The Man Who Quit Money (3 page)

Suelo is also welcomed by family, friends, and complete strangers. He has an open invitation to stay with his parents in Grand Junction, Colorado, his brother Doug Shellabarger near Denver, his friend Damian Nash in Moab, and a half-dozen others across the country. Tim Wojtusik, in eastern Oregon, is not surprised when, after no word for months, he wakes to discover his friend camped in the backyard. Suelo has lost count of the times someone picked him up hitchhiking, then brought him home and served him a meal. A Navajo man gave his own bed to Suelo and slept on the couch, then in the morning treated him to breakfast.

Through two decades in Moab, Suelo has developed a reputation as a reliable house sitter. In a town of seasonal workers
who often leave home for months at a time, his services are in high demand. He spent one winter hopping from one house-sit to the next. For a time a friend invited him to stay in a tree house in her backyard, until a neighbor complained.

Even with all the roofs offered, Suelo spends the majority of his nights outdoors. He camps in wilderness, the red rock country around Sedona, Arizona, or the Gila of New Mexico, where he spent a few weeks learning survival skills from a hermit. He and some friends rode bikes from Portland to Wyoming, camping along the road. He has hopped trains all across the country. One summer Suelo colonized an island in the Willamette River in the heart of Portland. He commandeered a piece of plastic dock that had floated downstream, and paddled it to the brambles of the undeveloped island. He carved out a clearing in the thick brush so that he couldn’t be seen from shore. “I had visions of building a cob house,” he says, but that didn’t pan out. He spent another summer in the woods by Mount Tamalpais, just north of San Francisco. He dropped his pack just thirty feet from a trail and lived undetected in the heart of one of the wealthiest zip codes in America. He spent a month camped in a bird refuge on the University of Florida campus in Gainesville. Turns out there are plenty of places to sleep free in America: you just have to know where to look.

These days, in addition to the cave, he maintains a camp within Moab city limits, hidden in a thicket on private property. It looks like a typical homeless squat: torn plastic tarps draped over a tent, pots and dishes scattered in the dirt. One morning, the landowner saw smoke from the fire and came running with a shovel and blanket. He was relieved to find that it was just Suelo, whom he’d known for years. The landowner told him not
to build fires, and while he didn’t exactly grant Suelo permission to stay, he more or less turned a blind eye.

The town camp saves Suelo the two-hour commute to his cave, and sometimes he crashes there after a late night in town. But the truth is, he largely sleeps wherever he chooses to. “I’ve found you can camp anywhere, as long as you’re just a few feet off the pavement,” Suelo says. “People don’t notice you. I’ve slept right beside a police station.”

.  .  .

W
AIT A MINUTE
. isn’t suelo just kidding himself? Is there really any difference between accepting a room in a church and a room in a homeless shelter? And isn’t hitchhiking in a gas-powered automobile or blogging from a library computer evidence that he is just as dependent on money as the rest of us—if not on the green paper itself, then certainly the commerce without which there would be no cars or gasoline or libraries or computers?

Suelo considers these criticisms. He concedes that by using the public library, he is accepting other people’s tax money, and for a while considered stopping the practice, accessing the Internet only at friends’ houses. But ultimately he felt he was splitting hairs a bit too finely. He certainly wasn’t going to stop walking on public roads merely because they were paid for with taxes. Our economic lives are so intertwined that he could never achieve absolute purity. His intention is to give freely what he has without expectation of return, and to accept without obligation that which is freely given by others.

That said, he constantly rethinks and interprets the rules of living without money. After his first couple of months of this experiment, hitchhiking with a friend along the East Coast in 2000, he
complained in an email to friends, “We’ve been trying to live without money, but people slipping massive amounts of it into our pink little hands has raised questions of what we should do. I made a rule: I would get rid of it before sunset, either give it away or spend it, usually on some little treat I didn’t need, like a chocolate bar. But then that sunset rule turned into sunrise.” Finally he decided not to spend the money at all, but rather to give it away.

But a ride in a friend’s car meant using gas that someone was going to have to pay to replace. “Maybe if we just wait here someone will give us gas,” Suelo proposed on one occasion. “Or we’ll find some.” The friend opted to fuel up with his own money.

In the spring of 2001, Suelo had his one major lapse. While staying at a commune in Georgia, wondering how he was going to get back to Utah for a friend’s wedding, a most tempting and confounding piece of mail arrived: a tax return in the amount of five hundred dollars.

