The Man Who Quit Money Read online

  The

  Man Who

  Quit

  Money

  Also By Mark Sundeen

  Car Camping

  The Making of Toro

  North by Northwestern

  (with Captain Sig Hansen)

  The

  Man Who

  Quit

  Money

  . . .

  MARK SUNDEEN

  Riverhead Books

  New York

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Copyright © 2012 by Mark Sundeen

  Book design by Tiffany Estreicher

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  First Riverhead trade paperback edition: March 2012

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sundeen, Mark, date.

  The man who quit money / Mark Sundeen.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-56085-3

  1. Suelo, Daniel. 2. Self-reliant living United States. 3. Alternative lifestyles—United

  States. 4. Money—Social aspects. 5. Simplicity. I. Title.

  CT275.S87445S86 2011

  332.4’9792092—dc23

  [B]

  2011049882

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Cedar,

  who gave me the kernels anyway

  Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in the barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them… Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?

  —Jesus

  Let us live happily, then, though we call nothing our own! We shall be like the bright gods, feeding on happiness!

  —Buddha

  Home is anywhere I’m living, if it’s sleeping on some vacant bench in City Square.

  —Merle Haggard

  Table Of Contents

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Part Two

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Part Three

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Part One

  1

  . . .

  IN THE FIRST year of the twenty-first century, a man standing by a highway in the middle of America pulled from his pocket his life savings—thirty dollars—laid it inside a phone booth, and walked away. He was thirty-nine years old, came from a good family, and had been to college. He was not mentally ill, nor an addict. His decision appears to have been an act of free will by a competent adult.

  In the twelve years since, as the Dow Jones skyrocketed to its all-time high, Daniel Suelo has not earned, received, or spent a single dollar. In an era when anyone who could sign his name qualified for a mortgage, Suelo did not apply for loans or write IOUs. He didn’t even barter. As the public debt soared to eight, ten, finally thirteen trillion dollars, he did not pay taxes, or accept food stamps, welfare, or any other form of government handout.

  Instead he set up house in caves in the Utah canyonlands, where he forages mulberries and wild onions, scavenges roadkill raccoons and squirrels, pulls expired groceries from dumpsters, and is often fed by friends and strangers. “My philosophy is to use only what is freely given or discarded & what is already present & already running,” he writes. While the rest of us grapple with tax deductions, variable-rate mortgages, retirement plans, and money-market accounts, Suelo no longer holds so much as an identification card.

  Yet the man who sleeps under bridges and prospects in trash cans is not a typical hobo. He does not panhandle, and he often works—declining payment for his efforts. While he is driven by spiritual beliefs and longings, he is not a monk, nor is he associated with any church. And although he lives in a cave, he is not a hermit: he is relentlessly social, remains close with friends and family, and engages in discussions with strangers via the website he maintains from the public library. He has crisscrossed the West by bicycle, hopped freight trains, hitched through nearly every state in the union, hauled nets on a Bering Sea trawler, harvested mussels and kelp from Pacific beaches, spearfished salmon in Alaska streams, and braved three months of storms atop an ancient hemlock tree.

  “I know it is possible to live with zero money,” Suelo declares. “Abundantly.”

  . . .

  AS IT HAPPENS, I had met Suelo long before he gave up money, in the desert outpost of Moab, Utah, a haven for seekers and dropouts. We ran in the same circle, worked a stint together as cooks, and squatted on public lands, not as a statement against something, but because we didn’t want to pay rent. We had both gone truant from career paths because we were angry about the way the world was, and had no means of changing it. If we couldn’t overthrow the bastards, then at least we wouldn’t enter data in their cubicles and buy junk in their big boxes and make payments on their LandCrunchers. But over the years, we drifted our separate ways, geographically and otherwise.

  By the time I set out to find him again, we hadn’t had a conversation in more than a decade. I had heard of Daniel’s attempt to live without money, and I’d assumed he had simply lost his mind. For my part, I was no longer an itinerant river guide living in my truck on eight thousand a year, but a professional writer now and then passing through town to pull weeds and repair the plumbing at my rental property, a trailer on an acre of tumbleweeds whose market value had tripled in three years, thank you very much. My one connection to the cave dweller was that he had friended me on Facebook.

  I’d seen him once in the intervening years, though. On a visit to Moab, I had glanced at a shaggy gray-haired man across the aisle at the market. We made tentative eye contact. He looked familiar, but could this old guy, gray in the muzzle, with deep lines on his face and pants worn thin, be the Daniel I had cooked with a decade before?

  He smiled at me. The sight of his teeth, dark and crooked, rotting right
there in his mouth—it chilled me. As much as I supported a person’s right to voluntary poverty, here at the height of America’s greatest prosperity, I drew the line at bad teeth. I should not be forced to look at such a sorry mouth. The sight made me ashamed—of my own excellent dental condition, my disposable income, my rental property—as if he had accused me directly. My shame made me mad. It was a free country, I conceded, and Suelo had every right to sleep in the dirt and lasso grasshoppers or whatever, but how dare he sit in judgment of me?

  By now I had recognized my old acquaintance beyond doubt. But I did not take his hand, offer my friendship, ask about his health. I didn’t even say hello. My jaw tightening, I threw him a nod and escaped to my car.

  The truth was, I’d come to like money. In fact, I had always liked it. When I was a boy, I counted and recounted the coins I collected in a tin can, packing pennies and nickels into paper rolls and depositing them at the bank, greatly satisfied as my fortune grew on the passbook. I also liked what money represented, the entire system of trade and credit and saving. As I grew up, money served me well: I started getting paid to do what I wanted, like writing books. Money allowed me to test my wits, to save, to gamble, to win. Even in my days of living in a tent, the act of saving money allowed me more freedom. And now, when I hunted for a used car below Blue Book value, or refinanced my house at a lower rate, I felt like I’d outwitted the system.

  After surviving well into my thirties with only the possessions that could fit inside the bed of a pickup, I began to reap the rewards of my pennies saved and pennies earned. I acquired a second car and a second house (okay, one was that singlewide), contributed to a retirement account, and filed fifty-three pages of tax returns. I possessed six pairs of skis.

  Then came 2008. Twenty trillion dollars in world assets were incinerated by bad mortgages and speculation. The real-estate bubble splattered into foreclosure and bankruptcy, taking down with it the pensions and savings and jobs of millions of people. My paltry retirement account became 50 percent paltrier. Magazines that employed me furloughed staff, or shut down altogether. Budget cuts would eventually eliminate my college teaching job. Suddenly that big monthly payment on my home didn’t seem like money well spent. I could paint all I wanted, but no number of trips to Home Depot would make the house worth what I had paid for it. Those naysayers who forecast that my generation, born in the 1960s and 1970s, would be the first in America’s history to be worse off than their parents: maybe they had a point.

  Suelo meanwhile had gained a little notoriety, thanks to stories in Details magazine and the Denver Post, an interview with the BBC, even the pages of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. His blog and website got tens of thousands of hits. As I pored over the writings he had compiled, from Thomas Jefferson and Socrates and Saint Augustine, I began to think about the choices he had made, bad teeth and all. Here was someone who had said all along what the rest of us were being forced to contemplate for the first time, now that our bubble of prosperity had burst: money was an illusion. “I simply got tired of acknowledging as real this most common worldwide belief called money,” cried this voice in the desert. “I simply got tired of being unreal.”

  Daniel had opted out entirely, rejected what I had pursued. I wondered whether, apart from everything he rejected, there was something he embraced. What was I missing out on? Finally I decided to drive to the Utah desert and find out for myself.

  . . .

  I RETURNED TO Moab. I was staying with friends, a married couple. I had exchanged a few emails with Suelo, but we had failed to make a foolproof plan. Of course he had no phone. And apart from any question of cave etiquette—was it okay to just drop by?—I didn’t know where to locate him in the vast wilderness. I sent an email, then sat back and hoped that he wandered out of the canyon soon, and logged on at the library.

  A day passed. It was fall, and the air was sunny and cool and crisp. I sat on my friends’ porch, sipping a glass of fresh watermelon juice. One of my hosts, Melony (her real name, I swear), considered watermelon a wonder food, filled with antioxidants and electrolytes and vitamins. She swore it had cured her of a five-year illness that no doctor, medication, or allergy panels could solve, and she drank the red potion three times a day, stuffing rinds, seeds, and everything into a blender. But with the harvest over, and both markets in town sold out, she was running low. With winter approaching, she was contemplating doing something desperate, like ordering them on the Internet. Another day passed, and still no word from Suelo.

  And then, as I sat on the porch checking my watch, an apparition appeared. A bicycle was approaching: dark mount, dark rider. Horn-rimmed glasses emerged between gray hair and beard. The rider wore a black felt bolero cinched under his chin, with a stampede strap held snug by a tin brooch. His gaze was forward, serene. Although his legs were clearly pumping, his body gave the impression of utter calm. As he pedaled toward me I made out a plastic crate of apples and oranges lashed to a rear rack. I would not have been surprised had he let go of the handlebars, plucked the fruit from the basket, and begun to juggle.

