The Man Who Quit Money (8 page)

How long would it take someone to find his body? He had plenty of friends in town, but they never came looking for him. Daniel arrived in town when he arrived, he left when he left.
Nobody really knew where he was. When would someone start to miss him? And who would find him first? Probably the ravens, and then the coyotes. Or maybe the ringtail. The ringtails loved to eat meat.

So really there was some justice. Ever since he’d given up money, certain people had called him a freeloader, a parasite. (As one comment-thread malapropist put it: “Do you Believe you are smooching off others?”) They demanded to know what he was giving back. To which Suelo asked, Who says you need to give something back? What does a raven give? What does a barnacle give, or a coyote? In his view, every living thing gave plenty, merely by existing. But from a strictly materialistic view, his critics had an excellent point. A raven contributes nothing, except of course his own corpse, which will feed some other being. Now Suelo was dying, and he offered his body to the ravens, the coyotes, the ringtails, the mice, the ants.

Through the night he writhed and spat and prepared for death. Hours slipped away, but he was not aware of their passing. He knew only that he hadn’t died—yet. And then, as the canyon rim appeared in silhouette against the gray sky of morning, he felt a swelling in his gut. Suelo hadn’t vomited in twenty years, since battling dysentery in Ecuador, where he’d trained himself to plug all his orifices during all-day bus rides on bumpy mountain roads. But now he groped his way out of the cave, and there on the cobble below, heaved a torrent of green sludge. The beast was exorcised.

Tears in his eyes, Suelo began to grin, then laugh. The burning in his body was washed away by a cool wave of bliss. He wasn’t going to die after all. He was alive!

…

S
UELO LAUGHS AGAIN
when he tells the story of his near death by cactus. But it raises the question of his health, especially as he ages; Suelo recently turned fifty. Medical care is expensive and difficult to obtain even for those of us with money. Food and shelter come easy by comparison.

“He’s in a dangerous position,” his father says. “In old age we won’t be here. Things get tougher. He don’t have any means of support.”

Like a quarter of all Americans, Suelo lacks health insurance. He does not get Medicare. He does not have a regular doctor or dentist. Nonetheless, he is by all appearances in excellent health—far better than most people his age. He’s lean and muscular, without a ripple of fat. He hadn’t been sick in years when I met up with him. He can walk fifteen miles a day without fatigue. Basic tasks like packing food into the canyon or hauling buckets of water from the creek require and build muscle tone.

That said, Suelo doesn’t perform anything that looks like exercise. He does not belong to a gym. He doesn’t jog. Despite living in the outdoor sports capital of the world, he doesn’t mountain bike or rock climb or kayak or ski. After meeting Melony Gilles, the watermelon eater, Suelo began attending her free yoga classes. (He arrived in rolled-up jeans and a dress shirt, but removed his hat for the postures.)

One reason for his good health is his fairly nutritious diet. Before quitting money, he had experimented with vegetarian and vegan and raw and organic diets, but these days he eats pretty much what he can get. Although the fried chicken and
gummi bears are junk, he also eats plenty of rice and grains and fruit and vegetables. Being a scavenger doesn’t exempt him from the basic dietary issues of our times: Suelo is convinced that he has a mild allergy to wheat and dairy, and after feasting on donuts or pizza, he complains of feeling drowsy and unfocused.

Suelo takes no pharmaceutical or recreational drugs and drinks very little alcohol. Instead he employs a number of home remedies to keep healthy. His friend Dr. Michael Friedman, a naturopathic M.D., thinks Suelo has probably contracted giardia, a water-borne parasite, from drinking out of wild streams—a common affliction in North America that causes diarrhea and stomach pain. Suelo follows the naturopathic principle of using the most natural, least invasive, and least toxic treatments available. He has found that swallowing a small portion of pine sap is a good cure for gastrointestinal distress.

