The Utopia Experiment

by Dylan Evans

  When I first got to hospital, my physical condition was not much better than my mental state. Far from turning me into a horny-handed son of toil, my life in Utopia had weakened me, and left me gaunt and thin. Now I was eating normally, and I was beginning to put some weight back on. But I was still very weak, so the nurses encouraged me to use the hospital gym.

  I started going every morning after breakfast, motivated in part by the presence of a pretty young gym instructor. I would start with ten minutes on the exercise bike or the treadmill, and then move on to some of the machines for building muscle strength. As I pulled down, slowly and painfully, on the metal bar above my head, or struggled to push back a vinyl pad with the soles of my feet, I would sometimes reflect on the irony of it all. Here I was, using a bunch of artificial contraptions to help restore the strength that a supposedly natural life outdoors had sapped. Looking back on how I had felt a year before, as I was preparing to quit my job and head up to Scotland, I recalled my feelings of being a caged animal, desperate to break free and return to the wild. Now I was back in the safety of the zoo, chastened to learn that I could not survive outside it.

  Similar thoughts ran through my head when I attended a cooking lesson one afternoon. Three of us assembled in a room that seemed to have been built specially for the purpose, with three ovens and identical sets of bowls, wooden spoons, scales and pans. There was Terry, the middle-aged man I had met on my first morning in hospital, whose wife had supposedly got him locked up just so she didn’t have to share a hotel room with him. There was Alex, a young man still in his teens who had arrived a few days after me, and who had been placed on suicide watch for his first night. And then there was me.

  ‘Right!’ said the matronly lady who had come to teach us. ‘What would you like to cook today? How about cake? Shall we bake some little cakes?’

  She spoke as if we were children, but it didn’t annoy me in the slightest. On the contrary, it felt comforting, and slightly comical.

  We all agreed that baking cakes was an excellent idea, and we proceeded to cream butter and sugar together, beat in some eggs, and fold in some flour, as instructed by our new surrogate mother. We spooned the mixture into the little paper cases and popped them in the oven. Ten minutes later, we all proudly removed our golden brown fairy cakes and set them aside to cool down.

  How easy it all was, in this nice clean kitchen! How wonderful to be able to simply flick a switch and have a warm oven just a few minutes later! It had always been such an effort to get the Rayburn going, arranging the kindling properly so the fire would catch more easily, adding larger pieces of wood one by one so as not to put it out, and then waiting and waiting while the heavy cast-iron beast warmed up as slowly as a lizard straining for the first rays of sunlight. Was life really better that way? It had been easy to fantasize about the joys of simple living back home in the Cotswolds before heading up to Scotland, but it now seemed such a waste of precious time and brainpower. Yes, it could be meditative to do everything slowly, but was it necessary to do so every day? Couldn’t my brain be doing more interesting things, thinking more interesting thoughts, if it wasn’t focused on heating the oven?

  10. SPRING

  In March, the ranks of our fledgling community began to swell with the arrival of new volunteers. There was Nick Stenning, an eighteen-year-old who had just finished school and was taking a gap year before going to Cambridge University. Tall, with tousled red hair and pale blue eyes, he was as happy scything grass and chopping wood as discussing cosmology and playing the clarinet.

  There was David Ross, the former Royal Marine, who now ran a small business making boots. He was in his fifties, but still hardy and with a soldier’s can-do attitude. He was an invaluable companion on my regular scavenging trips to look for pieces of wood, scrap metal, and any other waste that could be used as building materials.

  And there was Harmony, who played the flute, of course, and offered to perform music for inspiration and meditation. She was twenty-three but she looked even younger, her baby face flanked by long straight brown hair that fell messily around her shoulders. She was quiet, with a slightly melancholy air about her, but completely unfazed at being the only woman on site when she arrived.

  Our growing numbers meant we had to take a more formal approach to decision-making, so I suggested we have a meeting each evening to decide what jobs needed doing the next day and to allocate tasks. Everyone seemed happy with this proposal, except Adam.

