The Man Who Quit Money Page 3

  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!”

  . . .

  WITH 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.

  After morning tea we move out of the cave onto the sunny rock ledges where Phil, the apprentice, leads a session of Qigong, a meditative Chinese martial art. We cycle through such postures as Embracing the Tree and Catching the Ball. With sunlight pouring over the rim and wrens singing, the moment swells toward unreasonable bliss, until Suelo swings at me with some honky karate chops and blurts in his best Bruce Lee accent: “Now we fight a match to the death!”

  Although he lives with great intention, Suelo seems to go whichever way the wind blows. When he finds binoculars, he takes up birding. When he finds a guitar, he takes up music. When a martial artist arrives in his caves, he takes up Qigong. And so on. “Randomness is my guru,” he told me.

  As such, canyon life is idyllic. Once it warms up, he will take a dip in the creek. When he doesn’t feel like going to town, he can survive for a week or more on his stores and what he forages. As we sit there in the sun he plays a melody on a wooden flute someone carved for him. Juniper and sage and the spindly reeds of Mormon tea shrubs rise out of the bench.

  Yet Suelo does not become too attached. He knows that at any moment a ranger could arrive and whisk him along. The cave does not belong to him. His residence here is explicitly against the law.

  “This is a nation that professes to be a Christian nation,” he tells me, surveying his temporary kingdom. “And yet it’s basically illegal to live according to the teachings of Jesus.”

  Expecting anybody to follow the teachings of Jesus—least of all the United States government—sounds like a pretty naive view of the world. Yet that’s how Suelo was raised, in a family of religious idealists who, like him, don’t accept that modern times are fundamentally different from the times of the prophets and heroes.

  3

  . . .

  ONE DAY WHEN he was eleven years old, Daniel returned from playing in the yard to find the house empty. The year was 1972 and the family was living in the suburbs of Denver, where Daniel’s father worked at a car dealership. Daniel called for his parents and siblings. No reply. His three older brothers were not in their room. His older sister was nowhere to be found. He called their names, his voice trembling. He rushed to his parents’ bedroom. His mother’s clothes lay atop her shoes. She would never leave clothing on the floor. It was as if she had vaporized while standing in them. “Mom!” he cried. “Dad!” An electric fan whirred.

  Daniel’s mind raced for some benign explanation. Maybe they’d taken a walk with the dogs. Or driven somewhere. But the car was in the driveway. Try as he might to interpret these clues in some other way, he fixated on what struck him as the only plausible scenario: Rapture. The Lord had returned and sat in final judgment. The righteous, including Daniel’s family, had ascended to heaven. As for the sinners, they were doomed to suffer the tribulations prophesied in the Book of Revelation. Fires would rain down from the skies and wicked Babylon would plunge into the sea. As poor Daniel stared trembling at his mother’s shoes, he could only conclude that while she and the rest of his family had soared up to heaven, he, in punishment for some unspeakable sins, had been left behind!

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p; When the family clomped up the front steps—they’d been over at the neighbors’ house—they found Daniel crying. They comforted him and had a gentle laugh. He was the youngest, and so worried about everything. He shouldn’t fret so much. When the end-times did arrive, he would be going home to Jesus.

  In a family of biblical literalists, Daniel was the most literal of them all. One summer when he was very young, he stockpiled his dollars and quarters and bought Christmas presents for Mom and Dad, for Pennie and Rick and Ron and Doug. He wrapped them with Santa Claus paper and presented them in the August heat. He wanted them to enjoy their gifts here on earth, before the Great Tribulation.

  Daniel felt like he was the only kid in Sunday school who took it seriously. But that didn’t make faith easier. The kids who goofed off and passed notes didn’t lie awake fretting about Mathew 19:24, wondering how a full-grown camel could squeeze through the eye of a needle, and if so, why such an event was more likely than a rich man entering the Kingdom of Heaven.