One time while Dr. Friedman was camping with him in the canyon, they began discussing the medicinal properties of bee venom, said to contain an anti-inflammatory one hundred times more powerful than hydrocortisone. Some believe that it relieves arthritis, as well as the symptoms of multiple sclerosis. Suelo had been suffering joint pain of late. He and the doctor pondered the best way to experiment. Finally they decided to keep it simple. The two men marched up to a nearby hive and let the bees sting them. “It feels better already,” Suelo reported, admiring his welts. He reported moderate pain relief, but did not repeat the treatment.

To the subject of eyeglasses, Suelo has devoted a few pixels in the Frequently Asked Questions section of his website:

But the bane of Suelo’s moneyless existence is dentistry. “I have gotten a couple cavities the past decade because I’ve eaten too many sweets,” he writes. “Okay, I must be honest and say that teeth and mosquitoes are two things that get me to question the perfection of nature.”

The remedy? Pine pitch—the same wonder sap from piñons that eases his intestines. Suelo claims that it is both a protectant and antiseptic, and he swears by packing the stuff directly into his teeth. “The summer I worked on the fishing boat I slacked in packing my first cavity in a molar and it grew until the pain was excruciating for about a day. I found my pinyon pitch and packed it again, and the pain vanished. But by that time the cavity was pretty deep, and half my tooth eventually broke off (without pain). I still have half a molar. Another tooth recently developed a cavity, which I’ve also been packing with pitch. It hasn’t been hurting me.”

I eventually learned that the poor condition of Suelo’s teeth was not, as I had assumed, the result of living without money. Neither for that matter were they actually rotting. In fact he broke his two front teeth in a go-cart accident that occurred while he still had a job and a home. The reason he was unable to repair them was that, like many of us, he lacked dental insurance. In 2010, after years of suffering, Suelo got his teeth fixed. A friend of his parents, a member of their church who had traveled to the Third World to volunteer his services, offered to give Suelo fillings. “I’m not opposed to medical services if a doctor was willing to provide them voluntarily,” Suelo says. “Then I would take them. I don’t like a lot of organized do-goodism. The idea is take what’s voluntarily given—and the people giving it aren’t doing it because they’re getting paid.”

There was one time when Suelo did, in fact, accept medical help that was not given freely. Visiting his brother Doug in 2004 and helping build shelves, he gashed his thumb to the bone on a shattered jar of screws. Suelo was fairly certain that he could give himself sutures, but his sister-in-law insisted on taking him to the emergency room. The doc cleaned the wound and stitched it up, and sent Daniel on his way. The bill: a thousand bucks.

Suelo was not willing to just ignore the charge—at the root of his forsaking money is the desire to avoid debt. So he went back to the women’s shelter in Moab where he volunteered, and asked if they would tally his hours, as if he were an employee, and cut a check directly to the hospital. After he had worked off about four hundred dollars of the bill, Suelo wrote to the hospital, asking if they thought it was ethical to charge one thousand dollars for seven stitches. The bills stopped coming.

.  .  .

I
T’S ONE THING
to forsake material goods like food and a home, or privileges like driving a car or flying on an airplane, but I wondered how far Suelo would take it. Would he get sick and die rather than compromise?

In the time I spent with him, Suelo caught a nasty flu that put him out of commission for a few days, but recovered without any medicine. Yet he is visibly aging. One night as we played a board game, he held the parts to within inches of his nearsighted eyes, complained that he was drowsy and “out of it,” and finally excused himself to pedal back to camp and go to sleep early. As he gets older, if a mountain lion doesn’t get him first, he’ll begin to suffer the frailties of old age.

Sitting across the table from him in a conference room in the Moab library that we’d claimed as our own, I asked Suelo if he would rather die than get a five-dollar vaccination, or pay for a hundred-dollar hospital visit that could save his life.

“Yeah, I guess I’d be willing to die,” he said. “If I broke my leg out in the wilderness, I feel it’s natural selection. We all gotta die sooner or later anyway. And what makes one way of death worse than another? Is it really worse to die from a broken leg in a canyon than dying a few years later with tubes in my arm in a hospital, or extending my life—”

I interrupted. “If you fall off a cliff in the canyons and the ravens get you, that’s kind of a romantic ideal. But what if you break your leg and don’t die, and are hobbling around on crutches, and then you get gangrene? There are other ways to die that are pretty easily cured with modern technology. It’s not
like the only two ways to die are five years in a hospital bed or the instant death of falling off a cliff and breaking your neck.”

