I lived in an alpine village[1] for about 18 months - mainly to see if I could handle the winter, the isolation when the road closed due to snow and there were no tourists, just us. I was villager number 37, I think.

In Spring, it rained (heavily, 5m of rain a year on average) 28 days out of 30, and on the other two it drizzled. Depending on the moods of the weather, floods could take out the roads[2], or slips, and never mind the earthquakes.[3]

During the winter you had to fill the kettle at work before 10am, because 10am to 11am was the coldest part of the day and that's when the pipes would freeze (the village lay in a valley running north to south, and the mountains limited winter sunlight to 11am to 2pm).

We weren't "returning to nature" as such, we always had power and usually dial-up (at a terrible bps...), but we were rather close to nature's virtues[4] and vicissitudes. We all relied heavily on wood fires, some on coal, although we only lost electricity some of the time.

What was really interesting for me though, was how a population of 37 handles all of the above, without killing each other.

Generally, everyone had one or two people that, I'd guess you'd call friends, but in reality were "people I can spend time with okay". Other than that, everyone kept themselves to themselves. In such a small village, it's very easy to gossip, hell, when you've only got two TV channels (and did I mention the shit dial-up?) it's an attractive option.

But, there were three types of occasions the entire village came together:

1) Happy Hour at the local pub on a Wednesday. And this misleadingly named event could last until 4am.

2) Cleaning up all the crap that tourists like to leave behind. So. Much. Litter. Basically an emu parade[5] over 3km of village.

3) Whenever an emergency hit. Whether that was flooding, a power outage, a bush fire, everyone pitched in as they could, no matter their differences, everyone was in it together.

I really enjoyed the model of living apart together, to be honest. Only reason I moved is that I got married, and about 20km down the road was a rather worrying neighbour, who I didn't want to subject my wife to...[6]

> The Alpine Fault has a high probability (estimated at 30%) of rupturing in the next 50 years. The rupture will produce one of the biggest earthquakes since European settlement of New Zealand, and it will have a major impact on the lives of many people.

But yeah, there was no inexorable slide towards a cult, because no-one could be bothered with that crap. And there were no "This man is actually an island, screw you John Donne" people, because when the the freeze came, and the cloud base was 100m above you, and visibility up and down the valley was 200m from you, in a valley 500m wide, everyone realised that they needed to talk to somebody every now and then, just to escape the reality that nature had put them in a frozen box.

[1]: https://arthurspass.com

[2]: https://i.imgur.com/kFryHnV.jpeg

[3]: https://westcoast.recollect.co.nz/assets/display/82881-max

[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyU3Q5DeKEI

[5]: https://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/resources/aus/word/ma...

[6]: https://www.gns.cri.nz/Home/Learning/Science-Topics/Earthqua...