The Man Who Quit Money (29 page)

I asked Mahan if he felt responsible for Daniel’s way of life. Had he filled a young student’s head with lofty ideas about giving up ambition and money, not meaning them to be taken so literally?

“I’m actually embarrassed that Daniel is so much more intentional about it than me!” he said with a laugh. “I never envisioned anyone being quite that radical.” More soberly, he reflected, “It is for all of us to answer, why we question the Dans in the world.”

.  .  .

A
S
D
ANIEL AND
I drove up Mount Evans, we encountered a bicycle race to its summit. Car traffic crawled behind the cyclists. We pulled off to wait for the traffic to thin. Fifteen minutes later we resumed driving. We figured we’d catch the line of vehicles soon, but after five miles we still hadn’t seen another car.

“Maybe they all decided to drive off the cliff,” Suelo said.

Suelo will admit that he’s never totally outgrown the evangelical streak instilled in him by his parents. He thinks others will benefit from what he has learned, so he doesn’t hesitate to talk about it. “Is it a bad thing to want to change someone? Is just talking to someone an influence? Should I zip my mouth and not speak?”

Moreover, he’s come to recognize the power of belief to effect change, even if no one religion has a monopoly on the truth. By studying Gandhi and Martin Luther King, he believes that the most effective social movements are those with a spiritual center. “It took me years to get beyond my antagonism against religion, which appears more destructive than constructive, until I saw at its core the paradox, the power of change, like a Trojan horse within the walls of commercial civilization,” he says.

Wherever they are and whatever they believe, Suelo tries to reach the people he thinks really need his message. It can be a tricky balancing act. Secular leftists are attracted to his moneyless
message; they already despise banks and corporations, and believe that greed is the root of most of the world’s problems. But they are generally not receptive to religious overtures. Suelo gets along just fine with freegan anarchists in the streets of Portland—until he drops the J-bomb. Broadly speaking, punkrockers think Christianity is the problem, not the solution.

“When I’m up in Portland, people don’t understand that rural America is fundamentalist,” he says. “There’s a whole population of Americans that won’t budge an inch unless we speak their language. That’s why I’ve chosen to stick with religious language.”

Take a look at the comments on Suelo’s blog, and you’ll see what he means. Most of his harshest critics are fundamentalists, quoting Scripture in their attempts to convince Suelo to repent and return to the flock. Suelo, of course, can quote Scripture right back at them.

“When I was a kid I thought I’d be a missionary to the heathens, but now I think maybe it’s okay to be a missionary, but to the Christians, because they’re the ones who need it, because they don’t believe their own religion.”

By that, he means that most devout Christians have become so obsessed with theology—with Jesus’s Second Coming and with preparing their souls for the afterlife—that they’ve stopped following His most basic teachings about loving your enemy, turning the other cheek, and blessing the meek. He thinks his path might illuminate the way for dissatisfied Christians.

“I decided to walk away from fundamentalism, even with the threat of eternal hell looming over my head,” he wrote in a 2010 comment thread, debating some readers. “Walking away from
the vise-grip of fundamentalism isn’t easy, so, please, you nonfundamentalists, have compassion on fundamentalists. I went through years of intense depression.

“Then I found my liberation. I resigned myself to hell. Yes. I decided I’d rather be in hell with Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Vivekananda, Ramakrishna, Mother Teresa, Buddha, Kabir, Rumi, Peace Pilgrim and, yes, with Jesus Himself, than to be in heaven with the torturous fundamentalist mentality that thinks itself right and everybody else wrong. I decided I’d rather be in hell for love than to be in heaven for bigotry.”

Suelo’s ultimate goal is not to change a policy or repeal a law, but to live his beliefs. He found the material world a living hell, and when he tried to end his life, he was given the opportunity to start over, and live a spiritual life instead.

High up on the road to the summit of Mount Evans, we found a tiny pullout and parked. We descended the steep slope to the site of Daniel’s wreck. Twenty years had passed, and though he had returned to the site a few years afterward, he now had some trouble identifying the exact spot. It was midsummer, but the flanks of the mountain were wrapped in cold cloud. We squeezed between white granite blocks, climbing with our hands over boulders, all the while eyeing the green lake far below. A patch of gray snow shivered in the ravine. Yellow and white wildflowers dotted the slope, along with bunches of grass with purple buds, and tufts of spiny-leaved plants.

“Nettles,” Daniel said. “You can eat those.”

We surveyed the narrow ledges of grass between the cliff bands. The air was thin and cold. Our breaths were quick. At fifty, Suelo found himself nervous at such exposed heights. Merely walking along the cliff frightened him, to say nothing
of trying to drive a car off it. “What the fuck was I thinking?” he said.

I asked him how he interpreted his miraculous survival.

“I finally felt the hand of God,” he said with a laugh. “And I hated it.”

If God did intervene—if Suelo did survive the crash for a reason—then it wasn’t the act of a sentimental God who wanted to prevent grief and suffering. The God Suelo believes in carried him up that cliff to put him to work, to dare him to align his actions with his faith, to force him to build heaven where he saw only hell.

We weren’t sure if we had found the ledge. We were hoping for some broken glass, a hubcap—something to prove we were in the right place. But after narrowing it down to two benches, we called it good and ascended the scree toward the road, mounting fridge-sized rocks that wobbled beneath our shoes.

“It seems we have free will, but we don’t,” said Suelo. “It isn’t my choice whether I live or die.”

