The Man Who Quit Money (2 page)

“Oh, it’s you,” he said.

For a dude who lives in a cave, Suelo displayed a positively keen sense of style. His trousers were a few inches too long,
cuffed with rolls above boxy workman shoes. A plaid flannel over a tight black T-shirt revealed a slice of trim belly above a leather belt. He looked like a cross between a Great Depression hobo and a vagabond French painter—Buster Keaton meets Paul Gauguin.

Unsure what to do next, I threw my arms around him in a clumsy hug. He smelled like wood smoke. I invited him inside and introduced him to Melony and her husband, Mathew. Melony poured tall glasses of watermelon juice—the last of her cache, she told us.

Suelo perked up. Above his right eye is a scar that causes the brow to rise in a sharp peak, giving him a perpetual appearance of intense curiosity.

“Do you know about the melon patch?” he said.

We didn’t.

“That field between the creeks,” he said, nodding toward the street. “There’s hundreds of melons over there. Watermelon. Crenshaws. Squash and pumpkins, too. I’ve been eating them for months.”

“Whose are they?” I said.

“Some guy.” He shrugged. “After Obama was elected, he thought the whole system would collapse, so he planted his fallow fields. But the end-times didn’t come, so he left everything to rot.”

Mathew and Melony and I followed Suelo out of the house and onto the street. He pushed his bike along the paved road until it turned to dirt, leading us to a field nestled between two creeks, a green swath of desert farmland that had survived from pioneer days. Someone had planted all kinds of trees and vines that grew out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye
and good for food. Peach trees. Pear trees. Apple trees. Only the serpent and the naked lady were missing.

And there were hundreds of melons, a cornucopia, some tucked green into the rows of thistle and tumbleweed, others already yellow mush swelling in the sun. Suelo cradled a sound one like a baby and thwapped it with his thumb.

“If the thud is too deep, it’s overripe.”

We wandered the rows, tapping and listening.

“Does anyone have a knife?” Melony asked. Suelo had left his on the bike. But no matter. He picked up a melon the size of a pony keg and raised it overhead, then heaved it down. It burst at his feet with a
whump
. He knelt beside it, scooped up the flesh, and lapped it from his palms.

And then, verily, he fed our multitude.

Wordlessly, Mathew and Melony shoveled watermelon into their mouths as the syrup dripped toward their elbows. I buried my face till my nose bumped against rind. We busted melons open, one after another, some putrid, others green, some delectable. It was cool and dry and sunny, and the sandy soil was wet after the first big rain of October. The field was ringed by cottonwoods exploding in yellow, like a million kernels of popcorn. Beyond the trees, the red cliffs bore down, and above them the snowy peaks thrust through a ring of clouds into the blue sky. We all ate and were satisfied. The number of those who ate was four.

“I don’t remember the leaves ever being this yellow,” Suelo said, drying his wrist on his pants. “Too bad all the squash are rotten.”

Looking across the fields, we could see that Mathew and Melony’s house stood just a hundred yards away, a literal stone’s throw from this Eden. It seemed truly mystical how unfindable,
moneyless Suelo had materialized from the ether and led us across the desert, to Melontopia. To the abundance.

Mathew and Melony and I filled our arms with melons, hoarding them like iGadgets we’d liberated from Best Buy after a hurricane. But Suelo chose only a single, small green fruit. He lowered it into his crate and silently pedaled off.

.  .  .

“O
UR WHOLE SOCIETY
is designed so that you have to have money,” Suelo says. “You have to be a part of the capitalist system. It’s illegal to live outside of it.”

He has a point. Our national identity is enmeshed with the idea of private property—our right to it is enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees that we not be deprived of it, any more than of our lives or liberty, “without due process of law.” The flip side of this protection of property holders, however, is a lack of protection for the property-less. And nowhere is this more apparent than with respect to real estate. The American Indian belief that man can no more own land than he can own air or sunlight was quashed with the arrival of Europeans. The ground beneath their feet was available for the taking, and over a period of three centuries, white people took it, until the frontier closed around the year 1900, after which all real estate in America was spoken for. The legal supremacy of private
property—a relatively recent human invention—is cemented in the American logic, as indisputable as the laws of physics. If you step off the roof, gravity will pull you to the ground. If you don’t pay the rent, the landlord will evict you. And if you squat in an abandoned building, you are guilty of trespassing.

