The Man Who Quit Money (7 page)

Rodents notwithstanding, the Utah desert simply does not provide enough food for living off the land. In any case, Suelo would prefer to eat other people’s excess than to harvest additional plants and animals. “I don’t feel good about going in the canyon and hunting when there’s enough food in the dumpster,” he says.

Suelo’s primary source of food, then, is what others have thrown away. Americans send 29 million tons of edibles to the landfill each year—that’s 40 percent of our food. Much of it is over-the-hill produce: brown bananas, moldy berries, bruised apples, and wilted lettuce. But even more is perfectly good food, some still wrapped in plastic, that has merely reached an expiration date. Suelo gathers boxes of cookies, cans of corn, and packages of bacon that hours earlier would have sold at full price. He finds nonperishables like rice and flour and beans. In addition to the dumpsters beside grocery stores, those behind restaurants are often a good bet. Bakeries discard whole loaves at day’s end, and pizza parlors chuck a lot of pies.

One day I set out with Suelo to gather food. Unlike begging, which in America is largely seen as degrading and pathetic, forcing the beggar to reveal his vulnerability to others, dumpster diving is slightly subversive, almost like stealing, a means of surviving by your wits. But success is not as simple as it sounds. Some fast-food chains instruct their employees to soil all throwaways with dishwater to discourage scavengers. And then there’s the question of trespassing. To whom does the garbage belong? The property owner? The collection contractor? Or the public? A bin in an alley allows room for legal interpretation, but many markets keep their trash under lock and key, or sealed away in
a loading bay. The supermarket dumpster we are raiding is inside such a cavernous room; clearly it sits on private property. But Suelo knows from experience that the rolling doors are kept open during business hours. “Just walk in there confidently,” he advises. “Like you have a purpose. Nobody will bat an eye.”

The next thing to know about dumpsters is that, unless they’re full, they’re hard to access. This one is five feet tall, five feet deep, and eight feet wide. We hoist ourselves up and rest our hips on the lip, then lower face-first toward the food, maintaining precarious balance by kicking our legs in the air. It’s a vulnerable position; a gentle nudge behind our knees from a passerby would topple us into the container. What’s more, after sixty seconds of dangling face-first into the heap, the blood is pounding in my ears and temples. We dig through the heap of refuse, heaving vegetables and bread loaves over our shoulder. The smell is sour and treacly. When finished, I pump my legs and push up from a bag of trash until I am upright, then slide back to earth. Some divers choose to climb into the dumpster. Then they can work in stealth and uprightness. However, being inside a trash bin creates its own set of anxieties. No longer are you merely picking trash; now you’re in it. Escape is more difficult. And claustrophobic types fear that someone will walk by and shut the lid.

The bounty is as varied as it is rich. Here’s what Suelo and I harvested that day:

The quality of a dumpster’s loot often reflects the neighborhood. Suelo’s best scavenging was in tony Mill Valley, California, where he and a friend struck gold in the bins behind organic bistros and gourmet boutiques, feasting on lemon-drizzled hummus and roasted pepper panini. “We were eating high on the hog,” he says. “There’s so much good food in Marin County.”

Much of what Suelo eats is simply given to him. Plenty of people invite him to dinner, or ask him to house-sit and help himself to whatever’s in the fridge. He arrives at potlucks with whole loaves of bread and decent-looking fruits and vegetables. When he first quit money, he would often volunteer to work without asking for food in return. But after a couple of episodes in which he wound up dizzy and weak-kneed, he began asking for food in exchange for labor. It’s the closest he comes to actual barter.

And then there are organizations that happily feed Suelo. A nonprofit farm called the Youth Garden Project in Moab holds a monthly “Weed and Feed” where volunteers spend a few hours pulling thistle and bindweed, and then are served a dinner largely from crops grown on the premises. Suelo swings a hoe at Sol Food Farms, a private farm with no paid employees, where a handful of volunteers are reviving an abandoned orchard and
fallow fields with tomatoes and greens and cucumbers. In exchange for their labor, they take a portion of the harvest. I wondered if this wasn’t barter—something Suelo refuses, as it violates the principle of giving without expectation of return. I asked the farm’s owner, Chris Conrad, how he compensated Suelo.

