The Man Who Quit Money Read online

  Even lands set aside for the public do not welcome a man without money. While a company may drill a mine or erect an oil rig on federal property, a citizen is prohibited from building a cabin there. Homesteading has been outlawed for more than a century. Visitors to national forests must vacate their campsites after fourteen days, and often must pay a nightly fee. Living in city parks and on sidewalks is deemed vagrancy and banned in most places. The punishment for sleeping in an unused public space that requires little upkeep—under a railroad trestle, or along a river—is often to sleep in an expensive jail built with tax dollars.

  Suelo has defied these laws. His primary residence is the canyons near Arches National Park, where he has lived in a dozen caves tucked into sandstone nooks. In the fall of 2002, two years after quitting money, he homesteaded a majestic alcove high on a cliff, two hundred feet across and fifty feet tall. Its sculpted mouth was windblown into smooth symmetry. Sitting inside and gazing into the gorge below felt like heralding himself to the world from inside the bell of a trumpet.

  Suelo’s grotto was a two-hour walk from pavement, and believing he was unlikely to be disturbed, he settled in for the long haul. He chipped at the rocky ground to create a wide, flat bed, and lined it with tarps and pads and sleeping bags that had been left out with someone else’s trash. He stacked rocks to block the wind, and built wood-burning cookstoves from old tin cans. He learned to forage for cactus pods, yucca seeds, wildflowers, and the watercress that grew in the creek. From dumpsters he stockpiled dry goods like rice and beans and flour, and sealed them in plastic buckets. He drank from springs, bathed in the creek. He washed his clothing by weighting it overnight with a river rock, dried it on the hot sandstone. He arranged on stone slabs a library of books. From a chunk of talus he carved a statue, a ponderous head like some monolith from Easter Island.

  In warm months the cave attracted occasional hikers, and when Suelo was away, he left a note. Feel free to camp here. What’s mine is yours. Eat any of my food. Read my books. Take them with you if you’d like. Visitors left notes in return, saying they were pleased with his caretaking.

  Then one day, after several years of peace, a ranger from the Bureau of Land Management arrived to evict him. Suelo had long since violated the fourteen-day limit.

  “If I were hiking along here and I saw this camp,” said the ranger, “I’d feel like I wasn’t allowed here, that it was someone else’s space. But this is public land.”

  “Are you saying this because you’re paid to say it, or because you really believe it?”

  “Well, I do have to keep my personal and my professional opinions separated,” said the ranger. “But you are making a high impact here.”

  Suelo said, “Who do you think is making a higher impact on the earth: you or me?”

  The ranger wrote a ticket for $120.

  “Well, I don’t use money,” Suelo said. “So I can’t pay this.”

  Not only did he not use money, he had discarded his passport and driver’s license. He had even discarded his legal surname, Shellabarger, in favor of Suelo, Spanish for “soil.” He chose the name spontaneously, back in his tree-sitting days in Oregon, when he caught sight of a sticker that said ALL SOIL IS SACRED. “Suelo” stuck.

  The ranger felt conflicted. He’d spent years chasing vandals and grave robbers through these canyons; he knew that Suelo was not harming the land. In some ways, Suelo was a model steward. The ranger offered to drive him to the next county to see a judge and resolve the citation. The next day, these odd bedfellows, a penniless hobo and a federal law enforcer, climbed into a shimmering government-issue truck and sped across the desert. As they drove, Suelo outlined his philosophy of moneyless living while the ranger explained why he had become a land manager—to stop people from destroying nature. “And then someone like you comes along,” he said, “and I struggle with my conscience.”

  They arrived at the courthouse. The judge was a kindly white-haired man. “So you live without money,” he drawled. “This is an honorable thing. But we live in the modern world. We have all these laws for a reason.”

  Suelo hears this all the time: that we’re living in different times now, that however noble his values, their practice is obsolete. He even heard it once when he knocked on the door of a Buddhist monastery and asked to spend the night, and a monk informed him that rates began at fifty dollars.

