by Dylan Evans
‘I told you they were watching us,’ whispered Adam.
The more we discussed the likelihood of violence in the post-apocalyptic world, and the need for defence, the gloomier I became about the prospects for the kind of utopian world I’d imagined in my original scenario. That story was a typical example of what the science fiction writer Brian Aldiss once referred to, dismissively, as a ‘cosy catastrophe’. This scenario is perhaps best exemplified by News from Nowhere, a novel by William Morris, in which the protagonist falls asleep in late Victorian England, and awakes to find himself in the year 2102. The industrial squalor he knows has vanished, and London has become a collection of pretty villages where everyone lives in peace and equality. He learns that a bloody civil war in the mid-twentieth century culminated in the destruction of the Industrial Revolution’s dark satanic mills, clearing the way for a more beautiful world to spring up in their wake.
The novel had entranced me when I first read it, as I was preparing to leave for Scotland, but now it seemed preposterous. I was beginning to think that Cormac McCarthy was a better guide to life after the crash than the starry-eyed Morris. The post-apocalyptic world evoked in McCarthy’s novel The Road is unremittingly bleak. The land is covered with ash and devoid of plant and animal life. The few human survivors have resorted to cannibalism, roasting newborn infants and slowly harvesting the flesh from their prisoners. But why would one even want to survive in such a world? What keeps the father and his young son trudging southwards in that novel? The mother, who committed suicide soon after the unexplained cataclysm, was surely more rational.
There is no insurance policy against the collapse of civilization. Even in the most well-prepared survivalist camp, life after a global collapse would be a grim affair. I’m sure the high-end doomsday bunker built by Vivos under the grasslands of Nebraska is very comfortable, but the 950 people who have each paid the $25,000 reservation fee will have to come to the surface when their food supplies run out. And then they’ll have to deal with the chaos like everyone else. So even if you think the apocalypse is imminent, you’re probably better off not bothering to prepare, and just taking your chances with everybody else when the shit hits the fan.
11. ON THE EDGE
One day in early April, I got a letter from the Area Planning and Building Standards Manager at the Highland Council. ‘During a recent visit,’ it said, ‘it became apparent that development has commenced prior to the granting of planning permission.’ The letter also asked me to ‘halt all works on site’ until such permission was granted. ‘Failure to do so,’ it concluded, ‘may result in formal enforcement action being taken against you.’
I couldn’t recall anyone from the Highland Council paying a visit to Utopia, so I was rather perplexed. Perhaps one of the people attending the open day was a council official in disguise? Or perhaps word had simply found its way back to the council by means of the social grapevine that mysteriously connects everyone in the Highlands. But one way or another, the Planning and Building Standards Office was now involved.
Apparently I needed to apply for permission to put up the yurts, and to convert the Barn into a kitchen and dining area. This seemed bizarre to me, given that none of this was permanent, and we’d be taking everything away when the experiment came to an end next year. But that was the law, and I began to worry that officials might descend on Utopia at any time and shut the experiment down.
And so I began the lengthy process of applying for planning permission. This involved filling out numerous forms, taking photographs of the Barn, and producing scale drawings of the yurts and other structures we intended to build. The kitchen table in the Barn was always either being used to prepare food, or cluttered with tools, so I had to spend long hours in Romay’s farmhouse, which increased my sense of isolation from the experiment.
Civilization was like quicksand. The more I struggled to break free from it, the more it sucked me back in, suffocating me with its rules and regulations. The irony of jumping through so many bureaucratic hoops in order to pursue an experiment in primitive living didn’t escape me. But it didn’t amuse me either. One of the biggest attractions about the experiment had been the promise of a life free from paperwork. And now I was drowning in it.
The paperwork only increased when we decided to build a reed bed sewage system to treat our wastewater. When it was just Adam, Agric and me on site, we had washed our dishes and our clothes in the stream, and occasionally scrubbed ourselves down in the old whisky barrel we had sawn in half. But now we had hot water in the Barn and there were more volunteers living at Utopia, and we didn’t want to pollute our precious stream or ruin our land by throwing our grey water away just anywhere.