“I tell him to take as much as he wants,” Conrad said with a shrug. “But I don’t even know if he takes it, to be honest. I don’t keep track of that kind of thing.”

The most reliable source of Suelo’s nutrition in recent years was a volunteer-run free meal program that served lunch in a Moab city park 365 days a year. Each day, a rotating crew picked up leftovers from restaurants and school cafeterias, then served a hot meal to whoever came. Over the course of three years, without any government or church sponsorship—without even a permit from the health department—Free Meal served thousands of lunches. Suelo went nearly every day, occasionally staying afterward to wash dishes. It was a pretty festive event: a combination of the grizzled homeless men you’d find at a shelter, along with transient young rock climbers and backpackers, and office workers who stopped by on their lunch break—people who would never visit a food bank. The group’s mission was not merely to feed the hungry, but also to prevent food from being hauled to the landfill, and in the process take the stigma out of eating free food.

“Free Meal is not classist or hand-down like your classic soup kitchen or welfare program,” Suelo has written. “It is hand-across. Folks from all classes and needs and no-needs show up and sit down together for food that would otherwise be thrown out.”

While Suelo appreciated the free food, what really brought him back was the community. “We crave community and friendship, but we want to have our own stuff,” he says. “We don’t want to be
that way but we’re addicted to our own isolation. A lot of it has to do with shyness in our culture. You have to overcome that. When I think about Latin America, there is a communal land tradition. The community goes out and harvests, and everyone works and celebrates and has fun. You can see people crave it here.”

.  .  .

A
T DUSK ON
a cold night, Suelo and Phil, the apprentice and Qigong instructor, strike out in search of bananas. Suelo wears a black hoodie and backpack, with his hat hanging from his neck. A friend who lives on the other side of Moab has captured seventy pounds of bananas from a dumpster and sent word: get them while they last.

The twilight is clear and moonless, the rimrock black against the last pink in the sky. We pass several trash bins that Suelo assesses. “That one usually just has boxes and office papers. I might check it once a month.” A source of perpetual griping among town scavengers is that the largest supermarket keeps refuse under lock and key. There is a single bin in the parking lot, however, where customers occasionally dispose of valuable items. “That’s where I found my Therm-a-Rest, and those binoculars,” Suelo says.

Although Moab is a small town, its sprawling layout is suited to drivers, not pedestrians. We cross the vacant grounds of the high school toward the ribbons of neon along the highway. Suelo and Phil tread silently the empty sidewalk between motels and car dealerships and fast-food outlets. 3.9%
FOR 60 MONTHS OAC.
M
OAB’S BEST DEAL
. K
ITCHENETTES-HBO-GUEST LAUNDRY. 10 LBS BAG OF ICE99¢
. Eighteen-wheelers rumble past, toward the Navajo Nation.

Approaching Pete’s house, we pass a grocery store just closed. We creep down the alley to the loading docks, where electric light
pools on the asphalt. Big machinery whines. I smell the acrid slicks of something sticky seeping across the lot. Suelo and Phil flip open the lids and peer in. The bins are piled high with black garbage bags that they peel open. Suelo pulls out a flat white paper box and sets it on the lid of the adjacent dumpster. The red-and-white flank of a Coca-Cola truck flickers in the dim light.

“Pizza, anyone?”

He retrieves another cheese pizza. He works efficiently in the darkness. He fishes out tubs of ranch dip and a pair of prepared meals in plastic platters from the deli and squints to read the label. “Some kind of spaghetti,” he says. Then, surveying the growing mountain of food, he says, “Is there some sort of box we could put this stuff in?” A sack of bagels. Eight pieces of fried chicken sealed in a plastic sack.

Within five minutes, the men fill two large cardboard cartons, which they cradle as they depart the premises. Next door is a self-storage complex—often a good source for usable items, but tonight we find only windshields. We continue down a residential street.

“Pete’s house is the kind where you don’t have to knock,” Suelo says. Inside the carport beside the recycling bins rises a mountain of food. A network of dumpster divers leaves their excess booty here, a warehouse for their friends to pick over. “A dump-store,” says Daniel, with pleasure. Suelo is all but blind to the various leafy vegetables, cartons of muffins, and whole angel food cakes. He’s come for the bananas. He peels one and munches, and then reaches for another.

