Q: All right, Bronwyn. How long have you been off the grid, at this point?
A: Almost a year and four months. Since January of last year.
Q: And you’ve gone completely non-technological? Like, back to the nineteenth century?
A: Hardly. When I need to buy tools and supplies, I buy modern machine-shop versions. I don’t hand-carve my own butter churns. (BEAT) But I do have a butter churn. (CHUCKLES) That’s one of the reasons I started posting to prepper sites in the first place—I had to learn a lot of the old techniques just to stay afloat, and people in the survivalist community put big value on skill-sharing.
Q: And yet you also live completely by yourself as well, we hear. One thing a lot of our other interviewees have said is that total isolation is actually dangerous—not just in case you find yourself hurt and without help, but because humans aren’t really meant to live that way. Community’s a key part of sanity. Why forgo it?
A: (PAUSE) I’d have to call that a matter of conscience as well.
Q: Meaning you don’t want to tell us? It’s all right if you don’t. We always respect the defined spaces of our guests’ privacy.
A: No, I’m going to tell you. It’s just that explaining it is going to take a while. And enough of your listeners are going to think I’m a psycho by the end of this anyway.
Q: You might be surprised. We’re pretty open-minded around here.
A: We’ll see.
(PAUSE)
Q: So we may as well start from the beginning. Had you always been interested in disconnection as a lifestyle, or was it a sudden change?
A: You could call it “sudden”.
(BEAT)
A: The truth is, up until last January, you would probably have pegged me as the last person you’d have imagined doing this. I was a stockbroker—or, as I liked to tell people I thought would think it was charming, I tricked suckers into throwing away their money trying to cheat the system out of more for a living. I was one of those people you see power walking along Bay Street with a Bluetooth in her ear and her nose in her smartphone, checking on Bloomberg and the TSE{The references to “Bay Street” and the “TSE” make it likely that Harmony/Bronwyn is Canadian, specifically from Toronto, Ontario; “TSE” in context almost certainly stands for the Toronto Stock Exchange, and Bay Street runs through the downtown finance core of the city, making it the Canadian equivalent of Wall Street in Manhattan.} for the latest buying and selling movements. That’s how it all started, in fact—I got a promotion and a pay raise that meant I’d finally be able to live downtown on my own salary, so I started looking around for a condo within walking distance of my office. And in December, I thought I’d finally found it.
It wasn’t a new unit, just a one-bedroom plus den job belonging to a guy who flew back and forth every week between Hong Kong and… and where I used to live, so when his job suddenly changed and he didn’t need to be there any more, he was more interested in unloading it fast than in gauging potential buyers. Not a lot of room, but all the space I needed for my office, plus a lot of shelving and a really nice northern view with lots of natural light. And there was this beautiful line of track-lighting in the main room, one of the best I’d ever seen—bright bulbs, understated fixtures, on a dimmer switch. I remember looking up at it while the realtor was nattering on and thinking, “Wow, that’s really nice.”
Q: So what you’re saying is, it was really nice.
A: Yeah, well, I think ultimately, that lighting might’ve been the primary reason I agreed to buy the place. So I go through all the paperwork, wait for buddy to move out and head back to Hong Kong, and I move in three weeks later and… the lighting is gone. He took it with him.
Q: You mean he actually removed the entire fixture? Not just took out the bulbs?
A: Yeah, that’s what I mean. There wasn’t anything left in the ceiling except this S-shaped row of plastic nodules where it must have been attached. I don’t mind telling you I was really pissed off about that, especially when the realtor said she couldn’t do anything—if the guy put it in he had the right to take it out.
Q: Was this some kind of unique hand-made brand or something? I wouldn’t think it’d be that impossible to replace a set of lights.
A: You wouldn’t, right? But no. I mean… getting a new track and bulbs wasn’t the problem—didn’t look exactly like what’d been there before, but at this point, I was willing to settle. The problem was when I got the lighting tech in to hook everything up, and he just couldn’t get it to work.
Q: How do you mean?
A: I mean he couldn’t get a current out of any of the wires running into those sockets. And even weirder? He couldn’t even find the goddam switch that worked that particular fixture. The dimmer and all that shit? Well, my realtor couldn’t remember where it was supposed to be, and neither I nor the lighting guy could find anything like it. Sure, there was a switch inside the door for the hall light, one for the kitchen—guy-o didn’t take that. A switch inside the john, for the vanity lights above the sink. But no switches anywhere else except right next to the en-suite washer-dryer unit built-in, and you know what that turned out to run?
Q: The washer-dryer?
A: Got it in one.
Q: Okay, I admit it, that’s a little weird… You’re sure you saw these lights actually working when you were first looking at the apartment? When the realtor was there?
A: Yes, for fuck’s sake.
Q: Uh, we’d really rather you didn’t—
A: Whatever. (ANOTHER PAUSE) And then I went downstairs, talked to the concierge, wanted to know what the lighting set-up was in all the other apartments with the same layout—they wouldn’t tell me. Cited privacy, can you believe that? So I tell them what’s happened, and how I just want to figure out how to put in lights that’ll turn on so I don’t have to light the whole place with floor lamps, and they’re like: well, we can’t help, can’t even get in touch with the Hong Kong dude because he changed his phone number and it turns out they never even had his email. And my mortgage agreement says I’m the one who’s basically responsible for everything that happens inside my walls, anyhow.
Q: So it was the, um… annoying, frustrating, no doubt expensive unreliability of this system which prompted your eventual… lifestyle change?
A: No. Not that.
(ANOTHER, LONGER PAUSE)
Have you ever thought—I mean, I guess you kind of must have, considering this show you run—but have you ever really thought, like in detail, about just how much we all rely on things these days that almost none of us actually understand?
Q: You mean, technologically? Like—
A: Yeah, that too, of course. But… not just that.
Q: Well, a lot of the people we interview do make a big deal out of how much we take for granted. How our whole society runs on these… tides of energy going back and forth: electricity, cellular signals, microwaves. Invisible presences that we all work with constantly, and only a tiny minority of people actually know how to build, or control, or fix. I remember one bloke talking about how he’d taught himself practical electrician’s skills as part of getting his lodge set up, and he did some handyman work for his friends and neighbours in the meantime; what always amazed him, he said, was how mind-boggled everybody he helped was. “It really was like I was some kind of wizard or magician,” he told me. “Wave my screwdriver, say stuff that made no sense, then everything works again. I mean, it felt good, but it was also kind of unnerving, you know?”