Suelo was quiet a while, thinking about this.

“I guess that’s where what people might call the superstitious, the religious part, comes in,” he said. “If we’re following our path, then
worrying
about what could or should happen is a worse illness than what could or should happen. And it’s more likely we’re going to be out of balance if we worry. The idea is that the future will take care of itself if we remain in the present. I really don’t know what I’ll do and I don’t think about it that much. Some might call that irresponsible. But that’s part of the path I’m on.”

.  .  .

I
N THE FALL
of 1981, the first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Daniel Shellabarger neatly epitomized the conservative backlash sweeping the nation. He was clean-shaven and close-shorn. He wore white T-shirts and collared polos and crisp Levi’s hiked to his belly button. Upon arriving at the University of Colorado at Boulder, he made a beeline for the fundamentalist Campus Crusade for Christ. In his first trip to the polls, he voted for Reagan. He had read a book by Soviet premier Brezhnev, and had learned that Communist agents were actively infiltrating every public institution in America, from its universities to the halls of Congress. He wrote an opinion piece for the campus paper on the subject. Watch your back, he warned. They’re everywhere.

But for a young fundamentalist wading into scientific and ascetic currents, there was no better place to plunge into mysticism than Boulder, Colorado. The city was a vortex for wayfarers,
the convergence of hundreds of alternative paths, from the Rocky Mountain Spiritual Emergence Network to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Tibetan Buddhist Naropa Institute, on down the line to every manner of past-life regression, crystal healing, chart reading, psychic reprogramming, energy alignment, and planetary ascension. In a place the
New York Times
called the “New Age’s Athens,” a quarter of the residents had “undergone some type of New Age training.” So pervasive was the anything-goes vibe that when in 1978 an egg-shaped spacecraft from the planet Ork landed on the college football field, the only thing the visiting alien had to do to assimilate was don a wacky pair of rainbow suspenders. In addition to launching the career of Robin Williams and adding “shazbot” to the lexicon, ABC’s hit show
Mork & Mindy
introduced Boulder to the rest of the nation as a singularly far-out kind of town.

Orkan-like as Suelo was in this landscape, the place exerted a gravitational pull on him even as he parroted the beliefs of his parents. The Boulder campus, with its ivy-covered brick buildings and shaded lawns, was the quintessential academy, a place to discover life’s truths. Soon he had made a circle of friends that included liberals, dreamers, agnostics, and drinkers. Daniel and his roommate—a lapsed Christian—stayed up late with them debating the existence of God, the meaning of love, the purpose of life. The conservatives at Campus Crusade seemed staid and incurious by comparison. He switched to Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, a collection of mainline denominations that was more progressive. “I didn’t realize people could be Democrats and Christians at the same time,” he says. Meanwhile he dropped his ambition of medical school and immersed himself in world religion, reading holy Scriptures of the faiths he’d been
taught were pagan: Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Taoism. He made it his mission to visit a different church each week: Catholic, Pentecostal, Unitarian, Baptist, even a synagogue.

He continued to study the Bible, researching and beginning to articulate an interpretation that would consume his imagination in the short term and alter his beliefs thereafter. Daniel had always considered Christianity a male-dominated religion, with both the Lord and the Messiah taking male form. But as he studied the Old Testament’s Book of Proverbs—King Solomon’s exhortation to his people to embrace wisdom—he puzzled over the fact that wisdom was not merely an abstract concept. Wisdom was personified—as a woman: “Wisdom calls aloud in the street, she raises her voice in the public squares.” Daniel traced this conundrum backward and forward in both testaments, examining all references to women, from Ruth to Mother Mary to Mary Magdalene, to Babylon the Whore, to the New Jerusalem, Jesus’s millennial bride in the Book of Revelation. Proverbs 30 had always perplexed him: