by Mark Sundeen
The twilight is clear and moonless, the rimrock black against the last pink in the sky. We pass several trash bins that Suelo assesses. “That one usually just has boxes and office papers. I might check it once a month.” A source of perpetual griping among town scavengers is that the largest supermarket keeps refuse under lock and key. There is a single bin in the parking lot, however, where customers occasionally dispose of valuable items. “That’s where I found my Therm-a-Rest, and those binoculars,” Suelo says.
Although Moab is a small town, its sprawling layout is suited to drivers, not pedestrians. We cross the vacant grounds of the high school toward the ribbons of neon along the highway. Suelo and Phil tread silently the empty sidewalk between motels and car dealerships and fast-food outlets. 3.9%FOR 60 MONTHS OAC. MOAB’S BEST DEAL. KITCHENETTES-HBO-GUEST LAUNDRY. 10 LBS BAG OF ICE99¢. Eighteen-wheelers rumble past, toward the Navajo Nation.
Approaching Pete’s house, we pass a grocery store just closed. We creep down the alley to the loading docks, where electric light pools on the asphalt. Big machinery whines. I smell the acrid slicks of something sticky seeping across the lot. Suelo and Phil flip open the lids and peer in. The bins are piled high with black garbage bags that they peel open. Suelo pulls out a flat white paper box and sets it on the lid of the adjacent dumpster. The red-and-white flank of a Coca-Cola truck flickers in the dim light.
“Pizza, anyone?”
He retrieves another cheese pizza. He works efficiently in the darkness. He fishes out tubs of ranch dip and a pair of prepared meals in plastic platters from the deli and squints to read the label. “Some kind of spaghetti,” he says. Then, surveying the growing mountain of food, he says, “Is there some sort of box we could put this stuff in?” A sack of bagels. Eight pieces of fried chicken sealed in a plastic sack.
Within five minutes, the men fill two large cardboard cartons, which they cradle as they depart the premises. Next door is a self-storage complex—often a good source for usable items, but tonight we find only windshields. We continue down a residential street.
“Pete’s house is the kind where you don’t have to knock,” Suelo says. Inside the carport beside the recycling bins rises a mountain of food. A network of dumpster divers leaves their excess booty here, a warehouse for their friends to pick over. “A dump-store,” says Daniel, with pleasure. Suelo is all but blind to the various leafy vegetables, cartons of muffins, and whole angel food cakes. He’s come for the bananas. He peels one and munches, and then reaches for another.
Inside the house, a gray-haired woman washes dishes and a fluffy dog greets us. A food dehydrator whirs on the table and the place reeks of bananas. Moments later, Pete himself arrives, wearing a bike helmet. He has just returned from a ride around the neighborhood on his unicycle. We step back outside and stand around the food. The forecast calls for frost, and we wonder if the bananas will blacken. Daniel stuffs a bunch of bananas and the fried chicken into his backpack. Then he peels one more banana from the box and takes a bite.
“My brother used to call me Bananiel,” he says.
We walk an hour in the dark cold night until we reach the trailhead. From the thicket where Suelo stores his bike, we retrieve three cans of beer. “Somebody—some unknown person—left them in my bike basket,” says Suelo. And from there we pick our way up canyon in the black night.
It is an exaggeration to say that I cannot see my own hand in front of my face. However, I cannot see thorned branches at arm’s length, and after a few whaps in the face, I hold my fist out like a boxer to protect my head. I set down my feet gingerly, not knowing if they will fall on rock, dirt, shrub, or water. Suelo strides quickly over the rugged terrain. We remove our shoes and cross the creek three times.
The next three crossings are narrow. “You can either take off your shoes,” says Suelo, “or do the leap of faith.” With that he carefully inches his way toward the bank, then jumps into the darkness, landing safely on the other side. This method works for me until the final crossing, when I misjudge the terrain and step to my shin in the chilly stream. We put on our shoes and Suelo leads us through a tangle of reeds and brambles in blackness. It occurs to me that over the years he has made this same dark trip hundreds of times.
