The Man Who Quit Money

Also By Mark Sundeen

Car Camping

The Making of Toro

North by Northwestern

(with Captain Sig Hansen)

.  .  .

MARK SUNDEEN

Riverhead Books

New York

For Cedar,
who gave me the kernels anyway

Part One

.  .  .

I
N 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.”

.  .  .

A
S 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.