didn’t have to spend every morning like that myself.
But when we cooked breakfast on the Rayburn, I would change my mind. It took ages for the Rayburn to heat up, but our omelette and beans tasted all the more delicious for taking so long to prepare. And whenever I headed off again to visit Bo, it would be hard to leave, with the smell of freshly baked bread wafting out of the oven, and Adam darning his socks by candlelight, and Agric chopping vegetables for supper – and a sense of betrayal gnawing away at my heart.
I had built not one but two little communities, and yet I was not fully a member of either. Romay continued to warn me I was asking for trouble, and that I would have to choose between them, or mess up both. I continued to ignore her warnings, assuring her that everything would be fine, that I had enough time and energy to care for both my new families. ‘Yes,’ Romay would say, ‘you do now, but the experiment has just begun, and there are only two volunteers here. Things will be very different when spring comes, and Utopia begins to grow again.’
I still cherished the fantasy that Bo might move to Utopia in the spring. Perhaps she would no longer feel the need for walls of brick and mortar when the worst of the winter weather was over. And then my attention would no longer be divided, and my two little families would become one big tribe.
So I asked Bo to marry me.
I’d already been married once, in my twenties, and had decided never to marry again, but now I had gone and proposed, and Bo had accepted. In January, as the wedding approached, Romay was worrying about what effect this further complication would have on my experiment. Again I dismissed her concerns with a smug assurance that all would be fine, and busied myself with preparations.
Finally, the big day arrived. It was a sunny morning in February and I felt on top of the world. Bo had invited some of her friends from London, and I had invited my mother and sister. The two of them flew up to Scotland the day before, and I can still remember the look of horror on their faces when I proudly showed them the site of my experiment.
Charlotte peered reluctantly into one of the yurts. A couple of sleeping bags lay crumpled on the hard wooden floor, while various items of clothing hung limply from the hazel roof poles, reeking of wood smoke from the stove in the centre.
‘You sleep here? In this mess?’ she asked, screwing her face up as if she was sucking on a slice of lemon.
‘Well, I do spend a couple of nights a week at the cottage with Bo,’ I said.
‘I would spend every night there, if I were you,’ said Charlotte. ‘This is horrible.’
My mother was equally unimpressed, though she seemed more sorry for me than appalled by the primitive conditions in which the utopians slept. She was even sadder that I was getting married. She thought I was getting married for the wrong reasons and therefore risked making a terrible mistake, and had no hesitation in telling me so. She had not wanted to come, but I had begged her, and she had taken a week off from a three-month stint in southern Spain to attend the ceremony.
The day itself seems unreal to me when I recall it now. I can remember standing in a registry office in the nearest town, with Bo next to me and a motley crew of guests seated behind us. I was smiling, and dressed in a shabby suit I had retrieved from a musty case of clothes, unopened since I packed up my house in the Cotswolds some eight months before. And there was Bo, looking fabulous in a pretty white dress.
And yet I see this scene from the outside, as if I were an observer looking on from a distance, not from the perspective of the man who made his vows that day. I cannot see inside his head or divine what is really driving him, as he slips a wedding ring on the woman’s finger, and presumably kisses her. All I feel is a shiver down my own spine, the spine of the observer, since I know what happens next.
9. POSITIVE DISINTEGRATION
I had been in the hospital for about two weeks when Vera arrived on the ward. She was by far the maddest person I met while I was there. You could have a conversation of some description with all the other patients, but not with Vera. If you asked her a question, she would say something completely unrelated in reply, or start jabbering about her wedding ring, while staring right past your face into the space behind your head. Within half an hour of her arrival, nobody bothered even trying to speak to her any more. So Vera just sat around, fidgeting compulsively, whispering to herself, crying, and occasionally shouting out loud.
For some reason, Rowena seemed particularly annoyed by Vera’s behaviour. Everybody else just ignored her, but on those rare occasions when Rowena emerged from her room, she would glower at Vera and tell her to shut up. There were times when I thought Rowena was going to walk over and punch her.
But Rowena somehow managed to control herself and walk away. Until, that is, she was seated at the same table as Vera one evening for supper. I was chewing silently on the unappetizing sausages that had been served up, trying to ignore Vera while she nagged away at some unseen companion, when all of a sudden Rowena picked up her fork and threw it like a dagger at Vera’s face. It somersaulted through the air and in an instant the prongs embedded themselves in the flesh just above Vera’s left eyebrow.
There was a moment of silence as Vera stopped talking and we all looked in astonishment at the fork sticking out of her forehead, quivering gently, as thick dark drops of blood began to trickle down her face. And then Vera started screaming, a shrill ear-splitting scream. Rowena stood up, glowered at Vera in triumph, and marched off to her room. I was dumbstruck.
Suddenly, the hospital didn’t seem like such a safe place after all. After the first few days of not knowing what to expect, of my imagination conjuring up all sorts of fearful images of evil psychiatrists and brutal nurses, I had gradually calmed down, until the place began to feel dependable and protective – safer and saner than Utopia, anyway. And now, in an instant, that sense of security was suddenly snatched away, and the hospital felt as dangerous and unpredictable as anywhere else. There was no refuge, not even here, no place to hide from random violence, no guarantee that, when you least expected it, a fork wouldn’t skewer your forehead, or even perhaps your eye. But the danger didn’t come from the obviously mad ones. It came from the quiet ones, the ones who kept themselves to themselves.
It was my weekly chat with Dr Satoshi. I was fidgeting as usual, picking at my face compulsively and clicking my heels together every now and again as I sat opposite him, feeling ashamed of every tic, but unable to keep still.
‘Have you ever heard of Kazimierz Dabrowski?’ he asked.
I shook my head.
‘He was a Polish psychiatrist. He wrote about something called positive disintegration.’
That last word made me wince. I had fallen apart and it didn’t feel very positive at all. No, I hadn’t fallen apart – it was all my own work. I had dismantled my whole life, bit by bit. I had systematically deconstructed everything I had built up over the past decade – my career, my relationships, my lifestyle. I had burnt all my bridges, alienated my former colleagues, sold my house, and given away most of my possessions. The few remaining ones lay scattered about Utopia or stuffed in cardboard boxes in a shipping container at the edge of a muddy field. I hadn’t realized until then how our most cherished possessions are like extensions of our bodies, and now it felt as though I had dismembered my very self. I had taken an axe to my carefully arranged existence and smashed it into a thousand pieces.
‘What’s positive about disintegration?’ I muttered glumly.
‘You sho
uld know,’ smiled Dr Satoshi.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Well, isn’t your whole experiment about finding Utopia after collapse? Sometimes you have to take something apart in order to construct something better.’
I pondered his remark for a moment. ‘Like a snake that has to shed its skin in order to grow?’ I ventured, hesitantly.
‘Yes, exactly! People who never experience a crisis don’t advance. But Dabrowski thought people have different potential for growth. The ones who can go furthest tend to be oversensitive. They feel the extremes of joy and sorrow more deeply than others. They display what some call emotional intensity.’
‘For a long time I thought everyone was like that,’ I said, slightly embarrassed by how naive I must have been.
‘Well they aren’t. You are a very unusual person, Dylan, and you have a lot more to accomplish in your life.’
‘But I’ve ruined everything,’ I said. ‘What can I do now?’
Dr Satoshi paused for a minute and looked at me seriously.
‘You’ll just have to start again,’ he said.
I groaned. I barely had the energy to get out of bed in the morning, let alone rebuild my whole life. The idea seemed impossibly daunting.
‘Tell me more about this positive disintegration thing,’ I murmured.