  One evening, I got back to the Barn after a long day chopping wood, carrying water and sowing seeds. Agric was preparing vegetables on the large wooden table, while David lit the fire in the Rayburn. Adam was in his easy chair half asleep (though he was pretending to read a book), while Harmony sat nearby plucking softly at her guitar.

  I cleared my throat, trying to call attention to what I was about to say, but no one looked up. I clapped my hands, and Adam roused himself from his slumber.

  ‘OK, guys, let’s try and figure out what we’re all going to do tomorrow,’ I said, trying to sound as cheerful and enthusiastic as possible.

  ‘I’ll chop some more wood, and do some digging,’ said Nick.

  ‘What about you, Adam?’ I asked tentatively.

  He snorted. ‘Every last power of one over the other must go!’ he proclaimed regally. ‘If you see a job that needs doing, just do it yourself. Don’t expect others to do it for you, or tell anyone else what to do. You can ask for help if you need it, and if they are moved by the Great Spirit to help then they will. But no orders!’

  ‘That’s just not practical, Adam,’ I said, trying to remain calm. ‘What about the jobs that nobody wants to do, like carrying water up from the stream, or washing up?’

  ‘Everything is perfect,’ beamed Adam. ‘If nobody wants to do it, it’s not meant to be.’

  I took a deep breath, trying to work out how to shift this immovable object, but Agric seized the opportunity to explain the next steps in his master plan to grow enough food to keep us all fed throughout the next winter.

  ‘We’ll need a supply of dried beans,’ he began. ‘Currently we have a borlotto, which we are growing mostly for dried beans but which we can also use for pods early on. We also have a Blue Lake white-seeded pole bean, which is mostly for pods, but also has some dried-bean-worthiness. But we need more varieties that produce beans for drying. My preference is for climbing beans since they produce more per space, but we should grow one or more dwarf beans for drying, just to compare.’

  I had no idea what all this meant, but I nodded my head sagely. ‘If this experiment succeeds,’ I thought to myself, ‘it will be in large part thanks to Agric.’

  Harmony raised her hand. ‘I’m happy to do some sowing tomorrow morning,’ she said. ‘But I’d like to continue weaving my mattress on the peg loom in the afternoon.’

  The loom was simply a row of wooden pegs fitted into a timber base. Each peg had a hole in the bottom through which string was threaded, so that tufts of unspun fleece could be woven around the string. Harmony had mastered the knack quickly, but I was still struggling, despite Adam’s several attempts to teach me. I would watch with a growing sense of incompetence as he took chunks of wool and teased them through his fingers, before weaving them in and out of the pegs, back and forth.

  ‘I’ll help you with the platform for the big yurt,’ said David.

  In addition to the two little yurts that Adam had made, we also had the pieces for a much bigger yurt that could sleep up to eight people. It was the genuine article – made in Mongolia and imported by an eccentric couple who bred alpacas in Wales. I had bought it from them just before coming to Scotland, and paid someone an exorbitant amount to drive it up here all the way from Wales in a small van. It had lain in its various pieces in the Barn for many months, waiting for the time when we had enough people to assemble it.

  But before we could put it up, we had to build a platform for it, as I had for the little yurts the previous summer. We had already built
a hexagonal framework of beams, and several of the six removable triangular sections of flooring that would be fastened to the beams. These sections were made of old plywood that someone in the nearest village had thrown away, with a layer of beech on top (reclaimed from someone’s floor). Now we had to finish building the remaining sections, and coat them underneath with sump oil, and varnish the beech with Danish oil.