We arrive at the cave at eleven-thirty, two and a half hours after leaving the banana stash. The temperature has dropped into the thirties, but I am warm from the walk. We are hungry. Daniel eats a banana, lights the oil lamps, and breaks out the bag of chicken. It’s cold but good, greasy and salty and crunchy like deli fried chicken is. We three sit on the rocks devouring the breasts and thighs. Phil pops open a can of beer.
“I just got a bite that tasted like mold,” Suelo says, holding the bag to the lamp and taking off his glasses to read. “It says it was packaged on the twenty-sixth.”
We consider this revelation. It turns out that learning a chicken’s date of preparation is not useful when nobody knows today’s date. One thing is certain: none of us wants to stop eating. I, for one, haven’t tasted any mold.
“Today couldn’t be later than the twenty-seventh,” Phil says.
“Yeah,” Suelo says, lying back on his bed, propped against a slab of stone. He kicks off his boots and reaches for a second piece of chicken. “I’m sure it’s fine.”
. . .
ONE EVENING IN 2006, watching the sunset from the rock benches in front of his cave, Suelo decided to eat a cactus. He had been eating prickly pear for years, and he didn’t see why a little barrel cactus would be any different. Besides, he had never heard of any cactus being poisonous. Not in North America, anyway. It went against evolutionary logic. The cactus’s needles already protected it from predators: why, biologically, would it need toxins?
Suelo bent down and unearthed the cactus with a pocketknife. He skinned it, careful to shear all the needles, and slurped the whole thing like a kiwi fruit, just like he used to do when hopping trains across the desert, to stay hydrated.
Night was falling. Suelo basked in the warm evening air.
Then his heart started pounding. Faster and faster. His skin got hot. He felt like he was being lowered into a vat of boiling water. The burn spread up his calves to his thighs, over his hips and belly, rising up his neck until his entire head was on fire. His heart thumped. It couldn’t take this.
I’m going to have a heart attack, Suelo thought.
The nearest hospital was a two-hour walk. He could hardly sit up. He crawled into his cave and lay there.
It wasn’t like he was some clueless rookie out here in the wilderness. He had survived in these canyons for a decade. He couldn’t believe this was happening. He had always talked, in the abstract, about how when it was time for him to go, he’d just lie down and die like a coyote, and surrender his earthly body back to the food chain. But he really didn’t want to die just yet. And although he was not a sentimental man, he thought about his parents, a hundred miles away in Colorado. They loved him despite all he’d rejected of their beliefs. Already they’d lost one son, Rick, taken by a brain tumor at age forty-one. It was for their sake as much as anyone’s that he scribbled his good-bye, which in his memory went something like this:
Well, life has been good, rich and full. I died happy. Don’t worry about me. We all die. I ate some poison cactus. I love everybody.
How long would it take someone to find his body? He had plenty of friends in town, but they never came looking for him. Daniel arrived in town when he arrived, he left when he left. Nobody really knew where he was. When would someone start to miss him? And who would find him first? Probably the ravens, and then the coyotes. Or maybe the ringtail. The ringtails loved to eat meat.
So really there was some justice. Ever since he’d given up money, certain people had called him a freeloader, a parasite. (As one comment-thread malapropist put it: “Do you Believe you are smooching off others?”) They demanded to know what he was giving back. To which Suelo asked, Who says you need to give something back? What does a raven give? What does a
barnacle give, or a coyote? In his view, every living thing gave plenty, merely by existing. But from a strictly materialistic view, his critics had an excellent point. A raven contributes nothing, except of course his own corpse, which will feed some other being. Now Suelo was dying, and he offered his body to the ravens, the coyotes, the ringtails, the mice, the ants.
Through the night he writhed and spat and prepared for death. Hours slipped away, but he was not aware of their passing. He knew only that he hadn’t died—yet. And then, as the canyon rim appeared in silhouette against the gray sky of morning, he felt a swelling in his gut. Suelo hadn’t vomited in twenty years, since battling dysentery in Ecuador, where he’d trained himself to plug all his orifices during all-day bus rides on bumpy mountain roads. But now he groped his way out of the cave, and there on the cobble below, heaved a torrent of green sludge. The beast was exorcised.
Tears in his eyes, Suelo began to grin, then laugh. The burning in his body was washed away by a cool wave of bliss. He wasn’t going to die after all. He was alive!
…
SUELO LAUGHS AGAIN when he tells the story of his near death by cactus. But it raises the question of his health, especially as he ages; Suelo recently turned fifty. Medical care is expensive and difficult to obtain even for those of us with money. Food and shelter come easy by comparison.
“He’s in a dangerous position,” his father says. “In old age we won’t be here. Things get tougher. He don’t have any means of support.”
Like a quarter of all Americans, Suelo lacks health insurance. He does not get Medicare. He does not have a regular doctor or dentist. Nonetheless, he is by all appearances in excellent health—far better than most people his age. He’s lean and muscular, without a ripple of fat. He hadn’t been sick in years when I met up with him. He can walk fifteen miles a day without fatigue. Basic tasks like packing food into the canyon or hauling buckets of water from the creek require and build muscle tone.
That said, Suelo doesn’t perform anything that looks like exercise. He does not belong to a gym. He doesn’t jog. Despite living in the outdoor sports capital of the world, he doesn’t mountain bike or rock climb or kayak or ski. After meeting Melony Gilles, the watermelon eater, Suelo began attending her free yoga classes. (He arrived in rolled-up jeans and a dress shirt, but removed his hat for the postures.)
One reason for his good health is his fairly nutritious diet. Before quitting money, he had experimented with vegetarian and vegan and raw and organic diets, but these days he eats pretty much what he can get. Although the fried chicken and gummi bears are junk, he also eats plenty of rice and grains and fruit and vegetables. Being a scavenger doesn’t exempt him from the basic dietary issues of our times: Suelo is convinced that he has a mild allergy to wheat and dairy, and after feasting on donuts or pizza, he complains of feeling drowsy and unfocused.
Suelo takes no pharmaceutical or recreational drugs and drinks very little alcohol. Instead he employs a number of home remedies to keep healthy. His friend Dr. Michael Friedman, a naturopathic M.D., thinks Suelo has probably contracted giardia, a water-borne parasite, from drinking out of wild streams—a common affliction in North America that causes diarrhea and stomach pain. Suelo follows the naturopathic principle of using the most natural, least invasive, and least toxic treatments available. He has found that swallowing a small portion of pine sap is a good cure for gastrointestinal distress.
One time while Dr. Friedman was camping with him in the canyon, they began discussing the medicinal properties of bee venom, said to contain an anti-inflammatory one hundred times more powerful than hydrocortisone. Some believe that it relieves arthritis, as well as the symptoms of multiple sclerosis. Suelo had been suffering joint pain of late. He and the doctor pondered the best way to experiment. Finally they decided to keep it simple. The two men marched up to a nearby hive and let the bees sting them. “It feels better already,” Suelo reported, admiring his welts. He reported moderate pain relief, but did not repeat the treatment.
To the subject of eyeglasses, Suelo has devoted a few pixels in the Frequently Asked Questions section of his website:
My old eyeglasses broke several times, and I rebuilt them several times with melted plastic until they looked pretty goofy. Then they finally disintegrated a couple years ago. I was kind of happy about it and decided I didn’t need eyeglasses. It would be like I was in a Monet painting, I thought. It was, and I was okay with it for about a year. But I started feeling embarrassed because I couldn’t recognize my own friends at a distance, and they were thinking I was “stuck up.” I decided I wanted to see more clearly again, and I was mentioning it to a friend. Another friend, Holly, who worked at the local thrift store, overheard our conversation and told me they had droves of old eyeglasses people donated, and to go and see if any fit my prescription and I could keep them for free. So I tried on several pairs, and the one that I thought looked most cool (Buddy Holly glasses) happened to be just my prescription. I’ve been wearing them since.
But the bane of Suelo’s moneyless existence is dentistry. “I have gotten a couple cavities the past decade because I’ve eaten too many sweets,” he writes. “Okay, I must be honest and say that teeth and mosquitoes are two things that get me to question the perfection of nature.”