Inside the house, a gray-haired woman washes dishes and a fluffy dog greets us. A food dehydrator whirs on the table and the place reeks of bananas. Moments later, Pete himself arrives,
wearing a bike helmet. He has just returned from a ride around the neighborhood on his unicycle. We step back outside and stand around the food. The forecast calls for frost, and we wonder if the bananas will blacken. Daniel stuffs a bunch of bananas and the fried chicken into his backpack. Then he peels one more banana from the box and takes a bite.

“My brother used to call me Bananiel,” he says.

We walk an hour in the dark cold night until we reach the trailhead. From the thicket where Suelo stores his bike, we retrieve three cans of beer. “Somebody—some unknown person—left them in my bike basket,” says Suelo. And from there we pick our way up canyon in the black night.

It is an exaggeration to say that I cannot see my own hand in front of my face. However, I cannot see thorned branches at arm’s length, and after a few whaps in the face, I hold my fist out like a boxer to protect my head. I set down my feet gingerly, not knowing if they will fall on rock, dirt, shrub, or water. Suelo strides quickly over the rugged terrain. We remove our shoes and cross the creek three times.

The next three crossings are narrow. “You can either take off your shoes,” says Suelo, “or do the leap of faith.” With that he carefully inches his way toward the bank, then jumps into the darkness, landing safely on the other side. This method works for me until the final crossing, when I misjudge the terrain and step to my shin in the chilly stream. We put on our shoes and Suelo leads us through a tangle of reeds and brambles in blackness. It occurs to me that over the years he has made this same dark trip hundreds of times.

We arrive at the cave at eleven-thirty, two and a half hours after leaving the banana stash. The temperature has dropped
into the thirties, but I am warm from the walk. We are hungry. Daniel eats a banana, lights the oil lamps, and breaks out the bag of chicken. It’s cold but good, greasy and salty and crunchy like deli fried chicken is. We three sit on the rocks devouring the breasts and thighs. Phil pops open a can of beer.

“I just got a bite that tasted like mold,” Suelo says, holding the bag to the lamp and taking off his glasses to read. “It says it was packaged on the twenty-sixth.”

We consider this revelation. It turns out that learning a chicken’s date of preparation is not useful when nobody knows today’s date. One thing is certain: none of us wants to stop eating. I, for one, haven’t tasted any mold.

“Today couldn’t be later than the twenty-seventh,” Phil says.

“Yeah,” Suelo says, lying back on his bed, propped against a slab of stone. He kicks off his boots and reaches for a second piece of chicken. “I’m sure it’s fine.”

.  .  .

O
NE EVENING IN
2006, watching the sunset from the rock benches in front of his cave, Suelo decided to eat a cactus. He had been eating prickly pear for years, and he didn’t see why a little barrel cactus would be any different. Besides, he had never heard of any cactus being poisonous. Not in North America, anyway. It went against evolutionary logic. The cactus’s needles already protected it from predators: why, biologically, would it need toxins?

Suelo bent down and unearthed the cactus with a pocketknife. He skinned it, careful to shear all the needles, and slurped the whole thing like a kiwi fruit, just like he used to do when hopping trains across the desert, to stay hydrated.

Night was falling. Suelo basked in the warm evening air.

Then his heart started pounding. Faster and faster. His skin got hot. He felt like he was being lowered into a vat of boiling water. The burn spread up his calves to his thighs, over his hips and belly, rising up his neck until his entire head was on fire. His heart thumped. It couldn’t take this.

I’m going to have a heart attack,
Suelo thought.

The nearest hospital was a two-hour walk. He could hardly sit up. He crawled into his cave and lay there.

It wasn’t like he was some clueless rookie out here in the wilderness. He had survived in these canyons for a decade. He couldn’t believe this was happening. He had always talked, in the abstract, about how when it was time for him to go, he’d just lie down and die like a coyote, and surrender his earthly body back to the food chain. But he really didn’t want to die just yet. And although he was not a sentimental man, he thought about his parents, a hundred miles away in Colorado. They loved him despite all he’d rejected of their beliefs. Already they’d lost one son, Rick, taken by a brain tumor at age forty-one. It was for their sake as much as anyone’s that he scribbled his good-bye, which in his memory went something like this: