The Man Who Quit Money (26 page)

It doesn’t matter where I am,
he now knew.
Wherever I am, I’m at home.

. . .

another year is gone
a traveler’s shade on my head,
straw sandals at my feet

—Basho

I
N 1953 A
woman set off on foot from Los Angeles with nothing but a toothbrush and a sheaf of leaflets calling for an end to all war. Dressed in a plain blue tunic with
PEACE PILGRIM
printed on the front, the woman, who would not give her birth name, crisscrossed the country for three decades, walking more than twenty-five thousand miles before she stopped counting. Peace Pilgrim never earned or spent money, relying on people she met for food and shelter. Sometimes she went days without food, and slept by the side of the road.

Those like Suelo who imitate Peace Pilgrim’s most radical version of the simple life generally do so alone or in very small numbers. A German woman named Heidemarie Schwermer has lived without money for fourteen years, and an Irish man named Mark Boyle has been moneyless for two. Suelo traveled for a few months with a band of Jesus Christians who call themselves
a “live-by-faith, work-for-God-not-money Christian community.” Despite the similarities, one would be hard-pressed to argue that a handful of moneyless individuals constitutes a movement.

That said, the spectrum of those who practice voluntary simplicity is wide, and not all do it alone. In 2000—the same year Suelo quit money—a punkrocker calling himself “koala” outlined an emerging anticonsumerist philosophy in a pamphlet titled “Why Freegan?” “If you are an anti-capitalist,” he wrote, “what better way to protest the economy than withdrawing from it and never using money?” The pamphlet offered tips on dumpster diving, shoplifting, squatting, and foraging, and concluded, “There are two options for existence: 1) waste your life working to get money to buy things that you don’t need and help destroy the environment or 2) live a full satisfying life, occasionally scavenging or working your self-sufficiency skills to get the food and stuff you need to be content, while treading lightly on the earth, eliminating waste, and boycotting everything.”

Freegans, like the WTO protesters of 1999, were reacting to boundless consumption and ecological waste. The website
freegan.info
defines the goal as “a total boycott of an economic system where the profit motive has eclipsed ethical considerations and where massively complex systems of productions ensure that all the products we buy will have detrimental impacts most of which we may never even consider. Thus, instead of avoiding the purchase of products from one bad company only to support another, we avoid buying anything to the greatest degree we are able.”

By decade’s end, the ethos had gained enough adherents to be identified as a movement, particularly in coastal cities like San Francisco, Portland, and New York. Freegans are the latest in a
tradition of radical simplicity dating back to the Shaker colonies of the eighteenth century and to Thoreau and the Transcendentalists in the nineteenth century. Its modern practitioners vary widely. In the 1940s, a band of nude long-haired young men known as Nature Boys roamed the canyons of Southern California, sunbathing, sitting in lotus, and browsing raw fruits and vegetables. In the 1960s, a San Francisco anarchist group called the Diggers—they took their name from the seventeenth-century radical communitarians—opened free stores and gave away food and medicine. Each year since 1972, busloads of hippies have congregated on public lands for Rainbow Gatherings, weeklong spiritual and artistic celebrations in which the exchange of money is forbidden. Abbie Hoffman’s 1970 manifesto,
Steal
This Book,
preached revolution through free food, housing, and transportation: “In a country such as Amerika, there is bound to be a hell-of-a-lot of food lying around just waiting to be ripped off.” In 1981, a band of antinuclear protesters collected and served vegetarian food at a protest in Harvard Square beneath a banner demanding
FOOD NOT BOMBS.
The loosely affiliated group has since disseminated the message—and the meals—worldwide.

In 2007, a young man named Brer Erschadi hitched into Moab. A native of Oklahoma, he had cooked and served at Houston’s Food Not Bombs, and thought Moab was ripe for something similar. By then Conrad Sorenson’s freewheeling food co-op had folded, replaced by a retail food store, and the town lacked an off-market food source. Working with his new girlfriend, Heila Habibi, Erschadi rode his bike around to restaurants, asking for leftover food.