Even lands set aside for the public do not welcome a man without money. While a company may drill a mine or erect an oil rig on federal property, a citizen is prohibited from building a cabin there. Homesteading has been outlawed for more than a century. Visitors to national forests must vacate their campsites after fourteen days, and often must pay a nightly fee. Living in city parks and on sidewalks is deemed vagrancy and banned in most places. The punishment for sleeping in an unused public space that requires little upkeep—under a railroad trestle, or along a river—is often to sleep in an expensive jail built with tax dollars.

Suelo has defied these laws. His primary residence is the canyons near Arches National Park, where he has lived in a dozen caves tucked into sandstone nooks. In the fall of 2002, two years after quitting money, he homesteaded a majestic alcove high on a cliff, two hundred feet across and fifty feet tall. Its sculpted mouth was windblown into smooth symmetry. Sitting inside and gazing into the gorge below felt like heralding himself to the world from inside the bell of a trumpet.

Suelo’s grotto was a two-hour walk from pavement, and believing he was unlikely to be disturbed, he settled in for the long haul. He chipped at the rocky ground to create a wide, flat bed, and lined it with tarps and pads and sleeping bags that had been left out with someone else’s trash. He stacked rocks to block the wind, and built wood-burning cookstoves from old tin cans. He learned to forage for cactus pods, yucca seeds, wildflowers, and the watercress that
grew in the creek. From dumpsters he stockpiled dry goods like rice and beans and flour, and sealed them in plastic buckets. He drank from springs, bathed in the creek. He washed his clothing by weighting it overnight with a river rock, dried it on the hot sandstone. He arranged on stone slabs a library of books. From a chunk of talus he carved a statue, a ponderous head like some monolith from Easter Island.

In warm months the cave attracted occasional hikers, and when Suelo was away, he left a note.
Feel free to camp here. What’s mine is yours. Eat any of my food. Read my books. Take them with you if you’d like.
Visitors left notes in return, saying they were pleased with his caretaking.

Then one day, after several years of peace, a ranger from the Bureau of Land Management arrived to evict him. Suelo had long since violated the fourteen-day limit.

“If I were hiking along here and I saw this camp,” said the ranger, “I’d feel like I wasn’t allowed here, that it was someone else’s space. But this is public land.”

“Are you saying this because you’re paid to say it, or because you really believe it?”

“Well, I do have to keep my personal and my professional opinions separated,” said the ranger. “But you are making a high impact here.”

Suelo said, “Who do you think is making a higher impact on the earth: you or me?”

The ranger wrote a ticket for $120.

“Well, I don’t use money,” Suelo said. “So I can’t pay this.”

Not only did he not use money, he had discarded his passport and driver’s license. He had even discarded his legal surname, Shellabarger, in favor of Suelo, Spanish for “soil.” He chose the
name spontaneously, back in his tree-sitting days in Oregon, when he caught sight of a sticker that said
ALL SOIL IS SACRED.
“Suelo” stuck.

The ranger felt conflicted. He’d spent years chasing vandals and grave robbers through these canyons; he knew that Suelo was not harming the land. In some ways, Suelo was a model steward. The ranger offered to drive him to the next county to see a judge and resolve the citation. The next day, these odd bedfellows, a penniless hobo and a federal law enforcer, climbed into a shimmering government-issue truck and sped across the desert. As they drove, Suelo outlined his philosophy of moneyless living while the ranger explained why he had become a land manager—to stop people from destroying nature. “And then someone like you comes along,” he said, “and I struggle with my conscience.”

They arrived at the courthouse. The judge was a kindly white-haired man. “So you live without money,” he drawled. “This is an honorable thing. But we live in the modern world. We have all these laws for a reason.”