The remedy? Pine pitch—the same wonder sap from piñons that eases his intestines. Suelo claims that it is both a protectant and antiseptic, and he swears by packing the stuff directly into his teeth. “The summer I worked on the fishing boat I slacked in packing my first cavity in a molar and it grew until the pain was excruciating for about a day. I found my pinyon pitch and packed it again, and the pain vanished. But by that time the cavity was pretty deep, and half my tooth eventually broke off (without pain). I still have half a molar. Another tooth recently developed a cavity, which I’ve also been packing with pitch. It hasn’t been hurting me.”
I eventually learned that the poor condition of Suelo’s teeth was not, as I had assumed, the result of living without money. Neither for that matter were they actually rotting. In fact he broke his two front teeth in a go-cart accident that occurred while he still had a job and a home. The reason he was unable to repair them was that, like many of us, he lacked dental insurance. In 2010, after years of suffering, Suelo got his teeth fixed. A friend of his parents, a member of their church who had traveled to the Third World to volunteer his services, offered to give Suelo fillings. “I’m not opposed to medical services if a doctor was willing to provide them voluntarily,” Suelo says. “Then I would take them. I don’t like a lot of organized do-goodism. The idea is take what’s voluntarily given—and the people giving it aren’t doing it because they’re getting paid.”
There was one time when Suelo did, in fact, accept medical help that was not given freely. Visiting his brother Doug in 2004 and helping build shelves, he gashed his thumb to the bone on a shattered jar of screws. Suelo was fairly certain that he could give himself sutures, but his sister-in-law insisted on taking him to the emergency room. The doc cleaned the wound and stitched it up, and sent Daniel on his way. The bill: a thousand bucks.
Suelo was not willing to just ignore the charge—at the root of his forsaking money is the desire to avoid debt. So he went back to the women’s shelter in Moab where he volunteered, and asked if they would tally his hours, as if he were an employee, and cut a check directly to the hospital. After he had worked off about four hundred dollars of the bill, Suelo wrote to the hospital, asking if they thought it was ethical to charge one thousand dollars for seven stitches. The bills stopped coming.
. . .
IT’S ONE THING to forsake material goods like food and a home, or privileges like driving a car or flying on an airplane, but I wondered how far Suelo would take it. Would he get sick and die rather than compromise?
In the time I spent with him, Suelo caught a nasty flu that put him out of commission for a few days, but recovered without any medicine. Yet he is visibly aging. One night as we played a bo
ard game, he held the parts to within inches of his nearsighted eyes, complained that he was drowsy and “out of it,” and finally excused himself to pedal back to camp and go to sleep early. As he gets older, if a mountain lion doesn’t get him first, he’ll begin to suffer the frailties of old age.
Sitting across the table from him in a conference room in the Moab library that we’d claimed as our own, I asked Suelo if he would rather die than get a five-dollar vaccination, or pay for a hundred-dollar hospital visit that could save his life.
“Yeah, I guess I’d be willing to die,” he said. “If I broke my leg out in the wilderness, I feel it’s natural selection. We all gotta die sooner or later anyway. And what makes one way of death worse than another? Is it really worse to die from a broken leg in a canyon than dying a few years later with tubes in my arm in a hospital, or extending my life—”
I interrupted. “If you fall off a cliff in the canyons and the ravens get you, that’s kind of a romantic ideal. But what if you break your leg and don’t die, and are hobbling around on crutches, and then you get gangrene? There are other ways to die that are pretty easily cured with modern technology. It’s not like the only two ways to die are five years in a hospital bed or the instant death of falling off a cliff and breaking your neck.”
Suelo was quiet a while, thinking about this.
“I guess that’s where what people might call the superstitious, the religious part, comes in,” he said. “If we’re following our path, then worrying about what could or should happen is a worse illness than what could or should happen. And it’s more likely we’re going to be out of balance if we worry. The idea is that the future will take care of itself if we remain in the present. I really don’t know what I’ll do and I don’t think about it that much. Some might call that irresponsible. But that’s part of the path I’m on.”