The Man Who Quit Money (25 page)

Two weeks later, he was back on the road, hitchhiking across the country, visiting friends, living on the cheap. The only way for him to live ethically in this corrupt world, he felt—the only way to access that eternal present that he’d found in the monastery—was to abandon money. Suelo wanted neither to owe nor to be owed. In the words of Christianity, he wanted the Lord to forgive him his debts, and he forgave his debtors. In the words of the Bhagavad Gita, he wanted to release himself from the fruits of his labor. To give freely without expectation of receiving. Only then could he break free of the Western concept of linear time. Credit and debt kept us fixated on the past and the future. In the words of the Buddha, Suelo wanted to cut the tangle of attachments, to break the circle of reincarnation and dwell in the eternal present.

But to just stop using money was not easy. He would have to give up not only most material comforts, but also the freedoms he was accustomed to: driving a car required a license that cost money; traveling abroad required a passport that cost money.
But that was the point. We’d become so entangled that there appeared to be no way out but total refusal. Giving up money might even turn out to be illegal: what if, for instance, he owed back taxes? What he was proposing was a prolonged act of civil disobedience. Suelo was afraid to go it alone.

He learned about a communal farm in Oregon. Members grew crops and shared meals, no money required. Maybe such a place would be right for him. Suelo fired off a couple of emails inquiring if he could come, but received no reply. So he shouldered his pack and thumbed to Eugene, arriving at a ramshackle old house on a sprawling farm.

“I sent an email,” he said. “I’m here.”

Nobody remembered any email. If he wanted to stick around, they said, sure, go ahead, get to work. They required forty hours per week. That seemed fair. But the work wasn’t all digging potatoes and sharing the abundance. A lot of it was busywork—pulling dandelions or sweeping the drive or raking leaves. And the residents weren’t actually growing enough food to subsist on—the daily crop could hardly produce a salad. The farm survived from business ventures—they ran a café in the nearest town, and they contracted with the post office to deliver mail. The commune was beholden to credit and debt.

Worse yet, it just wasn’t fun. The people were dour and gloomy. Everyone worked their forty hours, and if you were caught idling, you were guilted into working more. It seemed the point of all the work wasn’t to produce more crops, but just to keep busy, to avoid being pegged as lazy, a subproductive member. These utopians seemed to have chucked the Protestantism but kept the work ethic.

Suelo thought about the Kung bushmen. They lived in one of
the harshest places on earth, yet they only had to work two hours a day. The rest of the time they spent in leisure. Yet here he was, slaving away on this farm, which was situated in one of the most fertile areas of the planet. What was wrong with this picture?

After a few weeks, Suelo packed his bag and left. The tangle of attachments remained tangled. He hitched up to his sister’s house north of Seattle. Now back with her husband, and as firm a fundamentalist as ever, Pennie did not approve of Daniel’s drift from Christianity, but she was willing to engage him in conversation about faith and the search for meaning. He took stock of his life. Suelo was thirty-nine years old, six years older than Christ upon crucifixion, six years older than Martin Luther was when he posted the 95 Theses, the same age as Martin Luther King Jr., at the time of his assassination. And what did he have to show for himself? A few adventures abroad. A few years in a cave. Do-gooder jobs.

He had to make a decision. Down one path was gainful employment, a regular life with a roof overhead, bills, debts, and all the moral compromises that came with it. Down the other path lay the romantic quest that beckoned, hatched in deep wilderness, in deep prayer, at the feet of the Lama. This was the path of the heroes and the prophets. But wasn’t it just a fantasy? Who was he, Daniel Shellabarger, of Grand Junction, Colorado, to single-handedly reject the modern era? It was a path filled with alienation, hardship, ridicule. Maybe he should give up this fandango. Maybe he should just bear down and get a job. The year was 2000, and the economy was booming. The temptation was great. At the moment it was irresistible.

With his fluent Spanish and Peace Corps résumé, he found a job in Seattle as an advocate for Spanish speakers navigating
government bureaucracies. On the first morning, commuting in his sister’s car, he sat in traffic for two hours. And then he stepped into chaos. The phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Strangers jabbered Spanish in his ear. He had to ask them to repeat themselves—his Spanish was a bit rusty. Stacks of paper spread across the desk in his cramped cubicle. Sweat soaked his shirt. His boss took a look at him and asked if he was sure that this job was what he wanted. He stared back, unable to answer. When six o’clock mercifully arrived, Suelo stumbled out to the street and found a parking ticket slapped on the windshield of his sister’s car. He inched up the freeway, another two hours in gridlock. He looked around at his fellow commuters. Not a single one was smiling. Not a single one looked content.

When he finally walked through the door, his sister asked how the day had gone. Daniel erupted: “This is insanity. I don’t see how people live like this.” He called his new boss, got voice mail, left an apology for wasting her time, regretted that he wouldn’t be back.

Now he was sure that he had to complete his journey. He pored over a directory of intentional communities, hundreds of them the world over. But most compromised, took part, through commerce or barter or membership investment, in this insane system he was determined to escape. That wouldn’t do. He had to go all the way.

He found a place: the Gandhi Farm, a radical vegan organic cashless off-the-grid commune far in the backwoods of Nova Scotia. Its twenty acres nourished a forest of sugar maple and white birch and quaking aspen, an orchard of walnut and cherry and apple. Plots of wild native strawberries and blackberries and Juneberries ripened in summer. Clear water sprang from a well.
An eighty-year-old farmhouse could sleep eighteen. Eden. The place was so off the grid, in fact, that it didn’t have a telephone number or email address.

Daniel looked at a map. Nova Scotia was a long way from Seattle. He had a few hundred dollars left. In September 2000, he bought a bus ticket to Bar Harbor, Maine. The ride lasted five days, the Greyhound cramped and stuffy and stinking of sweat and tobacco and vomit. When he arrived, he hitched to Canada and bought passage on a ferry across the Bay of Fundy. He had fifty dollars left. He folded it in half, then in quarters, and slipped it into his back pocket: his emergency insurance against the occurrence of some Bad Thing, whatever it might be.

Nobody on the ferry would even look at him, much less smile or say hello. He wondered if he smelled bad from the bus trip. He had never felt so unwelcome. Disembarking in Nova Scotia, he started to hitchhike. No one picked him up. He stood there all day. Did he look strange, or dangerous? Finally an old Christian couple stopped for him. He told them about his quest, and they seemed to understand. They took him all the way to the final spur road, wishing him the best.

Only ten more miles. Daniel began walking on the dirt road and put out his thumb. An occasional car passed him but none even slowed down. The woods became deeper and darker. Children playing in the yards of farmhouses scurried behind trees when they saw him. He walked and walked and walked, pack straps digging into his shoulders and his heels rubbing to blisters.

It was dusk when he reached the private road to Gandhi Farm. Naked maple branches hung low over a carpet of brown leaves. Despite the bad vibe he’d gotten all day, he was still thrilled. But when he rounded the final bend and the farmhouse
came into view, a shudder raced down his spine. The hulking Victorian farmhouse was a black silhouette against the twilight, windows smashed and curtains shredded to ribbons whipping in the wind. It looked like something out of a Stephen King movie. He took a few steps backward, reassured himself. Finally he climbed the steps to the porch. Shards of glass crunched beneath his boots. The planks creaked. The door hung open on battered old hinges, groaning in the wind.

“Hello?” he called. “Anybody home?”

Just the groan of the hinges and the whistle of the wind and the flutter of the curtains.

“Is anyone here?” he called out. The hair on his neck stood up.

He pushed through the door. He flipped a light switch but it was dead. He tore through his backpack for a flashlight, panting for breath. He swept the beam across the room. Not much to see. He found the remains of an old ledger. He recognized the name of the farm’s founder in the scrawl.
October 21, Philip’s parents came by to pick up his belongings.
No more entries. More than a month of empty lines on the page. Upstairs he found a wall calendar inscribed with someone’s scribbling.
August 21. Dug for water but well is dry. August 22. Dug for water but well is dry. August 23. Dug for water but well is dry.
This went on for weeks.

Suelo wanted to flee, but it was cold and dark and he had nowhere else to go, so he spread his sleeping bag on a cot and lay down. He didn’t sleep much. At first light he packed his bag. He lifted his boot and took a step down the road. Then another. Again he walked all day with no rides.

