The Man Who Quit Money (14 page)

At first, I took his reticence on the subject as sheer stubbornness. It wasn’t until I studied the Sermon on the Mount that I finally figured out his motivation. Most theological discussions with Suelo come back to this sermon, in which Jesus says:

The same message is in the Tao Te Ching:

.  .  .

O
N A WINDY
spring day I caught up with Suelo at Sol Food Farms, where he was volunteering. Although he often leaves Moab for cooler climes in the summer, in 2010 he decided to stick around to work on the farm. It was a cause he believed in. And although he chose his own hours and didn’t receive pay, it was the closest thing to a regular job he had had since salmon fishing three years before.

Sol Food’s acres extended between a new tract of largish homes and a wild thicket, in the same fertile creek bottom where Suelo had been harvesting melons the previous fall. The owner, Chris Conrad, began the enterprise in 2008 by leasing these fields that, until recently, had grown food for generations. Friendly and affable, with a toothy grin and wavy hair pouring over a visor, Chris described a sense of mission larger than merely growing tomatoes: he was also reviving a tradition of local agriculture that dated back to pioneer days. He told me that the name of his business stood for “Sustainable, Organic, Local.” “But legally I can’t call it organic,” he said drily. “The government owns that word.”

Chris and Suelo showed me around the farm. The carrots planted in late fall had survived the winter and were bushy on
top. Chris pulled a few and we washed them beneath a spigot and chomped on the sweet orange roots. He showed me the hoop house—a twenty-by-thirty-foot homemade greenhouse with a wood frame, steel ribs, and sheets of clear plastic. The structure had prevented the ground beneath it from freezing during the recent winter—the coldest on record—but had then collapsed beneath the snow, requiring an expensive rebuild. Chris took evident pride in what he’d created here, the neat rows of spinach and Asian greens and turnips. “You can eat those turnips like apples,” Suelo said. A six-foot fence encircled the precious crops and kept the deer at bay.

Like many permanent residents, Chris Conrad came to Moab for a seasonal job and ended up staying. After graduating from college in his native Pennsylvania, with a major in natural resource management and a minor in philosophy, he took a summer volunteer position at Dead Horse Point State Park, which morphed into a paid seasonal job. Over the years he worked as a guide, an ambulance driver, and then, feeling what he calls “societal pressure to get a real job,” he worked four years as director of the county’s emergency medical services. But then he decided he’d had enough of wearing a pager. “I’d read enough philosophy and financial freedom books—and had been lucky enough to live as a climbing bum—so that I knew there’s a life to live.” He quit his job and started his own photo business. In 2008 at the age of thirty-four he ran for a seat on the Grand County Council, and won. A year later he launched the farm.

The first year was tough. He hired some farmers with more experience than him, and they clashed. “Maybe I just didn’t have the leadership skills,” he told me. “I couldn’t get them to do what
I wanted them to do.” So in Year Two, Chris eliminated paid labor and was running the farm with volunteers who worked for vegetables.

The workers that day were Suelo, Brer Erschadi—the founder of the Moab Free Meal—and a kid who’d just graduated from Rutgers with a degree in psychology. He told me he had come out to Moab to “live,” as opposed to “sitting in an office and going into debt, which is what it would take to pursue my career or go to graduate school.”

I hadn’t actually come to the farm intending to work, but when I asked Brer if he had a minute to talk, he handed me a rake and said, “Sure, can you help us with this?”

It was a beautiful day in the orchard. Suelo and Brer swung hoes into the shallow irrigation troughs that had clogged with grass and leaves over the years, and the rest of us hauled the downed branches and limbs across the field to a burn pile. The orchard was decades old, but as far as Chris Conrad knew, its pears had never been brought to market. He planned to do just that.

We piled the branches onto a plastic tarp and dragged it through the orchard rows. It had been a long winter where I live in Montana, and the desert sunshine was like honey. Blossoms hung from the trees. It felt good to use my hands and feet and muscles. What’s more, we weren’t just working, we were restoring this paradise to its glory. Whoever planted these trees had given up the dream, and we were keeping it alive. The sun melted the clouds, crisp April wind blew, and the five of us caught the euphoria that comes from hard outdoor labor. Instead of resenting the boss and counting the hours, we were here by choice. Conversation skipped along from the coming global
water shortage to Vipassana meditation to the outrages perpetrated by the Federal Reserve Board. We pulled our rakes and swung our hoes with a consensus of purpose.