  For those not raised fundamentalist, the Rapture seems a cartoonish fairy tale. But in the past half century the notion has become mainstream. As the percentage of Americans belonging to mainline Protestant denominations has steadily dropped since the mid-1960s from a quarter to a tenth, those belonging to evangelical or fundamentalist churches have held fast at about 25 percent. Factoring in population growth, that firm percentage reflects an increase in numbers. In the popular imagination, the child’s nightmare of burning in hell with the devil and his pitchfork has been replaced by the Apocalypse of the Book of Revelation, with its four horsemen and pits of boiling sulfur. Those raised in the faith accept as fact that this world’s days are numbered. Clocks will stop, and time as we know it will cease.

  Suelo’s family typifies the nation’s drift toward fundamentalism. They are part of the counterweight to the great secular shift that was also occurring over the past half century, making Americans—my family, for instance—less religious and more educated, urban, and prosperous. I had assumed that a conservative Christian family would be less accepting of a son who chose to be homeless. I was wrong. For fundamentalists, living in a cave and eating locusts and wild honey is a less far-fetched way of life than it seems to secular people concerned with getting a good internship and scoring high on the SAT. The guiding mythology of the Shellabarger family is not the American Dream, in which wealth waits as the reward for a lifetime of hard work. Theirs is a deep idealism in which faith trumps everything, and money never matters much. For all of his eventual rebelling, Suelo’s upbringing actually prepared him for quitting money.

  . . .

  AT EIGHTY-TWO, Dick Shellabarger is still a lumbering fellow, with a sprawling six-foot-five frame and big hands and big feet. He fills the room like a Clydesdale. His booming voice carries a twang as he drops cowboyisms: I says to him, no way and The Lord don’t care about that. “Money is the public God,” he bellowed as a way of welcoming me. “They do anything possible—kill, murder, and lie—for it.”

  Dick has been married to Daniel’s mother, Laurel, for more than sixty years. They live in Fruita, Colorado, a farm town that is being overtaken by the sprawl of Grand Junction, fifteen miles to the east. They’re about one hundred miles from their youngest son’s cave. The cul-de-sacs named Comstock and Motherlode are empty except for children on bikes and mothers pushing strollers. American-made cars and trucks fill the double driveways, with bumper stickers that say RESPECT LIFE. The Shellabarger home is a single level of brick and stucco and wood siding, with a pair of evergreens on the lawn. On the front door hangs an inscribed placard: Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. The house, which is owned by Dick’s older brother, is plain and clean: three bedrooms and two bathrooms, textured walls all the same neutral shade of off-white. In the garage, between meticulously organized hand tools and coiled extension cords, is a nondescript sedan.

  The youngest of five children, Dick Shellabarger was born in 1928, on the cusp of the Great Depression, and raised in Colorado. His father, a mechanic and barber and jack-of-all-trades, hopped freight trains to California in search of work. After working as a truck driver on the construction of the Alaska-Canada Highway, he parlayed his earnings into two cow ponies and a ranch near Denver. Dick grew up on a horse, moving from one place to the next as his dad sold one ranch and bought another. “I was trying to go to high school in Castle Rock, taking two or three buses to get there,” Dick says. “I finally had to quit after tenth grade.”

  The family never got ahead, unable to obtain a loan for the initial livestock. They did keep afloat a dude ranch that offered horseback rides, and an old lodge with a bar, jukebox, and dance floor. Dick’s older brothers left home and built an empire of car dealerships, but Dick took after his father, tinkering with one thing and another. After an army stint in Japan, he supplemented his summer income at the ranch by breaking the neighbors’ horses.

  If Suelo inherited his itinerant nature from his father, then his contemplative side comes from his mother. Laurel is a year older than her husband, a real beauty with regal carriage and sparkling eyes and fine cheekbones. Laurel Jeanne Wegener was born in Denver in 1927 to first-generation Americans whose parents had emigrated from Germany. Her father, Charles, was a traveling salesman and woodworker. The family struggled during the Depression, buying groceries on credit. But Charles—who like a European of the previous century played the flute, dressed in dark suits, and never learned to drive, preferring trains and trolleys well into the automobile era—insisted that his daughters learn classical piano and sing in a choir.

  Although the family was nominally Christian, they were not devout. “I went clear through the catty-chism at the Lutheran church,” Laurel says. As she matured into a striking and proud young woman, her commitment to the religion proved thin. One day she walked to church for a field trip, arriving just as the bus was pulling away. She ran after it, waving and hollering, but the bus didn’t stop. “And guess who got mad,” she says. Laurel never went back.