A reed bed is basically just a shallow pond filled with gravel of different sizes with reeds growing on the surface. The wastewater flows in at one end and gradually seeps through the reeds, which pull oxygen down into their roots to feed the aerobic microorganisms that purify the water. By the time the water flows out at the other end of the reed bed, it is clean enough to go right back into the environment.
But of course the Highland Council demanded evidence that the system would work, and an engineer’s report that complied with the British Good Building Guide. And we would also need to carry out a percolation test, and submit the results to the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA). This meant more forms – and more application fees.
At least we didn’t need permission to build a compost toilet. Or at least, we thought we didn’t, and I didn’t check with the council for fear of adding to my bureaucratic burden. In addition to the makeshift toilet I had hacked together at the start, there was Adam’s more grandiose construction, complete with a little roof and a set of wooden steps. The principle was the same in both: after each crap, you needed to grab a handful of sawdust from the pile we kept nearby and scatter it over the fresh turds. When the bucket was full, it would be used as compost.
It was, needless to say, quite smelly, and not everyone went to get more sawdust when it ran out, or emptied the bucket of shit when it was full. But worst of all, for these tender refugees from the modern world, was the lack of toilet paper. The Chinese were using paper to wipe their bottoms fifteen hundred years ago, but until the late nineteenth century everyone else just used their hands, apart from a few wealthy people who used wool, lace or hemp. Many people still use their hands in the developing world, but for those who have grown up in the affluent West, it doesn’t come easy, so we would clean our bottoms with wood shavings, leaves, grass, moss, snow, ferns, or whatever else we could find lying around nearby.
Though it was he who had built the compost loo, Adam steadfastly refused to use it.
‘Adam,’ I said to him at supper one evening, ‘you’ve got to start using the compost toilet.’
There was no reply, just the sound of slurping as he pushed spoonfuls of beans into the opening in his beard.
I decided to press my point home.
‘If everyone did what you do, and dug a separate hole every time they had a shit, then by the end of the experiment the place would be covered in thousands of little mounds, each containing a single turd. Please could you shit in the bucket like everyone else!’
This was too much for Adam. He slammed his empty plate down on the table, and stomped out.
Adam began spending more time on his own, cultivating his heart-shaped herb garden down by the stream, and making little improvements to the yurts. Among the more useful things he made were several sets of shelves that could be hung from the lattice walls. They were simple but clever, consisting of nothing more than three small planks of wood with four lengths of nylon cord threaded through holes in each corner. Adam had tied several knots in each piece of cord so that when the contraption was suspended vertically, the planks rested on the knots, forming more or less horizontal shelves.
The shelves were a godsend. It is not until you have to live for some time with all your things scattered around on the floor that you re
alize quite how important it is to have a few raised surfaces. We didn’t keep much stuff in our yurts – just clothes mainly, plus some wood for the stove, a few candles, some matches and a torch. But when the floor was covered in sleeping bags and blankets, it could be frustratingly difficult to locate your torch when you really needed it, which was generally in the middle of the night, when you were bursting to go for a pee. It’s vital to have your light source ready to hand if you don’t want to spend ten minutes groping about the dark, especially if there are two other people curled asleep, who will not appreciate it if your probing fingers mistake some part of their anatomy for the torch you are seeking. Having a few shelves on which to store such things made life much easier, and once again I was grateful to Adam for his skill and experience in yurt life.
Tommy was annoyed that Adam wasn’t even pretending to muck in with everyone else any longer. He scoffed at the little herb garden that Adam mentioned whenever anyone accused him of not doing anything. ‘Fuck herbs!’ he roared at Adam on one such occasion. ‘They’re a luxury. We need to grow food! Food that we can eat!’
Angus, though, was quite happy that Adam was down at the herb garden. ‘He’s more of a hindrance when he’s around,’ he sighed. ‘Good riddance, I say.’
