by Dylan Evans
‘Agric never stops!’ Johanna whispered to me. A sixty-seven-year-old retired biology teacher living in Edinburgh, she had a Nordic accent that complemented her aura of dignified solemnity. But now and again she would beam a huge smile that immediately dissolved any sense of distance. Johanna was at the experiment for only a few weeks. The revolving-door policy of the experiment was another reason why I now began to doubt its validity.
On the one hand, allowing people to come for a short period permitted a much greater variety of volunteers to join in. If I had insisted that everyone had to stay for several months, let alone the whole experiment, it would probably have been full of dropouts in their twenties (and the occasional older dropout, like Adam). We certainly wouldn’t have had retired grandmothers like Johanna, with family obligations, or young people with big plans like Nick Stenning, or former marines like David Ross. And the diversity was important because the scenario we were acting out envisioned a group of strangers coming together to ride out the collapse of civilization together.
On the other hand, the shorter their stay, the less invested people were in the project. It’s hard to get excited about digging and planting if you’re not going to see the crops grow or eat them. Also, when people stayed for just a couple of weeks, they didn’t get quite dirty enough to summon up the courage to use our primitive bathing facilities. So we lost out on the sense of gradual decline that would surely set in if people were here for longer – people arrived with fresh clothes and all their teeth, and left with only slightly dirty clothes and all their teeth.
Only the hardened utopians who stayed for longer than a few weeks could get fully into the spirit of this primitive way of life. By the time he had been on site for six weeks, Agric was no longer fazed by the whisky barrel bathtub and its rank odour. And after three months, the bottom half of one of Adam’s front teeth broke off. I drove him to the nearest dentist but he couldn’t get free care because he wasn’t registered on any database. I paid for a quick fix, but the cheap dental crown came off again a few days later, so he just threw it away. At first this made him look a bit scary when he grinned, but we soon got used to it, and then it just gave him more character.
By now, we were making our own toothpaste by mixing baking powder, sea salt and peppermint, and rubbing it onto our teeth with our fingers. But we had no idea how to make the baking powder ourselves, so were still buying that at the supermarket. To be really authentic, we would have had to resort to more primitive measures, such as chewing sticks and twigs, as many people still do in India, but none of us went that far. Benjamin Franklin’s toothpaste was a mixture of honey and ground charcoal, but that probably didn’t keep the cavities away.
We also tried making our own soap, with variable success. First we would take some of the lard we had carefully stored after killing one of the pigs, and render it by boiling it up with water and letting the fat rise to the top as the mixture cooled overnight. The solid layer of grease floating on top the next morning was much cleaner than lard, since the impurities were left in the water below.
Next, we would take a large wooden bucket whose bottom had fallen out and place it on a stone slab down by the stream. We put a layer of grass and small sticks at the base of the bucket, and then covered it with wood ash from the Rayburn. Finally, we would gently pour water over the ashes and collect the brownish liquid (lye) that oozed out of the bottom of the bucket over the stone slab.
The last step was to mix the lye with the fat and boil the mixture over an open fire until it thickened into a frothy brew. As it boiled, we would throw some salt in to ensure that the cake of soap that formed on top would be hard, otherwise we would end up with a soft brown jelly which, while it functioned well enough as a cleaning material, was too far removed from the soap we remembered from civilization for most people’s taste. It was a lot of effort, but at least we could pride ourselves on mastering this particular element of post-apocalyptic living.
It’s the little things like toilet paper and toothpaste and soap, things that you hardly notice when you go about your daily life in rich countries, that you don’t think about when you merely imagine what life might be like after the collapse of civilization. It’s only when you start acting it out – when you start trying to live as if civilization has already collapsed – that these little details intrude. And these details turn out to matter much more than you might think.
I was beginning to lose track of who was supposed to be coming and when. I had drawn up a schedule while I was still in England, coordinating everything by email with the volunteers, but in the meantime some people had pulled out, while others wanted to come at different times, and my paper notes were now a mess. Agric kindly offered to take over the task, and we set up an old computer in the Barn for him to communicate with the forthcoming arrivals.
the computer was another compromise with the modern world. I tried to justify its presence on the grounds that we might be able to keep some electronic devices going for the first few years after civilization collapsed. But what about the Internet? Nick Stenning, the gap year student who had cut his finger, had suggested the net might survive in some form for a while. The infrastructure on which the Internet is built is pretty centralized and therefore quite fragile, but wireless networking might offer a decentralized, more organic alternative, similar to the way mobile phone networks operate. There is still a certain level of hierarchy with cell phones, in the sense that each cell is operated by a mast. In theory, however, a call can bounce from cell to cell without being rerouted through a central hub. Ad-hoc wireless networks can be formed of computers too. A group of wireless computers can talk to each other (often through other members of the group) without any real hub. And it was this kind of network, Nick argued, that anyone preparing for the collapse of civilization should try and enhance. There are no cables to maintain, no natural disasters to guard against (in the sense that you only have to protect the computers, not the infrastructure connecting them – that’s just air).