Suelo hears this all the time: that we’re living in different times now, that however noble his values, their practice is obsolete. He even heard it once when he knocked on the door of a Buddhist monastery and asked to spend the night, and a monk informed him that rates began at fifty dollars.

The Buddha himself would have been turned away, Suelo observed.

“We’re living in a different age than the Buddha,” he was told.

But Suelo simply doesn’t accept this distinction. Whether today or two thousand years ago, he believes, public spaces are for the public, and he need not ask permission to occupy one. When
a policeman asks what he’s doing as he hitchhikes into town or pulls a pizza from a dumpster, he says, “Walking in America.”

“It resonates with cops,” Suelo says. “A lot of them are very patriotic, many are veterans, and they understand that every citizen should have the right to walk in this country.”

To the Utah judge casting about for an appropriate sentence, Suelo questioned the purpose of the fourteen-day camping limit. “Does it have anything to do with justice or protecting the environment? No. It’s to keep people like me from existing.” Daniel offered to do jail time or community service.

“I don’t think jail would be appropriate,” said the judge. Like the ranger, the monk, and the many cops who meet Suelo, the judge just didn’t know what to do with someone who refused to abide by one of our culture’s most basic premises—the use of currency as a means of exchange. Finally he said, “Well, what do
you
think you should have to do?”

Suelo suggested service at a shelter for abused women and children. They agreed on twenty hours. Suelo volunteered regularly at the shelter anyway, so the punishment was a bit like sending Brer Rabbit back to the briar patch. And within a few weeks of eviction from his grand manor, he found a new cave, this time a tiny crevice where he would not be discovered.

.  .  .

I
T’S TEMPTING TO
conclude that Suelo’s years in the wilderness have transformed him into a crusader for the earth. During his 2001 stint as a tree sitter, he was exactly that. A year after quitting money, he perched atop an Oregon hemlock for three months, alone most of the time, disregarding threats from the
sheriff and the buzzing saws of loggers. He and his fellow activists saved the grove from being cut down.

And clearly his lifestyle has a lower impact than virtually anybody else’s in America. Without a car or a home to heat and cool, he produces hardly any carbon dioxide. Foraging for wild raspberries and spearfishing salmon has close to zero environmental cost—no production, no transportation. And although food gathered from a dumpster must be grown and processed and shipped, rescuing it from the trash actually prevents the further expenditure of energy to haul and bury that excess in a landfill. Suelo brings into existence no bottles, cans, wrappers, bags, packaging, nor those plastic six-pack rings that you’re supposed to snip up with scissors to save the seabirds. As for the benefits of pitching Coke bottles into the recycling bin—Suelo is the guy pulling those bottles
out
of the bin, using them until they crack, then pitching them back. The carbon footprint of the average American is about twenty tons per year. Suelo’s output is probably closer to that of an Ethiopian—about two hundred pounds, or about one half of 1 percent of an American’s.

“He wants to have the smallest ecological footprint and the largest possible impact at improving the world,” says his best friend, Damian Nash. “His life goal since I met him is to take as little and give as much as possible.”

Yet saving the earth is not Suelo’s primary mission. His energy use before giving up money was already so low that quitting money caused only a negligible decline. And even after his successful tree sit, he questions the value of political action. “I don’t know if it does any good. We’re feeding the roots and pruning the branches—and they flourish more, actually. If we
really want to help, we shouldn’t feed the monster in the first place, and that’s the monetary system.”

.  .  .

S
UELO’S QUEST FOR
free Parking might be easy if he availed himself of government programs or private homeless shelters. But Suelo refuses these charities as by-products of the money system he rejects. Government programs are funded by taxes paid not freely but out of legal obligation. Most shelters are staffed by paid workers who “give” only with the expectation of a check.

Suelo does, however, accept hospitality that is freely given. He has knocked on the door of a Catholic Workers house, a Unitarian church, and a Zen center, and has been offered a place to sleep. He has spent time in a number of communes, including one in Georgia where members weave hammocks to provide income, and another in Oregon where residents grow their own vegetables. In Portland, Oregon, he stays at urban squats populated by anarchists, or in communal homes that welcome transients.