  Despite Adam’s stubborn insistence on doing things his own way, Utopia was beginning to feel like a real community. Not only were there more of us now, but we were all working together towards a common goal. Even Adam said he was committed to making the experiment a success, and he would often surprise me with a new talent or piece of handiwork. He built a wooden compost toilet, raised like a throne above a deep hole in the ground, single-handedly, though he never used it himself, preferring to shit au naturel and bury each turd in a new hole he would dig wherever he happened to deposit his droppings. He wove several thick fleece rugs on the peg loom that made passable mattresses to sleep on, though they were rather smelly and oily. One moment he would be talking very sensibly about how to make felt, or where to put the compost toilet, and the next he would be trying to figure out what the pigs were trying to tell us by digging a hole in a certain place, or describing his sacred duties as a high priest of the order of Melchizedek. I found him by turns frustrating and lovable, but always fascinating.

  Not long after he arrived, Nick cut his finger with an axe while he was chopping wood. A friend of Romay’s drove him to the nearest hospital. Thankfully it wasn’t serious, and he only needed a few stitches. But without antiseptics and other simple elements of modern medicine that most of us take for granted, even minor injuries can be fatal. Small cuts can become infected, leading to a painful death from blood poisoning.

  To be really authentic, I suppose we shouldn’t have taken Nick to hospital. We should have just patched him up with whatever we had lying around. But what if his wound had gone bad? What if he had developed septicaemia, and become gravely ill? What if he had chopped his whole finger off?

  From then on, I became terrified that one of the volunteers might get seriously hurt, or even killed. I took out third-party liability insurance, but that felt like cheating, like I wasn’t fully embracing the radical uncertainty of primitive living. I had a foot in both worlds – one in the post-apocalyptic world where death stalks you at every turn, and the other in the risk-averse, overprotective world of modern Britain, where doctors wait in high-tech hospitals to kiss us better if we have the merest scratch. I hated having to make these compromises, and wished I could plunge wholeheartedly into the experiment, cutting all my ties to the world outside.

  But did I really? Or was I secretly glad that civilization still existed out there, intact and ready to help out in times of emergency? I hated that thought most of all.

  Nick’s wounded finger meant he had to limit himself mainly to cooking and making things for the Barn (he rigged up a clothes line, that hung across the ceiling above the Rayburn, for example), and leave the more strenuous work to David and myself. David was indefatigable, always cheerful and ready to help out with any task at hand, from constructing the remaining flooring for the big yurt, to digging the vegetable patch. The only time I ever saw David lose his cool was one morning when Adam had decided to take a long lie-in.

  ‘I know it’s not the marines, but we need to have some modicum of discipline around here if we’re going to get anything done,’ he complained to me over a mug of tea. ‘Adam isn’t pulling his weight.’

  ‘He did build that compost toilet,’ I countered weakly.

  ‘Yes, but right now we don’t need a bloody throne,’ said David. ‘We need to get this platform finished so we can put up the big yurt. We need more sleeping space.’

  ‘I know, but I’ve given up trying to tell Adam what to do. The only person Adam listens to is the Great Spirit.’

  David shook his head.

  ‘Fuck the Great Spirit,’ he said.

  A few days later, my friend Angus arrived. We had known each other since we were teenagers, and even though I only saw him once every one or two years, it always felt as if barely a day had passed since our previous meeting. Now he was just back from a two-year stint in Mexico and Guatemala, and was full of tales about shamans and ancient Maya rituals. His face bore the marks of a man who had lived; his skin was rough and his cheekbones looked chiselled by the wind, but his dark brown eyes always twinkled underneath his bushy eyebrows and wavy hair.

  Angus could turn his hand to anything, and I doubt if we could have finished putting up the big yurt without him. Even with his help it took us almost a week. One reason it took so long was that this platform also turned out to be a little too small. At first we tried tightening the tension band to pull the lattice walls into a narrower cylinder, but this just pushed the roof poles up into the wrong angle, and we grudgingly accepted that we would have to make the platform bigger. It took two days to accomplish just this, since we had to coat the added pieces with sump oil underneath and varnish on top, as we had done for the original platform.

