Kingsnorth and Hine had drawn a lot of negative attention for the unremitting pessimism of their vision of the future, but what struck me most on reading it was its undercurrent of stern utopianism. As is the way of much apocalyptic writing, from John of Patmos to Karl Marx, the manifesto was animated by the desire for the immolation of a corrupted world, and the hope of witnessing a new dawn rising above its ashes. Beyond the uncompromising insistence that the rising tide of climate change would wash the Earth clean of our civilization and all its works, the Dark Mountain Project argued for a displacement of humanity from its seat as the center and source of all meaning in the world, and for an enactment of this displacement in new forms of “uncivilized” art and literature and storytelling. And what it ultimately gestured toward was something strangely hopeful, at least on its own terms: a world beyond the collapse of technological civilization in which humans—those humans who survived such a cataclysm—would find themselves no longer above or beyond nature, but within it, in a place where such categories as “human” and “nature” were no longer useful distinctions. “The end of the world as we know it,” as they put it in the manifesto’s closing lines, “is not the end of the world full stop. Together we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.”
* * *
—
On the evening of my arrival in Alladale, I had very real trouble getting my tent into any kind of tent-like configuration. The opaque disk of the sun was disappearing behind the great shadowing slopes of the western highlands, and the remaining light was dwindling inexorably, and I was, I realized, in serious danger of having to get the thing up in the dark, with only a headlamp to light my way, when a young woman who’d had her own nearby tent up for a while now poked her head through its entrance flap and asked whether I needed a hand. I will not pretend that accepting her offer did not involve a certain measure of masculinity-related discomfort, but it seemed to me that the embarrassment of politely declining, only to then continue foundering in tent-purgatory, would be exponentially more severe than the comparatively benign embarrassment of accepting.
“I used to work in a camping store,” she said, “so I’m pretty used to putting tents up. They’re tricky bastards, some of them.”
I was immediately struck by the empathic skillfulness of this revelation, by the deft footing with which the woman had positioned herself not as a human being of normal competence, but as someone whose time as a camping store employee had endowed her with a special facility in tent construction—thereby skillfully maneuvering me out of my own position as an idiot who could not put up his own tent, and into the much less mortifying position of a person who, never having worked in a camping store, could be forgiven for not having been initiated into these esoteric practices. The profound emotional intelligence of this tactic was, in truth, even more impressive to me than the efficiency and speed with which she was putting up my tent in the dwindling light, which I knew was something any fool could do, myself excepted.
This woman’s name was Amelia Featherstone. (It is only now that I’m writing about her, incidentally, that her name’s amalgamation of emblematically opposed images—feather, stone—strikes me as somewhat heavy-handed in its paradoxical poeticism. This is hardly something Amelia herself could be blamed for, but neither is it something for which I can be held accountable.) As she put up my tent, and as I pretended to help her, she told me she was from Melbourne and that she worked for the government, in ecological conservation. This revelation prompted me to talk about how, as much as I wanted to see Australia, it was precisely its ecological diversity that gave me pause. Australia’s sheer abundance of flying, skittering, crawling horrors constituted a deal-breaker, I said, in terms of my prospects for ever visiting the country.
I asked Amelia whether snakes were a particular concern in Melbourne, and she said that she did from time to time come across them in her work as a fire department volunteer.
“Now and then,” she said, “you’ll get a situation where you’re dealing with a bush fire, and there are snakes in the bush, and the snakes are leaping out of the bush towards you.”
“You mean, like, right at you?” I said.
“Yeah,” she replied, in a tone that sounded to me almost apologetic.
“At your face?”
“More or less, yeah. Not deliberately, but you’re in their path. And they’re on fire, of course, when they’re leaping at you, which is not great.”
“So this is something that has happened to you, in your own life, as a person? Actual snakes that are on fire have leapt towards you from vegetation that is also on fire.”
“Yeah,” she said, and chuckled happily.
“I would not enjoy that at all,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s not great, as I said.”
* * *
—
I was out of my comfort zone. It was a narrow zone, but deceptively spacious, and I did not like to be out of it. My comfort zone had good Wi-Fi and 3G coverage, and you could get Japanese food delivered to it, and there was craft beer within walking distance, and bookshops, and it was clean and it was at all times more or less room temperature. It was a good place to be, my comfort zone. There were rarely spiders in it, and never any spiders that were on fire. There was not much nature in it at all, in fact, unless you counted potted plants, which were very much optional. My comfort zone was, strictly speaking, inside.
I had been thinking about this quite a bit before I came to Alladale, about my somewhat arm’s-length relationship with nature. I was all for nature in theory, but in practice I had no feel for it, no sense of any relationship with it at all.
Actually that is not entirely true, because I was afraid of it—or certain aspects of it, at any rate, certain parts of it—and to be afraid of a thing is to have a relationship with it, however dysfunctional. I had certain quite intense nature-based phobias. I was, most pressingly, profoundly terrified of moths. It’s a phobia I’d had for as long as I could remember, and was so mysterious to me in its weird urgency and intensity that I could only conceive of it as psychologically fundamental. It seemed to me that to disclose its origins would be in some sense to uncover the truth about myself.
When a moth enters a room I am in, or when I enter a room in which a moth is already established, it has long been my custom to swiftly withdraw. I cede the territory, no questions asked.
What is it about these small, defenseless creatures that so overwhelms me with elemental fear and disgust?
I find their blunt, furred bodies and twitching wings unpleasant to look at, certainly, but it is the manner of their movement that I find especially horrific: the total randomness of it, the indiscriminate courses of their flight. A moth will dart in one direction and then, for no good reason, just switch trajectories and double back the way it came. If your face happens to be positioned at any point along that trajectory, chances are the moth will blunder into it. And to be touched by such a thing, to have its body in contact with one’s skin, seems to me a prospect beyond the realm of the thinkable.