“What group are you with?” they asked, raising an eyebrow at this lanky bearded fellow with size-fourteen shoes towing a
wooden cart behind his junker. When he replied that he was working on his own, he got mostly slammed doors. “We asked for donations from churches but no church would help us,” he says today. “Didn’t want us in their kitchen.”

Brer and Heila were not easily discouraged. “Our first free meal was straight out of the dumpster,” he says. On a spring day in 2008, he and Heila hauled their grub back to the shack they shared with five other people and began cooking. There was a sense of urgency—the place didn’t even have a fridge, and the food was already ripe. They cooked up a pot of soup and tossed a salad. Then they loaded up the bike carts and rode to the corner of Main and Center and commandeered the sidewalk.

“We didn’t have tables or chairs or cars,” he remembers. “We set the pots on concrete. Twelve people came. It was really fun and inspired.”

Tourists and passersby looked on with curiosity at the ragged band of bean-eaters. Those in attendance were rock climbers and transient kids. Erschadi is as handsome as a movie star, and with his flecks of gray hair and the gangly body of a teenager, it’s hard to determine his age. Heila is also a stunning beauty, and has the same black hair and olive skin as Brer—both of their fathers were born in Tehran. Parked on a sidewalk in rural Utah, they were downright exotic. A cop asked some questions, but as soon as he found they weren’t charging money, he backed off. “He had a bowl of potatoes with us and went on his way,” says Erschadi, who had been hassled by plenty of Houston cops at Food Not Bombs.

“I was actually aching for a confrontation,” he admits now. “I was pretty angry at the time. I wanted to unload on someone.”

He would get his chance. The first meal was a success, and they made it a regular gig, collecting more cooks and dumpster divers
and regular diners. Then one day the health inspector asked to see their permit. Erschadi announced that he didn’t need a permit because he was merely having a potluck. The inspector insisted.

“If I have two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches in my backpack,” said Erschadi, “and go on a hike and want to give one to my girlfriend, do I need to get your fucking permission?”

The health inspector decided not to push his case with a crew of irate anarchists. “He told me I had to call some number and apply for such and such permit,” says Erschadi. “But I never did.”

When Brer and Heila had a baby, a firefighter named August Brooks took over Free Meal. His connections to civic leadership brought new legitimacy. Restaurants and even the school cafeterias donated food. Throughout 2009 and 2010, volunteers collected and served a meal every single day, rain or shine or snow.

Free Meal was revolutionary in its simplicity. All the food that would otherwise crowd the landfill instead ended up in people’s bellies. No one was turned away. No money changed hands. The food varied day to day from marginal (elementary school cafeteria pork and beans) to passable (day-old pizza) to inspired (prime rib and potatoes.) Unlike Food Not Bombs, Free Meal was not vegetarian. They would eat anything, as long as it had been discarded and was headed for the landfill. The program accepted no cash donations and no purchased food.

“People think this is a soup kitchen, but it’s not,” August Brooks says. “This is about getting people from all walks of life together.”

Indeed, what sounds radical on paper felt more like a picnic: a friendly gathering of all sorts of people, from homeless drifters to nine-to-fivers on their lunch breaks. The unintended consequence of choosing not to eat one’s
own
food, in home or office
or restaurant, was the fellowship of sharing a meal with strangers, of making new friends.

“People get a meal out of it, but that’s not why they come,” says Suelo. “They’re craving a social interaction that’s just gone from most of our society. It feels like real community.”

I agree. I had found that as I gained some semblance of financial independence, I’d begun to miss the community I’d created when I had less. Throughout my twenties, my goals were minimal consumption and maximum freedom. I worked part-time seasonal jobs and spent the rest of the year traveling and writing. I earned so little money that I hardly paid taxes. All of my possessions fit inside a truck. I lived communally, not exactly by choice, but because I couldn’t afford my own place. During guiding season, I camped out for weeks at a time with teenagers, only to return for days off at a crusty staff house where, if I wasn’t lucky enough to score a bunk, I unrolled my sleeping bag on the floor.

I loved this life. But as the years rolled on, I found myself yearning for my own space. When I was thirty-five I finally got it: I bought a small house on a tree-lined street where, for the first time, the room where I wrote was not the same as the one in which I slept. Although I lacked collateral and income, I qualified for a loan at low interest. I worked from home, no longer forced to leave my castle to earn money.