  The Buddha himself would have been turned away, Suelo observed.

  “We’re living in a different age than the Buddha,” he was told.

  But Suelo simply doesn’t accept this distinction. Whether today or two thousand years ago, he believes, public spaces are for the public, and he need not ask permission to occupy one. When a policeman asks what he’s doing as he hitchhikes into town or pulls a pizza from a dumpster, he says, “Walking in America.”

  “It resonates with cops,” Suelo says. “A lot of them are very patriotic, many are veterans, and they understand that every citizen should have the right to walk in this country.”

  To the Utah judge casting about for an appropriate sentence, Suelo questioned the purpose of the fourteen-day camping limit. “Does it have anything to do with justice or protecting the environment? No. It’s to keep people like me from existing.” Daniel offered to do jail time or community service.

  “I don’t think jail would be appropriate,” said the judge. Like the ranger, the monk, and the many cops who meet Suelo, the judge just didn’t know what to do with someone who refused to abide by one of our culture’s most basic premises—the use of currency as a means of exchange. Finally he said, “Well, what do you think you should have to do?”

  Suelo suggested service at a shelter for abused women and children. They agreed on twenty hours. Suelo volunteered regularly at the shelter anyway, so the punishment was a bit like sending Brer Rabbit back to the briar patch. And within a few weeks of eviction from his grand manor, he found a new cave, this time a tiny crevice where he would not be discovered.

  . . .

  IT’S TEMPTING TO conclude that Suelo’s years in the wilderness have transformed him into a crusader for the earth. During his 2001 stint as a tree sitter, he was exactly that. A year after quitting money, he perched atop an Oregon hemlock for three months, alone most of the time, disregarding threats from the sheriff and the buzzing saws of loggers. He and his fellow activists saved the grove from being cut down.

  And clearly his lifestyle has a lower impact than virtually anybody else’s in America. Without a car or a home to heat and cool, he produces hardly any carbon dioxide. Foraging for wild raspberries and spearfishing salmon has close to zero environmental cost—no production, no transportation. And although food gathered from a dumpster must be grown and processed and shipped, rescuing it from the trash actually prevents the further expenditure of energy to haul and bury that excess in a landfill. Suelo brings into existence no bottles, cans, wrappers, bags, packaging, nor those plastic six-pack rings that you’re supposed to snip up with scissors to save the seabirds. As for the benefits of pitching Coke bottles into the recycling bin—Suelo is the guy pulling those bottles out of the bin, using them until they crack, then pitching them back. The carbon footprint of the average American is about twenty tons per year. Suelo’s output is probably closer to that of an Ethiopian—about two hundred pounds, or about one half of 1 percent of an American’s.

  “He wants to have the smallest ecological footprint and the largest possible impact at improving the world,” says his best friend, Damian Nash. “His life goal since I met him is to take as little and give as much as possible.”

  Yet saving the earth is not Suelo’s primary mission. His energy use before giving up money was already so low that quitting money caused only a negligible decline. And even after his successful tree sit, he questions the value of political action. “I don’t know if it does any good. We’re feeding the roots and pruning the branches—and they flourish more, actually. If we really want to help, we shouldn’t feed the monster in t
he first place, and that’s the monetary system.”

  . . .

  SUELO’S QUEST FOR free Parking might be easy if he availed himself of government programs or private homeless shelters. But Suelo refuses these charities as by-products of the money system he rejects. Government programs are funded by taxes paid not freely but out of legal obligation. Most shelters are staffed by paid workers who “give” only with the expectation of a check.

  Suelo does, however, accept hospitality that is freely given. He has knocked on the door of a Catholic Workers house, a Unitarian church, and a Zen center, and has been offered a place to sleep. He has spent time in a number of communes, including one in Georgia where members weave hammocks to provide income, and another in Oregon where residents grow their own vegetables. In Portland, Oregon, he stays at urban squats populated by anarchists, or in communal homes that welcome transients.

  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.”

  . . .

  WAIT 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.

  . . .

  ON 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 a
sphalt 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.