Suelo, in a pair of leather work boots, shorts, and a black T-shirt, was throwing a hoe. Beads of sweat dripped from his hat onto his forehead. Over the course of an hour he’d dug a long straight trench the entire length of the orchard, a segment of the old network of irrigation ditches cut by pioneers. He leaned on the wooden handle of the hoe and inspected his work. “The Taoists believe that the devil walks a straight line,” said Suelo, “so they grow their crops in a zigzag.”

And then, with the ditches clear, the moment arrived. Chris Conrad pulled a lever, and a stream of spring snowmelt bubbled from a plastic pipe. It filled the newly cut ditches, pouring down the gentle gradient, building mass until an apron of tiny brooks flooded the fruit trees, the soil soggy underfoot, our boot heels sinking in muck. We were bringing the desert to life. We were doing good work.

. . .

Connecting Grand County with the outside world was not an easy task.

—Richard Firmage,
A History of Grand County

I
N THE SPRING
of 1974, Conrad Sorenson fueled up his Volkswagen Beetle and set out for Santa Fe from his home in Salt Lake City. He was carrying five hundred dollars in cash, with which he hoped to pay down on a few acres in the desert. Like many in those years, he was fleeing the city for the land.

With his long hair and Bug, Conrad resembled a typical hippie. He worked at a health food store and oversaw its book inventory—titles about women’s issues and American sha-mans and Eastern mysticism that in those days were hard to find in a mainstream bookstore. In 1968, he’d ridden his motorcycle to San Francisco, turned vegetarian, and spent the next few years flying back and forth to Salt Lake, occasionally packing kilos of grass in his leather trousers.

But unlike many back-to-the-landers, Conrad wasn’t some kid surfing the latest trend. He was thirty-four years old, and had been born into a working-class Mormon family in Ogden.
His mother sent him to classical piano lessons, and to this day he can still resurrect the exquisite chaos of Schubert and Chopin on the baby grand his mother willed him.

After two restless years at Brigham Young University, Conrad shipped to Germany as a missionary for the Latter-Day Saints. The year was 1960, and the stirrings of the counterculture were still faint, but he already sensed that he didn’t belong in a dark suit spreading the gospel. “I went on the mission to please my parents,” Conrad says, fifty years later. “They knew full well I didn’t believe a word of it.”

Now in his seventies, Conrad Sorenson lives in a studio built against the side of a Moab cliff, with a wagon wheel as a window. The exposed red-rock wall and cast-iron woodstove and a shimmering brass gong give his home a Middle Earth feel, and Conrad, with his slight frame and delicate hands, graying ponytail, and scruffy mustache, fits the role of reclusive gnome. His hobbit hole has neither television nor telephone. He prepares his meals on a hot plate. The grand piano fills the room like a ship in a bottle.

“Suelo is like John the Baptist, the Essenes, continuing a tradition that has run through our history, and all cultures—a lineage,” Sorenson told me, referring to the early bands of Jewish mystics. “He’s like Basho, the old Japanese wanderer and monk who wants nothing, is trusting of the universe to deliver, and accepts what is delivered.”

I went to see Conrad because he has known Suelo for twenty years, and as canyon country’s godfather of pilgrims, in some ways he paved the way for Suelo. While pockets of freegans have sprouted up all across the country in the past decade, most are in cities—Portland, San Francisco, Buffalo—tolerant urban
communities with plenty of waste to be scavenged. But for two decades Suelo has always returned to the most right-wing state in the nation. “I’ve always felt like Moab was unusually nonjudgmental,” Suelo says. “Even conservative people here don’t seem to care whether I’m homeless, or gay. Once in a while someone says something, but they seem the minority, whereas in most towns they are the majority.”

Suelo’s circuitous arrival in Moab resembles that of Conrad. After a year on his mission in Germany, Sorenson’s supervisors sensed he was ready to bolt, so they offered him a plum assignment: playing piano in a traveling dance band called the Internationals. These minstrels would jazz up meeting halls with swing and standards as a way of attracting a younger crowd. “Then the guys in shirts and ties would pass out the Mormon lit.”

Back in the States, Conrad dropped out of BYU and, in order to gain a draft deferment, enrolled at the University of Utah. He joined the premier campus choral group and fell in love with an alto who shared his passion for descending caves in the Wasatch Range and meandering the stone mazes of the canyon lands. But she was a dyed-in-the-wool Mormon, and it didn’t work out. By the time of his road trip toward Santa Fe, he had abandoned the expectations of his upbringing. He had had affairs with both men and women, and was buying property with a German woman two decades his senior whom he met while singing hymns and playing the pump organ at a Mormon meeting in Germany. The five hundred dollars with which he was to purchase their piece of paradise actually belonged to Gerda.

En route to Santa Fe that glorious sunny day in 1974, Conrad stopped in Moab. He often passed through the bleak uranium town on his hiking getaways to Canyonlands National Park.
Conrad was a prodigious explorer, but not your typical Boy Scout with a rucksack laden with folding shovel and rain slicker and trail map and compass. He was an aesthete. He was less interested in reaching some destination—a river or overlook or arch—than in the
experience
of traveling through the moonscape, visualizing steps and ramps on a sheer slickrock dome, squeezing into forbidden slots and wondering if there was an exit. He sought to become an element of the landscape, just like the knotty juniper trunk or the bobbing lizard or the swirls in the sandstone. There were few places in the world as conducive to this sort of mind-altering tourism as southern Utah, and on almost every hike, after a few hours of rambling, Conrad could find some little nook or box canyon where, he was certain, no other human had set foot. That was a thrill that rivaled the melodies in music. To attain these epiphanies, Conrad employed some unorthodox outdoorsman’s techniques. The first requirement was a few lungfuls from his personal West Coast stash. The second was to remove all his clothes.

His journeys had given him little reason to celebrate the dinky gateway towns that opened into his wonderland. He judged Moab in particular—with its dominant architectural style of single-wides, cinderblock tract houses, and Quonset huts riveted with sheets of corrugated metal—a godforsaken place. “I couldn’t get through it fast enough,” he says.

But this time he had a peculiar quest: to locate a cult author whose books on Gestalt therapy were available only through a tiny outfit called Real People Press, which was located, of all places, in Moab. Gestalt therapy was a midcentury intellectual phenomenon that combined elements of post-Nazi existentialism, Zen Buddhism, psychoanalysis, and experimental theater in the service of
learning to experience life in the present moment. The author, a cantankerous British woman named Barry Stevens, was said to be an associate of such prehippie mind-blowers as Aldous Huxley and Bertrand Russell, and in the early seventies had emerged as an unwilling guru of the human potential movement, thanks to a series of books she’d produced, with such heady titles as
Don’t Push the River (It Flows by Itself)
and
Person to Person: The Problem of Being Human
. Now, according to rumor, she had, in a Mr. Kurtz kind of way, gone native in the recesses of the desert.

Conrad found the street address and inquired after the author, only to be informed that Ms. Stevens lived in seclusion and did not accept visitors.

“She’s not friendly,” he was warned. “She might tell you to fuck off.”

But Conrad persisted, and was given a set of labyrinthine directions. He set out along the Colorado River on a road that was only partially paved, winding through the black-streaked loaves of sandstone. After not too long, he came upon a sign advertising five-acre plots. He climbed a muddy spur road and emerged into a sublime paradise: sheer red-rock monuments thrust up from a green valley toward dazzling white alps. A mild breeze blew the sweet scent of fruit blossoms. Lazy cows munched on grasses. It was like some idyllic Swiss haven—only in the desert.

After thirty miles on the river road, seven miles on a rugged mining trail, and driving his Bug across a broken bridge, he arrived at the ranch and found his quarry to be an absolute sweetheart. “For some reason I had brought some mangoes,” he says. “And it turned out she was a mango lover.” The two talked like old friends, and she offered him a place to camp out for the night. Conrad gobbled a pot brownie and lay there under the
explosion of stars, listening all night to the horrifying howls of beasts, which he thought might be a hallucination, but which Ms. Stevens informed him in the morning were coyotes.