by Dylan Evans
A few days later, Angus drove me to the airport. I was fidgeting nervously in the passenger seat, so he tried to cheer me up by reminding me about some of the good times we had spent together.
‘Do you remember that time when we went to the Notting Hill Carnival together, and you got waylaid by that really fat girl?’ he said, smirking.
I nodded silently, and forced a smile.
‘She would have eaten you for breakfast!’ Angus chuckled.
‘Thanks for coming up here and helping out,’ I stammered.
‘No worries, mate! You were a real support to me when I was in Germany, remember? Your phone calls were the only thing that kept me sane.’
‘Yes, I remember,’ I said weakly. I turned and looked at him. He had been through some tough times too, but he looked strong and happy now. I envied his sense of self-assurance, his devil-may-care attitude. I wondered if I would ever be like that again.
‘Am I doing the right thing, going away?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, of course you are! Everybody needs a break now and again. And, to be honest, I think everyone needs a break from you.’
‘Maybe I shouldn’t go. Maybe you should turn round and drive me back,’ I whimpered.
‘No! I’m not turning round. You’re getting on that flight!’
I was so reluctant to go he almost had to push me out of the car.
‘Come on, off you go! It’ll be good for you!’ Angus said, trying to be patient, but looking rather weary.
I opened the car door with one hand, but gripped firmly on to the seat with the other.
‘What’s wrong with me?’ I pleaded.
Angus smiled. ‘It’s simple. You wanted to get outside your comfort zone, and now you are, and you don’t bloody like it!’
I got out of the car and walked to the terminal building. It felt alien and futuristic, as if I had arrived from the distant past in a time machine. I fidgeted throughout the whole flight.
When Chris greeted me at arrivals in Heathrow, his jaw dropped. I was, he said, thin and pale, and looked as if I had walked all the way from Scotland. Back at his house, he had made up a little bed for me in his spare room. He had prepared some supper, but all I wanted to do was sleep.
Each day that week, as I crawled out of my bed and made my way downstairs for breakfast, I would look up admiringly at the rows of coloured paper pinned to the walls of the stairway. Chris wrote textbooks for a living, and each piece of paper had a list of milestones that he had set himself for each book. Every milestone had been dutifully ticked off as he had achieved them. These humble records spoke eloquently of his patient setting of goals, and his diligent accomplishment of each one. And they felt like a silent rebuke of my way of living.
Chris and I both wrote books, but we worked in very different ways. I would write furiously for a few months, finish a book, and then not write again until I had blown my advance on holidays, DJ equipment, or some ill-conceived project. And then I would return to my desk to write another book. My Utopia Experiment was just the latest and biggest blowout.
Chris, on the other hand, had been writing for several hours every day for the past ten years. In that time, he had steadily built up a small fortune. He was always talking about retiring to the country, but he never seemed to think he had enough money to take the plunge. Even now, with perhaps a million pounds in the bank and large royalty cheques arriving every few months, he was still living in his run-down old house in Catford. I used to chide him about this, wondering out loud if he would ever actually make the move. But now his inertia no longer seemed so risible, and I even fancied I caught the occasional gleam of triumph in Chris’s eyes, as if my downtrodden air was the vindication he had always been seeking that his way of life was better than mine.
I proceeded to indulge in an orgy of remorse for my former ways. Whenever Chris asked how I was doing, all I could do was to whisper, over and over again: ‘Why did I sell my house? Why did I give up my job? Why did I sell my house?’ Chris had the patience of a saint, but after a few days even he was getting worn down by my repetitious monologue. ‘That’s all in the past now, Dylan,’ he would say; ‘you’ve got to put it behind you and move on.’ I knew that, of course, but all the same I couldn’t help repeating my mantra ad nauseam: ‘Why did I sell my house? Why did I give up my job?’
‘Come on, Dylan, snap out of it! This isn’t doing you any good!’