“This experiment of having no money is on hold now,” Suelo wrote in a mass email to friends and family. He cashed the check, paid the deposit on a drive-away car, and blasted across America at the wheel of a brand-new, midnight-blue, convertible Mercedes-Benz 600 sports coupe.

“What a kick it is to go from penniless hitchhiker to driving a Mercedes!” he wrote. “I got a deep breath of the southern US all the way to New Mexico, riding most the way with the top down and the wind making me look like a dust mop. On top of that, I get so much pleasure seeing the look on hitch-hikers’ faces when a Mercedes stops for them. And dumpster-diving in a Mercedes is an absolute scream! Everybody should try it. It’s almost as fun as hitching in the back of a pickup. Almost.”

Later that summer he ditched the remainder of the money
“because it felt like a ball and chain,” and has not returned to it since.

.  .  .

O
N A SUNNY
october afternoon, a few days after the watermelon feast, I follow Suelo up the canyon. He wears a plaid shirt and a ranger’s olive-green trousers cut off at the knee—an attractive find in the discards of a national-park town, although a friend who made a similar score was cited for “impersonating a park ranger.” Suelo’s bolero hat completes the outfit. The flat brim and strap make me think of a Peruvian peasant, or a witch doctor. “I found this in the dumpster of the Christian thrift store,” he says. “It was a child’s cowboy hat. So I soaked it and stretched it and flattened it out. Fits perfect. Funny thing about that thrift store—they throw away all the good stuff and try to sell the crap. Anything that’s old and made out of wool, if it has a tiny hole in it, they toss it. But they resell all the cotton T-shirts made in sweatshops.”

Near the trailhead, he hides his bike in a thicket, scooping apples and potatoes from the crate into a threadbare backpack. Suelo has acquired and discarded many bicycles over the years. His current ride, which he has painted with Anasazi petroglyphs and decked with pink plastic flamingos, was a gift from his parents. He maintains it with parts and tools from a volunteer-run bike shop, and pulls used tires and tubes from the trash bins of retail stores. He doesn’t own a lock.

As soon as we leave the asphalt he slips off his sandals, tucks them into the pack, and grips the desert floor barefoot. His feet are leathery and wide and cracked at the heels. He pads along the rocky trail.

The canyon is dizzying. Golden cliffs tower on both sides,
ravens circling on the updrafts. We walk beneath ancient petroglyphs pecked into the rock—bighorn sheep and bigheaded humanoids. Along the base of the walls, the sandy bluffs are dotted with piñon pines and juniper and sagebrush, their trunks gnarled by the baking sun, roots burrowing into the sandstone cracks for a drop of moisture.

At first glance, the country appears uninhabitable. Above the canyon lies a badlands of stone fins and arches and dry gulches that has inspired place-names like Devil’s Garden, Fiery Furnace, and Hell’s Revenge—the kind of landscape in which Hollywood actors stumble upon a human skeleton picked clean by vultures, finger bones clutching a dry canteen. But at the bottom of the canyon, a cool green stream bubbles over the slickrock, carving porcelain bathtubs and plunging over algae-streaked falls into deep, clear swimming holes. Leafy willows and cottonwoods cling to the banks, dropping yellow leaves into the swirl. Beavers have chomped the soft trunks, building lodges and ponds that shimmer in the shady oasis. The air is sweet with the smell of Russian olive trees.

The trail turns to sand, and the grit pours into my shoes, so I follow Suelo’s lead and remove them. At a shallow spot in the canyon, hundreds of small green shoots rise from the sand. “Wild onions,” Suelo says, kneeling and digging away at the tendrils. I dig one, too. “Careful not to pull too hard,” he says, “or it’ll break.” He rummages through his pack for a metal spoon, and digs with that. We each harvest an onion, stripping the fibrous husk from the bulb. “You can eat the whole thing,” he says, curling the green stalk around the white tuber and popping it in his mouth. I do the same. It’s delicious—a sweet, tangy chive.

We drop into the shade and wade across the stream. A raven caws overhead and Suelo caws right back in perfect imitation.
After about an hour, we leave the trail and scramble up a shallow gulch. Suelo hops between rocks, avoiding the sand and grass. “I try not to leave footprints,” he says.