  I rushed into the street and called, “Daniel!” He slowed to a halt, then turned the bike around and looked at me, puzzled, until I identified myself.

  “Oh, it’s you,” he said.

  For a dude who lives in a cave, Suelo displayed a positively keen sense of style. His trousers were a few inches too long, cuffed with rolls above boxy workman shoes. A plaid flannel over a tight black T-shirt revealed a slice of trim belly above a leather belt. He looked like a cross between a Great Depression hobo and a vagabond French painter—Buster Keaton meets Paul Gauguin.

  Unsure what to do next, I threw my arms around him in a clumsy hug. He smelled like wood smoke. I invited him inside and introduced him to Melony and her husband, Mathew. Melony poured tall glasses of watermelon juice—the last of her cache, she told us.

  Suelo perked up. Above his right eye is a scar that causes the brow to rise in a sharp peak, giving him a perpetual appearance of intense curiosity.

  “Do you know about the melon patch?” he said.

  We didn’t.

  “That field between the creeks,” he said, nodding toward the street. “There’s hundreds of melons over there. Watermelon. Crenshaws. Squash and pumpkins, too. I’ve been eating them for months.”

  “Whose are they?” I said.

  “Some guy.” He shrugged. “After Obama was elected, he thought the whole system would collapse, so he planted his fallow fields. But the end-times didn’t come, so he left everything to rot.”

  Mathew and Melony and I followed Suelo out of the house and onto the street. He pushed his bike along the paved road until it turned to dirt, leading us to a field nestled between two creeks, a green swath of desert farmland that had survived from pioneer days. Someone had planted all kinds of trees and vines that grew out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. Peach trees. Pear trees. Apple trees. Only the serpent and the naked lady were missing.

  And there were hundreds of melons, a cornucopia, some tucked green into the rows of thistle and tumbleweed, others already yellow mush swelling in the sun. Suelo cradled a sound one like a baby and thwapped it with his thumb.

  “If the thud is too deep, it’s overripe.”

  We wandered the rows, tapping and listening.

  “Does anyone have a knife?” Melony asked. Suelo had left his on the bike. But no matter. He picked up a melon the size of a pony keg and raised it overhead, then heaved it down. It burst at his feet with a whump. He knelt beside it, scooped up the flesh, and lapped it from his palms.

  And then, verily, he fed our multitude.

  Wordlessly, Mathew and Melony shoveled watermelon into their mouths as the syrup dripped toward their elbows. I buried my face till my nose bumped against rind. We busted melons open, one after another, some putrid, others green, some delectable. It was cool and dry and sunny, and the sandy soil was wet after the first big rain of October. The field was ringed by
cottonwoods exploding in yellow, like a million kernels of popcorn. Beyond the trees, the red cliffs bore down, and above them the snowy peaks thrust through a ring of clouds into the blue sky. We all ate and were satisfied. The number of those who ate was four.

  “I don’t remember the leaves ever being this yellow,” Suelo said, drying his wrist on his pants. “Too bad all the squash are rotten.”

  Looking across the fields, we could see that Mathew and Melony’s house stood just a hundred yards away, a literal stone’s throw from this Eden. It seemed truly mystical how unfindable, moneyless Suelo had materialized from the ether and led us across the desert, to Melontopia. To the abundance.

  Mathew and Melony and I filled our arms with melons, hoarding them like iGadgets we’d liberated from Best Buy after a hurricane. But Suelo chose only a single, small green fruit. He lowered it into his crate and silently pedaled off.

  2

  . . .

  “OUR WHOLE SOCIETY is designed so that you have to have money,” Suelo says. “You have to be a part of the capitalist system. It’s illegal to live outside of it.”

  He has a point. Our national identity is enmeshed with the idea of private property—our right to it is enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees that we not be deprived of it, any more than of our lives or liberty, “without due process of law.” The flip side of this protection of property holders, however, is a lack of protection for the property-less. And nowhere is this more apparent than with respect to real estate. The American Indian belief that man can no more own land than he can own air or sunlight was quashed with the arrival of Europeans. The ground beneath their feet was available for the taking, and over a period of three centuries, white people took it, until the frontier closed around the year 1900, after which all real estate in America was spoken for. The legal supremacy of private property—a relatively recent human invention—is cemented in the American logic, as indisputable as the laws of physics. If you step off the roof, gravity will pull you to the ground. If you don’t pay the rent, the landlord will evict you. And if you squat in an abandoned building, you are guilty of trespassing.