‘But I’ve fucked up my whole life,’ I whined.
‘No you haven’t. The experiment isn’t going too badly. Think of everything you’ve achieved there already.’
But when I recalled the dirty, dingy, musty old Barn, and the cold, damp nights in the yurts, I didn’t feel any pride.
‘And I’m sure you’ll come out of this a much stronger and wiser person,’ he said. ‘Maybe you will discover your true self, like in that birthday card I gave you. Remember?’
I did remember. The card showed a young man hiking in the mountains. He is dressed like a typical backpacker, and wears a hippyish beard. He looks surprised, for on the path ahead, and looking straight back at him, is a man dressed in a smart suit and holding a briefcase. And this man has the same face as the hippy, minus the beard.
Below the cartoon, Chris had Tippexed out one of the words in the caption, and written my name there instead, so that it read: ‘Halfway up the Himalayas, Dylan finally discovered his true self.’
And in a way, that summed up one of the most galling lessons that the Utopia Experiment taught me. No matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t the rugged survivalist I had imagined myself to be. I just didn’t have it in me. There, halfway up Mount Utopia, I had indeed discovered my true self. And he wasn’t Grizzly Adams. He was wearing a suit.
It wasn’t that I wore suits very often before I started the Utopia Experiment. In fact I hardly wore suits at all. But I was just as incapable of surviving in the wild as any city dweller. I may have fancied I could turn my hand to anything. But the truth is it takes lots of time and practice to learn your way around a woodland, and know which plants to eat and which to avoid, and which trees provide the best wood for different uses, and how to track an animal, and how to build shelter and start a fire. I had arrogantly assumed I could pick up all these skills as quickly as I could master a new academic discipline or understand a scientific theory. But I couldn’t; book learning and hands-on survival skills require very different kinds of mental faculties.
But there was one sense in which the birthday card wasn’t right at all. I was never an organization man. The same visual trope was featured in an ad that DuPont ran not long after William H. Whyte’s seminal work The Organization Man was published in 1956. In the upper right-hand corner of the ad a handful of men dressed in look-alike suits stride purposefully towards some unseen office. In the bottom left-hand corner sits a solitary figure, ‘Bernie the Beatnik’, in sandals and jeans, holding a guitar. Across the top of the ad ran the headline, ‘The Organization, Man!’
Some smaller text below voiced Bernie the Beatnik’s refusal to take a job in a big company: ‘Go to work every day, do what you’re told, lose your freedom!’ he exclaims. That’s pretty much how I felt about working in academia, and it’s why I quit. I had found that universities were no different from any other large organization; the same timid conformity, the same stifling bureaucracy, was equally present in those supposed temples of creative thought and free expression as in the most faceless corporation. And in that sense, I really was the hippy in the birthday card, not the suited gentleman. Outwardly I may have looked like an organization man, but inside I had always been Bernie the Beatnik.
And, curiously, that fed into my disenchantment with Utopia. For all its outward eccentricity, the little community had by now become as conformist as any corporation. Nobody questioned the idea that civilization was about to collapse. Everyone agreed that the modern world was an increasingly grim place, and looked forward to the coming crash. Groupthink had spread through Utopia like a virus, infecting
everyone except Adam. He alone had remained resolutely difficult, a stubborn and obstinate bastard. And that was why I liked him, and felt so distant from the others.
Romay was there to pick me up at the airport when I flew back from London. Angus, she said, had gone back down to England.
I was no better, psychologically, than when I had left the week before. I was just as jittery, and I still wore the same wide-eyed expression, looking permanently like someone whose face has just been slapped with a wet fish. I told Romay I couldn’t face going straight back to Utopia, and asked her to drop me at Bo’s cottage.
When Bo opened the door she stood there for a few moments without saying a word. And then we had a conversation that ended our relationship.