At dusk someone stopped. “I saw you on my way to work,” said the driver. “Now I’m on my way home, and you haven’t
gotten very far. No one’s going to pick you up out here.” The man went out of his way to drive him to the nearest town.

Daniel considered the fifty dollars in his pocket. If this wasn’t the Bad Thing, it would do until one came along. Now what the hell was he going to do? With a glimmer of hope, he fired off an email at the public library to a guy he knew in Halifax. Within a few days they had met up, and his friend said there was this girl, Lorelei, he wanted Daniel to meet. A kindred spirit.

And sure enough, it was like he and Lorelei had known each other forever. She was a fiery redheaded sprite who had been living on the road for years. She talked about past lives and energy and harmony with plants and animals. Turned out she had spent some time at Gandhi Farm the previous year. So Daniel didn’t feel self-conscious about telling her his quest.

“I want to live without money,” he said.

“Me, too!” she said.

Off they went. With enough faith, the universe would provide. It was dangerous—an urban and industrial landscape, with “No Trespassing” signs everywhere you looked, far from his wide-open canyons and mountains. But the rides came easy. People were much more likely to pick you up when you were traveling with a girl. Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York. Oh, it was glorious, tumbling southward with the falling leaves. “Life has been magical for us,” he wrote. “Fantastic things happen when you’re at the mercy of chance! One couple who picked us up told us all they asked is that we do something for somebody else. They said this is a concept few understand, but that it is most important.”

And then at a truck stop on some Pennsylvania highway, he
crossed the final threshold. He and Lorelei had been waiting for two hours with no luck. Flurries of snow swirled in the gloom. His coat was thin. Rows of big rigs rumbled in the parking lot, rainbow splotches of diesel seeped across the asphalt, paper soda cups lay flattened beneath tire tracks in the slush. Once again, anxiety threatened, this worry about some imminent Bad Thing. The Bad Thing that only money could remedy.

Suelo removed the fifty dollars from his pocket. He went into the truck stop, spent a dollar on a stamp and envelope, and mailed twenty dollars to his sister—he still owed her for that parking ticket. His final debt was paid.

He returned to the parking lot. Motorists came and went, pumping gasoline into their vehicles and pouring coffee into themselves. Suelo regarded this scene of mundane commerce with agitation. As he sank deeper into concentration, he felt a growing thrill, as if some revelation were near.

And it hit him: the fifty dollars was not the
cure
for his anxiety, the fifty dollars was the
cause
of it. The Bad Thing would happen, sure. No amount of money, not fifty dollars, or a million, could keep it at bay. Because after all, what was the worst Bad Thing? Death. Mortality. The End of Time. That was the thing he was afraid of. But the Bad Thing came to everyone eventually, and when it arrived, not even money could buy it off.

Money perpetuated the fantasy of immortal earthly life, the illusion that we could determine the future. Suelo was ready to reject this illusion once and for all. The fifty dollars was merely keeping him from what he needed most: faith. If he wanted to know true faith, he had to accept that there was nothing in the material world to fall back upon. Faith was the only salvation from the Bad Thing. So let it happen. “If we embrace holy
poverty very closely,” said Saint Francis, “the world will come to us and will feed us abundantly.” If Suelo believed that Providence would carry him safely, then it didn’t matter what came next. He would be fine, with or without a bit of cash in his pocket.

He took his last thirty dollars into a phone booth and left it there, folded it on top of the telephone.

“Somebody has to take the first step to escape from servitude of money,” he would later write. “Digging a tunnel out of the prison, and then showing fellow prisoners that life outside the prison is abundant, without judging the fellow prisoners—that is the challenge.”

Suelo turned and walked across the parking lot, leaving the money behind.

The heavens broke open. It was mere rain, but to Suelo it felt like something warmer than honey pouring over his head and coursing down his shoulders. He stood paralyzed in ecstasy, embraced by grace, by the love that flows freely across the cosmos. Forgive our Debts, Cut the Tangle, Break the Circle. And when the baptism was over, when the tingling subsided in his trembling limbs, he knew he had arrived in the right place.