This tiny city is small enough to tuck neatly into a tight little corner of a Kalispell neighborhood. Small enough, in fact, to fit perched upon a folding table in an upstairs room.
And yet Zeymous, population 200,000, is way bigger than life, sprawling across endless miles of imagination.
Watson didn't “make it” the way most folk found a town. He didn't start with Main Street, didn't build outward with a haphazard grid as the town kept biggering itself.
Instead, Watson and fellow Zeymousians Kat Delby, Ellie Eberts and Brenton Tartaglino planned this place from top to bottom, carefully considering how life here would be lived, long before anyone moved in.
They plotted out tax rates, crime rates and growth rates. They projected development patterns, transportation needs. They considered food production, garbage disposal, water supplies. They knew where the retail would go, where the residential would go, knew what the homes would look like. They calculated social service needs, education systems and health care delivery.
“It's a pretty laid-back town,” Watson said. “People like living in Zeymous.”
And yet Zeymousians will not be living in this Icelandic city for another 150 years.
“That's the goal,” said Jim Watson, father of the city father. “They were given the parameters to operate a city in a 150-year time span. They were given the result, and then they're free to determine how to get there.”
The elder Watson, a former mechanical engineer, served as coach for these four junior high school students while they built this model city. But walking around town, through the open malls of public art and the oceanside parks, you surely don't see his fingerprints.
“They did it all,” he said, “and I just looked over their shoulders.”
He was still watching when, on Jan. 6, the four went to Boise and won the regional National Engineers Week Future City Competition. Now, they're packing up their town and heading to Washington, D.C., for a shot at the national title.
The goal of the annual competition is to begin with a hot engineering topic - this year it's hydrogen fuel cells. Students must work out from there to plot the logistics for an entire future city, 150 years from now.
“It's complex problem solving on a long-term project,” Jim Watson said, “with almost an infinite number of variables to balance.”
First, the team researched, learning the chemistry of fuel cells and the specific technologies needed to convert hydrogen into energy. They studied city planning, learned about every aspect of public life.
How does this city work, they wondered, and why?
Then they began plugging in the parameters, using SimCity software to peer into the future. Initial attempts failed; as the model grew, developers kept buying up needed farmland. Every variable pushed on another, and the computer model quickly grew out of control.
So they backtracked, fine-tuned, researched, fine-tuned some more. Finally, Zeymous stabilized, and the students brought their computerized town to life with a series of in-depth essays on how things work and why.
The last step was finally to build their town, for a budget capped at just $100.
“We did some Dumpster diving,” Delby said, but the little hydroponic garden really works.
Look closely, and you'll see the happy people of Zeymous are as plastic as they are tiny. Their commuter train is a ball running through a plastic hose, powered by a fan. There's blue insulating foam, electrical tape, egg cartons, a broken digital camera, a glowstick, a stove burner and not a few parts from a discarded dishwasher.
But if you're able to see all that, then you're looking too closely at the wrong things. Step back, reorient yourself in a new perspective, and get small.
“I want to live right there,” Eberts said, pointing to a subterranean housing complex capped by a greenhouse that cuts ultraviolet light, grows food, even optimizes sunlight. “It's at the end of the street, near the ocean, right next to the gardens.”
She'd wake up in her underground home, stirred by sunlight reflected down mirrored shafts.
“Zeymous is similar to an iceberg in design,” Tartaglino said, with much hidden below the surface. At 74 people per square mile, Zeymous is about as crowded as Boise, Idaho, he said, but the landscape above remains largely open.
Eberts' favored home, like all homes, is adobe, cool in the summer and warm in the winter. And it runs on the hydrogen economy, with tidal, solar and geothermal power plants breaking the H from the H2O. The liquid hydrogen courses through self-sealing pipes, right into private homes.
That's why they chose to build in Iceland, Watson said, a country where even today almost all power is generated at zero-emission geothermal plants.
Eberts eats a locally-grown breakfast in her Zeymous house - all organic, of course - before emerging onto the surface, where the landscape has been spared for open space and agriculture.
“We grow lots of food,” Tartaglino said. In fact, food exports rival technology exports as the primary driver in this microeconomy.
Zeymousians import building materials and not much else, Delby said, and work either on farms or for the high-tech companies that build the nano-robots that farm the farms. The rest of their time is spent outside, engaged in creative community, public art, recreation.
In this future they travel by Zeyball, a gyroscopic subway speeding through the Zoom Tube, commuters resting comfortably as the ball rolls at rocket speed toward the space port, the zoo, the art museum, the gardens, the school.
And about that school. It's a Montessori school, of course, just like the one these four kids attend. They are, in fact, the only students in this the first year of the Flathead Valley Montessori Academy, a pilot school that stretches local Montessori education into the seventh and eighth grades.
In Zeymous, all education is Montessori-based.
“Everyone's happy,” Sam Watson said. “There's even a disco. It's a smile-based economy.”
And a science-based town, with lots of research centers and a progressive technological solution to just about every problem.
Waste is recycled, composted, turned to food. Gray water is treated and pumped back up the tap. The earth's renewable energies are harnessed. Holographic shopping malls (remember Star Trek's “Next Generation”?) eliminate the need for big sprawling retail centers, and purchases are shipped straight to your home. Criminals are injected with the memories of having served harsh prison sentences, eliminating the need for expensive incarceration.
But the “chemical prison” is “sort of scary to me,” Delby said, as it meddles with self, invading the privacy of personal experience.
“I'm a little scared of our city, just because of that,” she said.
And with that these budding engineers and city planners become young ethicists, debating the nature of self and what it is that makes us who we are.
These, then, are lessons that go far beyond Engineers Week. These are lessons about how to live a life, how to get along in a world of people who don't always see eye to eye.
And in the end, these are lessons about how to live now, not 150 years from now. In many ways, Zeymous looks a lot like Kalispell, with its agriculture and its arts, its small-town ambiance and informal community connectedness.
“Personally, I'd add a ski hill,” Tartaglino said. “Then it would have everything.”
The others, too, would not change much.
“I like how it seems small, but it has everything,” Delby said.
“There's never not something to do,” Eberts agreed.
But the lines have blurred. Delby and Eberts aren't talking about Zeymous anymore. They're talking about Kalispell.
“In the end,” said teacher Jeff Pernell, “I think we've learned more about living here and now than about living in the future. Zeymous is a nice place to visit, but we still have to wake up here in Kalispell.”
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com.
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