I was intrigued by Nick’s thoughts on post-apocalyptic networking. What would it be like to live in a world in which people had largely returned to low-tech pre-industrial technology but still had a few computers hooked up to the Internet? The pre-industrial world seemed, in many respects, so much more appealing than the industrial one, but it clearly had several major defects, one of which was its parochialism and the great difficulty of spreading good ideas. A pre-industrial world with Internet access might have the best of both worlds.
But this rosy image of laptops in tree-houses was, of course, beset by the same problems that cast a shadow over Tommy’s suggestion that we could simply wander around gathering used iPods. Sooner or later the computers would break down, and without a modern technological infrastructure we wouldn’t be able to repair them. So even if we kept some kind of limited network going for a while, it wouldn’t last very long.
Perhaps we could take advantage of this grace period to copy down the most important bits of knowledge from the web before it disappeared completely. Assuming we had a supply of paper and pens, we could work like medieval scribes, preserving the hard won knowledge of our ancestors for posterity. But what, exactly, would we choose to preserve? Would it be best to focus on purely practical things, like which plants were poisonous, and how to make soap? Or would it be worth including some more abstract stuff too, like the periodic table and the germ theory of disease? Millions of our ancestors died because they didn’t realize that some diseases can be transmitted by organisms that are too small for the naked eye to see, so it would be useful to keep at least some scientific discoveries as well as the more practical bits of knowhow.
But when Angus wanted to use the computer to check Facebook, I baulked. The computer was only for organizing the volunteers, I insisted. It wasn’t really supposed to be part of the experiment itself.
‘That’s a moot point,’ said Angus, shaking his head. ‘I’m not really clear about what is and what isn’t part of the experim
ent any more, Dylan. Are you?’
For one week in mid-May the weather was unusually benign – sunny days that made the Highlands look like Switzerland in June. But the week after there was torrential rain, and the weather turned bitterly cold. Our latest arrival – a former medical physicist who had opted out of the rat race a few years before, and now divided her time between a flat in Edinburgh and a caravan in southern France – was, quite rightly, miserable.
‘I’ve lived in Scotland for twenty-four years,’ said Georgia, ‘and I know what cold is. This is cold! Lying in a sleeping bag under two duvets and a blanket and still having cold feet is cold in anyone’s language.’
‘But you’re still here!’ I said, impressed with her stoicism.
‘I don’t know any other woman who would be!’ she said. ‘But I’m not scared. I’ve got more bloody bottle than that.’
But the following day the yurt she was sleeping in began to leak. We tied a cord to the corners of a bit of plastic and slung it over the top of the yurt. It seemed to work, but it didn’t look like it would last very long.
Agric was still smiling. ‘Isn’t it wonderful, though, this kind of lifestyle?’ he chided. ‘Doesn’t it make you see how your normal life isn’t as good as you thought?’
‘Certainly not!’ replied Georgia. ‘My normal life is fabulous!’
Though volunteers came and went, the number of people living on site at any one time gradually increased, and by now there were usually between eight and twelve. As a result, we were using a lot more wood. The pot-bellied stoves in the three yurts were banked up with logs every evening, the Rayburn was going through fuel at an awful rate, and we also wanted to build more structures, such as a cold storage cellar under the ground (using wooden planks to line the earth walls). There was no way our little patch of woodland could cater for all our needs. The experiment had already become unsustainable, at least in terms of trees. Like the Maya, we had exceeded the carrying capacity of our local environment. But unlike the Maya, we had the Forestry Commission, so I called them and ordered seventeen tons of logs.
The wood was delivered early one frosty morning. I had lain awake all night, worrying what would happen when my money ran out, wondering whether I would be trapped in Utopia forever, when I heard the deep growl of a large engine grow louder and louder. I pulled on my trousers, and trudged up the side of the little valley to the higher ground where Gertrude stood. And there I was confronted by a horrifying sight.
The Forestry Commission had not delivered the little blocks I was expecting, but a dozen or so whole tree trunks. They were massive things, sixteen feet long and almost two feet in diameter, tall Scots pines felled by huge harvesting machines, and piled on the back of a fearsome articulated lorry. I watched, speechless, as the driver unloaded the trunks one by one with the boom crane attached to the truck, and piled them up in an imposing stack that dwarfed my puny little body. When he had finished, he hopped down and asked if I was happy.
All I could do was nod my head and stammer: ‘I . . . I . . . thought they would be smaller . . .’ I wasn’t even able to muster a smile.
It was only when the lorry had disappeared that it dawned on me that the tree trunks rested on a gentle slope, and were stacked in such a way that they might roll downhill if, somehow, they were dislodged. If they did start rolling, they would quickly pick up speed and smash Gertrude to pieces, and then cascade down the valley onto the small blue yurts below. From then on, I was terrified that the pile would collapse in the middle of the night. I had visions of being crushed to death by a stray Scots pine while I was sleeping.
Once again, my worries about something external collapsing distracted me from my own psychological collapse, that was by now a far more clear and present danger. The tree trunks symbolized my loss of control, my sense of powerlessness to prevent a looming disaster. Only this can explain my apparently exaggerated reaction to their sudden appearance. When Romay appeared, to find me frozen to the spot, my face white with horror, she couldn’t suppress a little giggle.