And that’s where I like to leave Suelo—on the flank of the mountain, climbing that cliff, with or without his free will, striving to find a life worth living. As one philosopher said of the hero Sisyphus and his eternal task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, the struggle toward the heights is itself enough to fill a man’s heart. If God had a purpose for Suelo, then even Suelo could not resist it. Daniel Shellabarger died as modern man driving his car over a cliff, and was reborn as eternal man—without money or possessions, with only his two feet and two hands, trying to climb back to the top. “And where we thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god,” writes Joseph Campbell. “Where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay
ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with the world.”

The struggle itself toward the eternal present is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Suelo happy.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First, I am grateful to Daniel Suelo, who gave me his story freely, in all senses. When Becky Saletan at Riverhead Books first contacted him to gauge his interest in a book, he wrote, “I, of course, couldn’t take a penny or anything else for it, otherwise it would render the whole thing nonsense.” From the outset of the time we worked together, Daniel said that he would withhold nothing, and I believe he kept that promise. He opened his heart, and encouraged the same of his family and friends, who not only answered my questions but often fed me and gave me a place to sleep. I feel especially thankful for getting to know the Shellabarger family: Richard and Laurel, Doug, Ron and Elaine. I must single out the contributions of Tim Frederick, Timothy Wojtusik, and Damian Nash, who handed over troves of Daniel’s personal letters (with his permission) that recaptured so many lost years. Irv Thomas also sent an archive of old emails.
I’d like to thank Conrad Sorenson for lending his rich story to this book.

My friends and neighbors in Moab were invaluable in depicting the town’s personality and charting Suelo’s path through it. They are: Chris Conrad, August Brooks, Andrew Riley, Dorina Krusemer, Linda Whitham, Bill Hedden, Frankling Seal, Brer Erschadi, Rayburn Price, Roberta Ossana, Whitney Rearick, Pete Gross. Special thanks to the ladies of the Youth Garden Project: Jen Sadoff, Rhonda Gotway, and Delite Primus. Critical to piecing together Suelo’s eventful life story were Dawn Larson, Rebecca Mullen, Corinne Pochitaloff, Brian Mahan, Michael Friedman, Randy Kinkel, Kathryn Chindaporn, Satya Vatu, Mel Scully, Ander Olaizola, Tre Arrow, James Ward, Sam Harmon, Logan White, Roy Ramirez, Phillip Maughmer.

It is a truism to say that a book does not come into existence by the mere toil of its author, but nonetheless, the product you hold in your hands is evidence that it takes a village to make a sausage. I am grateful to the writer Christopher Ketchum, without whose fine magazine story on Suelo this book might never have been born. Blaine Honea sent me a Student Bible, which I finally read. Isan Brant contributed the author photo to the cause. Barb and Scott Brant welcomed me to their family and taught me things about faith that I believe will outlast my writing of this volume.

The first people to get an inkling of what I was up to were my students and colleagues in the MFA writing program at Western Connecticut State University, who listened to me read the very first draft in a microphone in a hotel bar in Danbury. Their barrage of questions and loud dissent indicated I was on to something good. I’d like to thank Brian Clements, who for
six years flew me from Montana to teach there, and my fellow writers-in-residence—Paola Corso, Elizabeth Cohen, Dan Pope, Daniel Asa Rose, and Don Snyder. I am also grateful to Sharon Oard Warner and Greg Martin at the University of New Mexico for repeatedly welcoming me back to the Taos Summer Writers Conference.

The people at Riverhead/Penguin not only made this book much better than it otherwise might have been, but revealed enough true enthusiasm for the project to convince me it was a good idea. I am grateful to Elaine Trevorrow, Martin Karlow, Pamela Barricklow, Tamara Arellano, Ashley Fisher-Tranese, Rick Pascocello, Liz Psaltis, Alex Merto, Tiffany Estreicher, Helen Yentus, Caitlin Mulrooney-Lyski, and Craig Burke. Melissa Kahn at 3 Arts Entertainment kept the train on the rails.

I was guided intellectually and aesthetically and emotionally through the writing of this book—as with previous books—by my dear friends Melony Gilles and Mathew Gross, worthy companions for both metaphysical inquiry and whitewater beer drinking.

The earliest readers of this book were Richard and Rosemary Sundeen, former seminarians both, whose breadth of religious and academic know-how made them ideal sounding boards, not to mention fine parents. The manuscript benefitted from the rigorous line edits of Ellen Finnigan (“Poor Mark!”), Elizabeth Hightower Allen (“yeah yeah yeah”), and Erik Bluhm (“It’s Pat!”). I’d also like to thank for reading early drafts and chapters: my brother Rich Sundeen, Stan and Sharon Bluhm, Tim Bluhm, Eric Puchner, Antonya Nelson, Leslie Howes, Ashley Gallagher, and Alissa Johnson.

My agent Richard Abate has stuck with me for more than a
decade. His intellect, loyalty, and friendship debunks the things we provincials are led to believe about New York literary agents. Publisher Geoffrey Kloske deserves credit for more than once unwisely gambling his otherwise good name on me. In an era when book editors are widely assumed to speak only the language of sales charts, tie-ins, and platforms, Becky Saletan showed what perhaps it was like, way back when, when editors brought as much passion and curiosity and creativity as did the authors. In a year filled with trials she returned to this manuscript again and again with insight and care. I am grateful.

Cedar Brant applied the ear of a poet and the wisdom of a pilgrim. Over the course of writing this book she also helped me bury Sadie my dingo, threw me a fortieth birthday party, and agreed to marry me. Love love love.