The costs of living the dream, however, were great, and I don’t just mean the mortgage, property tax, home insurance, utility bills, health insurance, and retirement savings. I lost the freedom I’d had to stop paying rent and spend a few months in the truck. But the most surprising by-product of my economic independence was this: I was lonely. I became restless and
anxious. I yearned for the inconveniences of having to put up with other people.

Study after study shows that the accumulation of wealth and goods is accompanied by a decrease in happiness. And so it’s no surprise that in the boom decades, the spectrum of those drawn, like me, toward a simpler life has widened. The ideas put into radical practice by Suelo have also seeped into the mainstream. Amid the decade’s economic convulsions, you didn’t have to be an anticapitalist to surmise that the system wasn’t working. In 2001, the dot-com bubble segued into the real-estate bubble, and easy credit enabled more buying while masking the financial risk. Between 2005 and 2009, publishers brought out no fewer than four books with the title
Affluenza
—defined in a PBS documentary as the “epidemic of overconsumption.” Other alarming titles included
The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need
(1999),
The High Price of Materialism
(2002), and
Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture
(2005).

At the same time Americans began to think more critically about the things they were buying. Bin Laden’s attacks made it harder to ignore how America’s dependence on oil financed the very regimes and ideologies that sought to destroy us. Decades of human-caused ecological catastrophes—the Exxon
Valdez
oil spill, the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, depletion of the ocean fisheries, deforestation of the Amazon—had revealed that the ultimate costs of food and energy were much higher than their bargain price at the register. The devastating effects of our fossil-fuel binge leaped to the international forefront in 2006 when Al Gore’s
An Inconvenient Truth
became a box-office smash and won him a Nobel Peace Prize. Even those disinclined toward guilt over getting ten miles to the gallon, when faced with a hundred-dollar
tank of gas and the forecasted depletion of the earth’s petroleum, wondered if there was a better use of their money. Annie Leonard’s 2007 documentary film,
The Story of Stuff,
voiced anticonsumerist ideas in language and cartoons so unthreatening that it has been played to countless school groups, translated into fifteen languages, and viewed by 12 million people.

Those still unconvinced that our freewheeling system of commerce had led us astray were stirred to outrage in 2008. When the dust of the subprime mortgage derby settled, we learned that the captains of finance had bet the neighbor’s farm on Endless Boom, but hedged with a personal wager on Inevitable Bust. The fortunes of financiers survived intact while middle-class investors and working-class pensioners were left with a pocketful of stubs. By 2010, the income gap was more severe than ever, with 1 percent of Americans owning 24 percent of the wealth, up from 18 percent in 1915. “Economically speaking, the richest nation on earth is starting to resemble a banana republic,” Timothy Noah wrote in
Slate
. Ten years after koala’s call to arms against the “all-oppressive dollar,” no less staid a publication than
The New Yorker
conceded, “Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless.”

But what could a concerned citizen do? Upset as I was about a drift of plastic the size of Texas swirling at sea, I was mired in my own web of noxious entanglements. I wasn’t going to go live in a cave about it. But selectively opting out of the money system isn’t easy: if you’re in for a dime, you’re in for a dollar. Like many Americans, I am upset that the government seizes a portion of my income to squander on purposes I regard as immoral. For me, the sticking point is the war in Iraq; for others is might be publicly funded abortions or teaching Darwin in public schools. I
deployed my legal means of democratic participation—voting, writing letters to Congress, walking in peaceful protest—without result. I resolved to withhold federal income tax, even ready, like Thoreau, to spend a night in jail. But consequences for such civil disobedience have increased by Draconian orders of magnitude since the 1840s: instead of a sleepover in the village clink, Uncle Sam would confiscate my home, fine me one hundred grand, and lock me in prison for five years. This was a sacrifice I was unwilling to make. Regardless of who I voted for, or what slogans I affixed to my bumper, if I paid taxes, I was a supporter of the war. Many people feel this powerlessness in their search for a simple, moral life this side of the wilderness and the jail.