  Perhaps it was her parents’ European refinement, but Laurel was just plain dissatisfied with the life that wartime America offered. After graduating, she worked as an usherette in a movie theater, then earned a certificate in calculation from the community college and got an accounting job. After a few months she thought, Good grief, is this all there is?

  The year was 1946, decades before fundamentalism reached the mainstream. “Born again” and “personal savior” were phrases cried out under revival tents, not under the dome of the United States Capitol. Billy Graham’s evangelical crusades would not begin until 1948, and Jerry Falwell would not found his church until 1956. (Though some might quibble, I use the terms “fundamentalist” and “evangelical” interchangeably. Both describe a faith based more on a literal Bible reading than on membership in an organized church.) As the size and scope of secular government increased during the New Deal and World War II, and mainline churches focused on social justice instead of personal salvation, more Christians responded to what looked like the apocalypse—D-day, Auschwitz, Hiroshima—by seeking the moral certainty of scripture.

  One night, listening to her parents’ radio, Laurel tuned in to the warm voice of a preacher on The Old Fashioned Revival Hour broadcast from California. He spoke of missionaries in Africa, saving souls on the hot plains and deep in the jungle. Now, that sounded like a fulfilling—and exciting—life. Laurel enrolled at the Denver Bible Institute. On the first day, the teacher unrolled a sheet of paper and drew a time line outlining the seven eras of human existence, corresponding to the seven days of Creation. The Dispensation Chart. The First Dispensation was the Creation. The Second spanned the 1,656 years from Adam to Noah, the Third encompassed the next 430 years to Abraham, and the Fourth covered the following 1,960 years to Jesus. Ever since then, the teacher announced, we had been living in the Fifth Dispensation, or the Church Period, which would come to a catastrophic close with the return of Christ, and the advent of the Sixth Dispensati
on: the Great Tribulation. In this violent period lasting only seven years, the prophecies of the Book of Revelations would come to pass: the seven seals would be opened, Christ would sit in judgment, fires would burn down from heaven, Satan would boil in sulfur, and all of wicked humanity—Babylon—would be cast into the sea like a millstone. When the ash cleared, the true believers, the righteous Christians, would go forth into paradise and the Seventh Dispensation: the Millennium. Having destroyed Babylon, Christ would rule the New Jerusalem. The martyrs and saints would be resurrected, the Twelve Tribes of Israel restored, and the lion would lie down with the lamb.

  “I was saved,” Laurel says now. “I went home that night and asked Christ to be my personal savior.” She spent the next three years in Bible college. The teacher took her under his wing like a daughter, and she traveled to Bible camps to testify. She preached the gospel to her parents, and they, too, were born again.

  In the fall of 1948 she took a vacation. The bus dropped her seven miles from the guest ranch. Two cowboys leaned against an old Studebaker pickup. She locked eyes on the younger of them, a strip of rawhide in Levi’s and boots and a Stetson, six foot five and 150 pounds. She squeezed between the two men in the cab of the pickup as it rattled toward the ranch. Every time the truck hit a bump, her knee banged against the skinny cowboy and a volt of something thrilling crept up her spine.

  They arrived at the ranch and Laurel was led to her quarters, a sparse wood-planked cabin with a cot, smelling like pine needles and mothballs. Although the lodge was closed, Dick Shellabarger plugged in the jukebox. “I put some music on and we danced,” he says today. “Just the two of us.”

  By the next day, they couldn’t stay apart. Dick invited Laurel to have a look at a private cabin that he took care of. They walked together in the cold wind, closing the heavy wooden door behind them. He struck wooden matches and lit the kerosene lamps. He unfolded fresh bedsheets and together they spread them over the mattress. Then he knelt by the fireplace and wadded newspaper and stacked kindling and lit a match. Laurel discovered a piano and sat at the bench. Dick remembers the music she played as something ethereal, romantic, divine—nothing like the honky-tonk he was used to. He hovered behind her, swallowing her sweet scent and breathing the melody. His hands removed themselves from his hips, ventured forward unsteadily, and came to rest on her face.