I began to wonder if I would have been happier if I had done the experiment on my own, like Thoreau in his hut by Walden Pond, or the Unabomber in his log cabin in Montana. Far from being a solace, the community I had created had come to feel oppressive and claustrophobic. In my former life, in my little cottage in the Cotswolds, I spent lots of time alone, and now I missed those hours, those days – even weeks – of silent contemplation, of uninterrupted reading, of long solitary walks in the country. Now I was far away from civilization, in one of the least populated parts of Europe, and I couldn’t get away from people. When Jean-Paul Sartre remarked that ‘hell is other people’, I doubt he had the Scottish Highlands in mind.
In the second week of April, a journalist from The Times came to stay with us for a week. He wanted to write a big article about the experiment, and, after discussing it with the volunteers, I agreed to let him visit.
Ross arrived in a taxi, with three chickens – cellophane-wrapped and oven-ready. ‘I may spend the week cold, wet and useless,’ he smiled, ‘but I’m damned if I’ll starve!’
There didn’t seem much chance of that. Ross described himself as ‘an overweight, fifty-four-year-old city boy with a serious good-food, Old Holborn and rum habit.’ I showed him into the Barn and introduced him to Pete, who was busy kneading the dough for the next batch of bread, and Agric, who was instructing Pete on the finer points of bakery. Pete’s eyes watered when he saw the chickens.
Linda was also there. Fresh out of school in her native Ecuador, she had come to the UK for a year to learn English, and was paying a visit to Utopia because, as she informed Ross, ‘I have nothing better to do.’ Then I led him past the big Mongolian yurt and down into the valley where the smaller yurts sat by the stream.
On the way down I introduced Ross to Angus, who was hard at work reconstructing the tiny, one-person wooden hut that he had built to house a new toilet. A gale had demolished it early that morning. Linda had been inside moments before, and had barely managed to haul up her jeans and run out before the wind tore it apart. Had she not taken decisive action when the flimsy structure started shaking and creaking around her, she would have been rather exposed. Angus had now rebuilt the thing and was weighting it down with ropes and breezeblocks.
I showed Ross his yurt, which he would be sharing with Pete. Ross seemed both impressed by Adam’s craftsmanship and appalled by the primitive nature of his sleeping quarters. His normal minimum bedtime requirements, he informed me, included central-heating radiators on low, a firm but deep mattress, a 13-tog duvet, two fluffy pillows and a Cuban woman (his wife was from Cuba). ‘But, hey: it’s the end of the world,’ he laughed, good-naturedly. ‘I suppose a chap has to make sacrifices.’
Ross was still unpacking his rucksack when Agric came bustling down the slope and press-ganged him into digging the vegetable patch. The journalist was clearly unused to physical labour: after just ten minutes, beads of sweat were forming on his forehead and he was exhausted.
‘Time for a nap,’ he sighed, and trundled back down to his yurt.
The next day I asked Ross if I could have a word with him in private. He was an outsider, with a fresh pair of eyes and no personal stake in the experiment. I wanted to know how it all struck him, and whether he thought we were all nuts.
We retired to his yurt, and I sat cross-legged while Ross tried in vain to find a comfortable way of squatting on the hard floor. In his subsequent feature for The Times, Ross would write that I looked gaunt, tense and stressed.
‘Have you got any advice for me?’ I asked.
‘Not really,’ said Ross. ‘I think you’re doing pretty well.’
I squinted at him in disbelief. Was he saying this just to make me feel better?
‘But we’re nowhere near self-sufficient,’ I said. ‘And I’m getting really low on funds.’
‘Relax,’ said Ross, ‘this is going to work.’
‘Really?’ I asked. ‘You really think so?’
He nodded, and smiled. ‘Just look after your health, OK?’