  Dressing the yurt was a whole new task in itself. Fixing the rectangular sheep-wool felt segments to the lattice walls turned out to be more difficult than I had anticipated. They were heavy and unwieldy, and it took two or three people just to handle one segment. Fitting the two semi-circular felt covers to the roof was even harder, and required even more hands. Finally, the canvas outer layer proved to be the most challenging task of all. We all stood round the yurt, grabbing on to the outer edge of the huge tarpaulin, pulling and yielding in turn, but each time it looked just right to one person, someone else on the other side of the yurt would complain that it hung too far down on their side, or didn’t hang down far enough. It was infuriating, and before long my arms were aching and my back was sore.

  Angus ran round and round the yurt like a madman, telling one person to pull here, another to let go there. Finally he yelled a big whoop of victory, and we all stood back to admire our work. She did look pretty impressive. Gertrude, as Adam insisted on calling her, cut a strange figure against the Scottish scenery. From a distance, it looked as though a big white spaceship had landed in a muddy field, a pristine and alien technology surrounded by bare-branched trees and, further away, snow-covered mountains.

  On 1 April we held an open day and invited people from the nearest village to come and visit the site. Perhaps my choice of this particular date revealed greater ambivalence about the experiment than I was at that point willing to admit. Perhaps I was afraid of being taken too seriously.

  I did, in fact, worry that dozens of people might come from all around the Highlands, since several Scottish newspapers had recently featured the experiment in prominent articles. It was headline news, no less, in the Ross-shire Journal, with a full-colour photo on the front page. The Press and Journal had also run a story a few days before.

  As it was, only four or five visitors turned up: a middle-aged couple dressed in their Sunday best, a local farmer or two, a jolly housewife. There, in the middle of our shabby patch of ground, stood a white Mongolian yurt, with fine views over the Moray Firth and the mountains beyond. And inside the yurt, sitting cross-legged with their backs against the circular wall, were the volunteers, looking like they had just raided a thrift shop. Adam, with his bird’s nest beard and leather breeches; Harmony, with her flute and woollen Nepalese cap; Agric, with his shock of white hair and hobnail boots. Unsurprisingly, the visitors looked rather bemused by the whole set-up.

  I gestured for the visitors to sit down with the volunteers, and said a few words about the experiment. I explained that we weren’t survivalists, that we didn’t really think civilization was about to collapse, and that we were simply trying to imagine what life would be like if it did. The purpose, I said, was to raise awareness about global warming and peak oil, so we could do something to address these problems before it was too late. The visitors looked even more perplexed than before.

>   Then Adam and Harmony played some music, Adam plucking away at his guitar while Harmony accompanied him on the flute. Finally, Agric gave a little talk of his own, which didn’t seem to make the visitors any less bewildered.

  As I looked around at their faces, trying to work out what on earth they made of this experiment going on in their vicinity, I became increasingly agitated. Their puzzled expressions made me see, for perhaps the first time, how odd everything I was doing must have looked to the outside world. My friends and family had of course raised many objections when I told them about my plans over a year before, but I had brushed them off without a second thought. And since arriving in Scotland, I had lived in a world of my own creation, surrounded by people who believed in the project, and only venturing occasionally into civilization. Now, I was forcibly reminded of how bizarre the whole experiment must have looked to a casual stranger.

  I could feel my heart beating faster and faster. I couldn’t breathe. I needed to get out of the yurt and be alone. I longed for Agric to finish his talk.

  But Agric showed no signs of wrapping up, and soon I couldn’t stand it any longer. I got up, made my excuses, and ran down to the area beside the river where the two smaller yurts stood. I took refuge in one of them, curled up on the wooden floor in a foetal position, pulling whatever blankets and coverings I could find on top of me, and closed my eyes.

  I don’t know how long I stayed like that. But at some point, Scott peered in through the doorway, and asked me if I was all right.

  Scott was in his fifties, and had lived in the Highlands for the past thirty years with his wife Jules. Short and wiry, with curly dark hair and piercing blue eyes, he was as tough as the granite peaks that overlooked his gamekeeper’s lodge. I had met him and Jules on my first trip to the Highlands, with Romay, in 1988, and had made a special point of seeing them on every visit since.