In a shady alcove where black streaks of springwater stain the cliff, we climb a steep talus slope and arrive at his current cave, a spacious twenty-by-twenty cavern with a commanding view of the opposing cliffs and brilliant blue sky. Beside a fire ring, a deflated sleeping pad lies in the dirt, along with a sleeping bag, a few articles of clothing, a guitar, and Suelo’s most recent score: an expensive pair of binoculars. “I found those in a dumpster,” he says with evident delight. “So I decided to become a birder.” So far he has glassed a great blue heron, a hawk, and a pygmy owl.

Suelo drops his pack and carries a scuffed plastic soda bottle down canyon to a rain pool, where he hops across a quicksand bog and crouches to fill the bottle. He harvests handfuls of wild grasses, pine needles, juniper sprigs, and mallow leaves.

“People are always giving me wheatgrass,” he tells me. “And I thought, well, why not use wild grasses? So I’ve been drinking it most every morning. And I’ve been feeling really good.”

He sits cross-legged on a foam pad in the dirt and lights his stove—a blackened number-ten chili can with the lid removed and a hole cut on the side. Into the opening he feeds twigs, until a fire burns inside the can. He sets a pot of water directly on top. Holes poked in the side of the can provide ventilation, and within just a few minutes the water is boiling. Suelo lowers his bundle of wild herbs into the pot and lets them steep.

Between the wilderness approach, the soot-covered cave, and the gray-haired wise man steeping herbs over a flame, a visit with Suelo starts to feel like some Himalayan trek to the guru. And it’s true that conversations with him turn quickly to religion
and philosophy. On this particular trip, Suelo is hosting what you might call an apprentice, a young man from Indiana who has been studying martial arts and Eastern religion for a decade, and after reading about Suelo on the Internet took the Greyhound west to learn moneyless living from the master.

Suelo quickly deflates any perception of himself as a holy man, however. The deeper he gets into philosophy, the more he laughs at himself, averting his eyes when he says something particularly insightful, as if embarrassed to reveal his deeper knowledge. He is chronically forgetful, rubbing his forehead and saying things like “I can’t remember if I went to India before or after I went to Alaska.” He has a disarming habit, when presented with some fact he already knows, of exclaiming, “Oh, yeah!” or “Ahh!” as if he were learning it afresh.

Me: “I read that the Buddha was born a Hindu.”

Suelo: “Oh, yeah! You’re right!”

What’s more, Suelo’s sense of humor is strictly goofball. Upon hearing that a tract of land beside the cemetery is to be developed into houses, he says, “I hear people are just dying to get into that neighborhood!”

While I ask him what he has learned from living without money, he beats back a column of smoke from the second round of tea. I note that he has taken on a certain Oz-like appearance, answering from behind the curtain of smoke. He waves his hands like a sorcerer and intones in a wizardly voice, “Now I have entered the mystical realm!” He busts up at his own joke. “I am a genie in a bottle!”

.  .  .

W
ITH FOUND AND
discarded objects, and a construction budget of zero, Suelo has turned his current cave into a postconsumer
hobo paradise. When he first discovered it, the floor was rocky and uneven, so he hauled buckets of sand to level it. He piled boulders at the mouth to block wind and visibility. He collected discarded pots, pans, bowls, plates, knives, forks, spoons, and spatulas. In a sealed plastic bucket he stored rice, flour, noodles, oatmeal and grains, as well as root vegetables like potatoes and carrots, which can last for months in the dry, cool cave. Now fresh groceries hang from the ceiling in a cotton bag, safe from mice and ringtail cats.

Tucked beneath a north-facing cliff, the cave never gets sun, and even in the daytime it is chilly. As darkness falls, he lights his lamps. While Suelo sometimes finds functional flashlights, the batteries eventually die. Oil lamps arranged on small rock ledges around the cave are a more reliable light source. To make one he simply fills a glass jar with vegetable oil, then inserts a short length of cotton cord into a wine cork, which floats on top. A tinfoil barrier keeps the cork from catching fire, and the wick burns for days.

That night I unroll my bag across the fire ring from Suelo and, gazing out the cave and up at the bright silent stars, quickly fall asleep. When I awake just after dawn, Suelo is sitting cross-legged on his pad with his sleeping bag draped over his shoulders. He sits perfectly still facing the canyon as the sun creeps down the far walls. Then he lies back down and sleeps awhile longer.