Our newly abundant supply of wood encouraged us to develop our woodworking skills. A local couple called Paddy and Sue were old hands at green carpentry and came to teach us the basics. They were selling their house to take up a nomadic lifestyle, and asked if they could come and stay at Utopia at some point. They seemed to think of it as just another eco-village or hippy commune, rather than an experiment in post-apocalyptic living, but I was too despondent to try and change their minds.
Paddy and Sue were enthusiastic about working without power tools. They laid out their implements like surgeons preparing for an operation – a side-axe, a drawknife, adzes and mallets – and unveiled their shave horse, so-called because the user sits astride it. Then they led us into the woodland down by the river on a search for suitable raw materials, and we came back with some branches of ash and cherry.
We began by cutting the branches to length with a coarse saw, and then hewed the wood into rough billets with the axes and adzes, always working with the grain. With the longer billets, which we planned to use for chair legs, we would clamp them to the shave horse and shape them with a drawknife. With the shorter pieces, we would just whittle them into shape with a pocket knife. Graham, a twenty-one-year-old architecture student from Sheffield with floppy brown hair, who had just arrived in Utopia the previous day, was soon happily whittling a spoon. Everyone seemed to be having fun except me. This was exactly the sort of thing I had looked forward to when I started planning the experiment, and yet now I felt joyless and empty.
That evening a few friends of Paddy and Sue arrived in an old jeep and an impromptu party sprang into life. The weather was glorious and Graham gathered some wood for a bonfire. Then, Paddy’s friends took a chainsaw out of their jeep and sawed a length of wood about three feet long off the end of one of the huge tree trunks that had been delivered by the Forestry Commission. Two people then wrestled the stump over to near the bonfire, and set it upright. They cut four deep grooves in the top, in the shape of a cross, and put some shavings in the centre of the grooves, and lit them. As the flames burned down into the grooves, the tree stump sent out flames, shooting up like fireworks, which gave out more heat than the bonfire. The volunteers cheered.
I tried to look happy but inside I was numb. ‘What a terrible waste of wood,’ I thought.
By the time Heather came to Utopia to teach us how to identify the medicinal plants that grew wild around the river, I was no longer myself. I felt as though the ground had been pulled from under my feet, and I was falling, falling, falling, with nothing to grab on to and no idea when, or if, I would ever land.
But nobody else seemed to notice, or if they did, they kept quiet about it. I felt like screaming, but no sound would come out. My eyes, I was sure, had the wild, desperate look of a man who has just been told he will be shot at dawn. And yet everyone went about their business as if nothing had happened, as if everything was normal. I felt invisible.
So when Heather arrived, and walked around Utopia with us, bending down now and again to point out a plant, or a flower, and describe its various uses and healing properties, all I could do was to follow mutely along and pretend I understood.
‘This is wood sorrel. You can make tea from an infusion of the leaves to treat fever and colds.’
The volunteers were fascinated, and nibbled the leaf that Heather passed round to see what it tasted like. But none of this seemed real to me.
‘This is goosegrass, or cleavers. It has a soothing effect which can help with insomnia.’
I struggled to make out the identifying features of the plant, but it looked like, well, it looked like just another plant.
‘This is sweet cicely. It’s good for treating coughs. But be careful not to confuse it with hemlock! The little white flowers look very similar, but hemlock is a deadly poison.’
And then it struck me. If only I could find some hemlock! That would be my way out of Utopia. If it was good enough for Socrates (th
e philosopher, not the cat), it was good enough for me.
From that moment on, thoughts of suicide began to recur with increasing frequency. I contemplated hanging myself in the woods, but that was too dramatic, and it would be better anyway if I could make it look like an accident. I thought about sleeping outside on a cold night to get hypothermia, but that wouldn’t be quick enough, and the volunteers might try to save me. I kept coming back to hemlock, which definitely seemed the best solution – if only I could find some. It’s harder to kill yourself in the wild than in an urban setting, where bridges, cars and trains provide plenty of opportunities.
But deep down, I think I always knew that I didn’t have the courage. It takes guts to put an end to your life, and a decisiveness that I once had but was now completely lacking. I bumbled along, incapable of making the smallest decision, let alone a momentous one like suicide. And I could see no way out of Utopia, no place to land, and nothing to put an end to my free fall.
Apart from Bo, the only other person I confided in about my rapidly worsening state of mind was my friend Chris. I had broken my rule about only using the Internet for Utopia business and sent him an email. My ability to concentrate had diminished to the point where I was only able to write a few lines. But they must have been enough to convey some idea of my sense of helplessness and despair, for Chris immediately bought me a plane ticket to London, so he could look after me for a week at his house in Catford.
Miserable though I was in Utopia, I was loath to take another break. I had already spent time with Scott and Jules after my crisis at open day, and now I was at the cottage every other night with Bo, so the idea of spending a whole week away on top of all that felt deeply disloyal. The volunteers might come and go, but I was supposed to be there throughout the experiment, fully immersed in my alternative reality. But that was clearly no longer the case, and Chris tried to reassure me that this was the best thing I could do to make the project a success. Even the volunteers agreed I needed a break. But all the same, I felt guilty about going away.