13. COLLAPSE
Breaking up with Bo was an emotional blow, but I consoled myself with the thought that I could now spend all my time at Utopia, instead of dashing back to Bo’s cottage every few days. Rather than lifting a weight from my shoulders, however, my less sporadic presence at Utopia only made my mood darken further. I now felt trapped, and when any of the volunteers tried to engage me in conversation, I never knew what to reply. I would stand there in silence for a few moments, then make some hasty excuse and shuffle off. I might occasionally try to join in the daily work, chopping firewood or weeding the vegetable patch, only to find myself paralysed. Ashamed of myself, I took to wandering off into the woods to hide, hoping that nobody would come and find me brooding under a tree, or curled up by the little waterfall. I was even less present than I had been before.
In the first week of June, a group of three film students from London arrived to make a short documentary about the experiment for their final year project. Camilla, Tony and Ryan looked very incongruous as they paced around Utopia with their high-tech camera equipment. They had visited several months before, when I was still well, and they were shocked to find a very different Dylan, no longer confident and energetic, but now downtrodden, dejected and listless.
This only made for a more interesting film. A documentary about an experiment in post-apocalyptic living was already a good start, but to show the founder coming unstuck and undergoing some sort of psychological meltdown added an extra twist. It was a pretty classic story, of course. A mad scientist who creates a bizarre experiment and then goes off the rails? Hardly original, but then it’s always the old plots that work best.
As they walked around, filming bits here and there, I felt like the Savage from Brave New World, whose quest for isolation is thwarted by dozens of gawking sightseers, intrigued by his weird behaviour. When they filmed me chopping wood, I could barely even hit the log, let alone split it cleanly down the middle. I was uncoordinated, feeble and pathetic. When they interviewed me, I tried to give the impression that everything was going just fine, but my voice was hoarse and low, with no breath left in it.
Tony was from South Africa. He had worked for Reuters and reported from Somalia and Zimbabwe. He looked upon the Utopia Experiment with the eyes of someone who had seen real disasters and real poverty.
‘If you want to see what life is like after peak oil,’ he said, ‘all you have to do is look at Africa.’
He was right; they already lived with scarcity, while we play-acted unconvincingly, our kitchen shelves stocked with five different kinds of vegetable oil and packs of rare spices, which previous volunteers had brought with them and left behind. Agric’s pot of Gardener’s Relief hand cream sitting on the table said it all.
Nor was it the first time I had been confronted with such criticisms. When I had first arrived in Scotland a friend had pointed out the parallels with Marx’s critique of utopian socialism. Wasn’t I just as naive as Charles Fourier or Robert Owen, a self-satisfied bourgeois playing at paradise while the rest of the world went to hell in a handcart? Real societies out there in the world were actually dealing with reconstruction after social breakdown, so wasn’t it in fact rather distasteful to play at it?
Back then, I had tried to justify my experiment by arguing that it wasn’t simply any kind of social breakdown that I was interested in, but a particular one – namely, the collapse of our globalized late-industrial civilization, with all the attendant breakdown of government, finance and trade. And while it was true that there were societies out there in the world actually dealing with reconstruction, the breakdown suffered by those societies was limited in geographical scope and thus very different to the global collapse I envisaged. As long as social breakdown was confined to one country or region, other countries could provide assistance; some forms of stable currency would remain to those who could afford them; international transport links would remain in place. But if breakdown propagated through the whole global system, aftermath would be very different.
Was it distasteful for affluent Westerners to play at imagining such things? I didn’t think so at first, but now I wasn’t so sure. When it was just play, it was perhaps OK. There’s nothing wrong with play, and I had hoped it would be lots of fun. But it wasn’t really fun any more, and the volunteers increasingly thought of it less as play and more as a dress rehearsal. In their minds it was morphing from a simulation of what life might be like if civilization collapsed, into a real-life preparation for an imminent catastrophe, just as it had in mine beforehand.
While Camilla, Tony and Ryan were still at Utopia, finishing off their film project, my friend Lewis came to visit. I had known him since we were students at Southampton University together, and he was now a professor of archaeology.