Just when we should have been focusing all our efforts on planting the summer crops, we embarked on the most quixotic endeavour of the whole experiment. Romay had persuaded me to purchase an old Victorian signal box that sat in some local’s garden and which he no longer wanted. It was a small wooden building that once housed the mechanical levers for controlling the points and signals on the old railway line. Romay thought it would make an excellent place for drying out the felt we planned to make from the fleeces we had acquired, as well as being a suitably historic and characterful addition to the Utopia estate. But taking down the signal box and moving it to Utopia turned out to be a much bigger job than any of us had anticipated.
To start with, it was just a matter of one or two volunteers heading over to the garden where the signal box sat, and dismantling it piece by piece. But after the nails and superficial fittings were removed, it required more than just two people to remove the beams and wallposts, and the project came to absorb more and more of our labour, leading us to neglect more pressing jobs such as tending our vegetable patches and chopping wood. Even dismantled, the sections were too big to fit on the trailer I had rented to transport it to Utopia, so Angus had to saw bits off. As we brought the structure over to Utopia in bits and pieces, I felt like Fitzcarraldo, trying to pull a 320-ton steamship over a steep hill in the Amazon jungle. It was just as exhausting, and just as ridiculous.
Then, when all the bits and pieces were finally lying in stacks around Utopia, we started to reconstruct it. Even with the help of a master builder who lived nearby, it was fiendishly complicated, like an Ikea kit designed by a malevolent demon, but without any instructions. Eventually we had no choice but to return to the vegetable patches, or risk losing our summer crop altogether. And so we abandoned the signal box in its half-finished state, and there it stayed, incomplete, for the rest of the experiment, a constant reminder of my folly. The whole process had been a huge waste of time and energy, a pointless distraction from the real tasks of daily survival, and it left me exhausted and despondent. Gazing balefully at the battered structure, I sighed and looked at Angus. ‘Sometimes you stick your toe in the water,’ I said, ‘and before you know it you’ve started a process that you can’t extricate yourself from.’
The signal box also cost me far more than I had anticipated. I couldn’t ask the master builder to spend several days helping us for free, and the previous owners of the signal box were now insisting I pay for the pleasure of removing it from their garden. I had originally been under the impression that it was available free to anyone who would dismantle it and take it away, but the owner demanded several hundred pounds for it. ‘This will have cost a grand by the time we’re finished,
’ muttered Angus. ‘We could have bought a brand new log cabin for that!’
I had made a tidy profit when I sold my house, and I had been using this money to fund the experiment. It didn’t cost very much to buy the basic vegetables needed in the first few months before we were able to start eating our first crops, and even less to supplement these thereafter, but it all added up, and on top of that was the rent I was shelling out for Bo’s cottage, and a hundred other little things like stoves for the yurts, and seeds for the crops, and spades and shovels and axes and fleeces and candles and planks and hammers and saws and all the other things we had apparently managed to salvage from the wreckage of civilization.
Nine months after arriving in Scotland, my money was fast running out. I wasn’t even sure I would have enough to keep the experiment going for the whole eighteen months. Even if I did, there wouldn’t be much left at the end. And then what?
Strange as it may seem, I had never really pondered this question before. Not once, since the idea for the experiment first occurred to me in Mexico, had I thought about what I would do after it was over. It wasn’t as if I had planned to stay in Scotland forever. On the contrary, the Utopia Experiment had always been a time-limited project, with a definite end date. So the complete lack of any plan for what I would do afterwards was, in hindsight, quite puzzling.
Perhaps, deep down, I never thought I would survive it. Or perhaps I thought that civilization really would collapse while the experiment was still ongoing, and then there would be nothing for it but to stay there. Whatever the reason for my neglect, it couldn’t last, and by spring 2007 my dwindling finances were beginning to intrude on my consciousness, and the question of what I would do when the experiment finished was starting to nag away, at first quietly, and then with increasing urgency.
Eventually, I confided in Agric.
‘I’m getting a bit worried about money,’ I said one day. ‘What if I run out, and can’t afford to keep buying food?’