Lewis was in rude health. He had been working out, and his shoulders were broader. I, on the other hand, was painfully thin, and my clothes hung limply about me, like a baggy jumper on a scarecrow. Lewis looked shocked when he first saw me.
‘My god, Dylan, you look terrible!’ he gasped.
I managed a weak grin. ‘It’s not easy surviving the apocalypse,’ I said.
I showed Lewis around Utopia, and he seemed vaguely impressed, but I wasn’t sure whether he was just being polite. He had thought of staying in the yurts like everyone else, but when he poked his nose into one and saw the jumbled mass of sleeping bags and smelt the musty odour, he decided he would sleep at Romay’s farmhouse instead.
The next day, Lewis decided he would rent a car and drive up to the Orkney Islands to visit Skara Brae, a stone-built Neolithic settlement located on the west coast of Mainland, the largest island in the Orkney archipelago. Camilla, Tony and Ryan were going with him, and they all wanted me to come along too, but once again I felt hesitant about leaving Utopia. I hated every minute I spent there, but the idea of leaving didn’t seem to promise any relief. On the contrary, it terrified me.
Eventually Lewis cajoled me into getting in the car with him and the others, and we drove to Scrabster, on the northernmost edge of Scotland, where we would take the ferry to Stromness. But as we drove, I could feel myself becoming increasingly anxious, and I begged Lewis to turn round and drop me back at Utopia.
‘Don’t be silly, Dylan. Relax! This is going to be fun,’ said Lewis.
‘Please, Lewis, please!’ I pleaded. ‘Please take me back! I need to get back!’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really! Please please please take me back.’
Lewis pulled over to the side of the road and did a U-turn. And then, after we had been heading back down south for a few minutes, I let out a deep sigh.
‘It’s OK, Lewis, I’m fine now. I want to see Skara Brae with you. Please turn round, will you?’
Lewis looked at me with growing impatience. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘but I’m not turning round any more. If you ask me to take you back to Utopia again, I’m going to ignore you.’
I nodded meekly, and Lewis turned the car back round again. When we finally got to Scrabster, we had just missed the ferry by about five minutes.
‘Damn!’ said Lewis. ‘I wanted to spend the night in Stromness so we could get up early to visit Skara Brae. We’ll have to stay here now, and get the first ferry tomorrow morning.’
I don’t know what the film students made of my strange behaviour. They were very gracious about missing the ferry, and didn’t say a word of blame. We found a cheap guesthouse, and then went out for some fish and chips. I hadn’t eaten chips for months, and I savoured every one, dipping them in mayonnaise and ketchup like a little kid. Lewis looked at me and shook his head slowly.
‘It’s not really a scientific experiment at all, is it, this Utopia thing?’ he said. ‘I mean, a real scientific experiment has to have hypotheses. What are your hypotheses?’
I winced, and pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of my pocket. Scrawled on it were a few lines of spidery handwriting, in which I had tried to sum up the main axioms on which the experiment was predicated. I had written it while I was staying with Chris, in a vain attempt to remember what I was doing, and why, and I had kept it with me ever since, like a talisman. I gave it to Lewis. It read:
Global civilization is going to collapse within our lifetimes due to global warming and the energy crisis (peak oil).
When civilization collapses, billions of people will die, but some people will survive.
It will be impossible to rebuild civilization. Those who survive will have to escape to the wild, form tribes, and learn survival skills. This process is called ‘rewilding’ or ‘de-industrialization’ or ‘the New Tribal Revolution’.
Rewilding will improve our quality of life compared to how it was before the crash.
Lewis read it over several times and gazed into the distance, pondering what I had written.
‘So that’s your main hypothesis,’ he said, at last. ‘Getting back to nature would make you happy.’
‘I guess so,’ I whispered.
‘Well that didn’t work out so well, did it?’