by Mark Sundeen
He punches the gas. The car jerks toward the cliff. Daniel thinks: If God has some purpose for me, then not even I can resist it.
The rocks scrape beneath as he launches. Then blackness.
Part Two
6
. . .
Do not expect me to be a man in the worldly sense.
—Milarepa, eleventh-century Tibetan Buddhist saint
MAY 30, 1991. Daniel Shellabarger drives his car off a Colorado cliff toward certain death. Even viewed as a solitary event in a troubled life, it’s a dramatic moment. Yet in the context of all that came next, the crash assumes almost supernatural importance. Instead of a series of disconnected episodes without clear purpose, Suelo’s life begins to resemble an ordered fable, in which one scene leads irreversibly to the next, in which things happen for a reason.
The term for such a tale—in which the hero’s journey and ultimate battle against the dragon is choreographed by fate—is myth. Suelo’s quest to rid himself of money, when measured by modern yardsticks like politics and economics and psychology, just doesn’t add up. People in the real world don’t behave like this. The genre in which people wander for years in the desert, give up all worldly possessions, dwell in caves, and survive a series of near-death trials, is mythology.
“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder,” wrote Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, his 1949 exploration of religion and mythology that inspired, among other things, the heroic journey of Luke Skywalker. “Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
Outlining the journey’s three phases—Departure, Initiation, Return—Campbell proposes that a hero’s “visions, ideas, and inspirations come pristine from the primary springs of human life and thought…. not of the present, disintegrating society and psyche, but of the unquenched source through which society is reborn.”
Suelo long struggled with the ordinary world. As a child, he believed that through faith in Jesus he would spend eternity in heaven, but early in adulthood he lost faith in God, and doubted the eternal. As a young man, he was mired in a world in which his admiration of the great heroes—Jesus, John the Baptist, the prophet Daniel—was met with the same reply: We’re living in different times now. But Suelo did not accept that explanation. He demanded a life that emanated from more primary sources.
Then one day he was called to adventure. While innocently collecting berries in the woods, he ate the poisonous fruit, the morideros. “A blunder,” writes Campbell, “apparently the merest chance—reveals an unsuspected world, and the individual is drawn into a relationship with forces that are not rightly understood.”
Poisoned by the magical berries—“bites of death”—Suelo had his first true vision of the eternal. Much to his horror, it was not a place where angels strummed harps. It was a place of Christ nailed to the cross and never-ending suffering. It was hell, and his path of Bible study and good deeds would never lead him to heaven.
Is that reading a bit too much into a case of accidental poisoning? Couldn’t Daniel have just as easily seen fairies and unicorns? But blunders are not random, according to Campbell. “They are the result of suppressed desires and conflicts,” he writes. “They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs.” Suelo’s vision of hell was already within him; the morideros presented themselves on the vine in order to make him see it.
Thus called to his quest, Suelo reacted by refusing it. He was like Moses, who, when apprised of his task to free his people, cried out, “O Lord, please send someone else to do it.” Suelo’s method of refusing the call was to drive off a cliff.
And that’s when he first experienced what Campbell calls “Supernatural Aid.” The car soared into the abyss but never reached bottom. As if lifted by angels, Suelo found himself alive on the side of the road. Helicoptered to a Denver hospital, he emerged virtually unscathed. He could not refuse the call to adventure. Fate would not allow it. He cursed God, bitter that the Father would force him to endure an existence that, like it or not, would last forever. The purpose of his quest, then, was becoming clear: to transform this life from hell into heaven.
The year was 1991. The economy was in recession, and our hero was a thirty-one-year-old social worker with a case of suicidal depression—trapped in the belly of the beast. A year passed. Everywhere he looked, the world was ugly. He wanted to get away from its materialism and headaches and phoniness. He wanted to start fresh in some place that was uncluttered by modernity, where man’s folly was cast into puny relief by nature, where a man might indeed believe that these times are no different from those of the ancient heroes.
Like many seekers before him, he didn’t exactly choose the tiny speck on the map. The speck chose him. His friend Damian Nash had moved to Utah, and invited Daniel to join him in a busted dust-swept uranium outpost. The town, an oasis amid golden cliffs, just happened to have been named after the biblical land along the River Jordan, the same river across which Moses led his people into the Promised Land, the same one where John the Baptist cleansed the soul of Jesus.
To ring in the 1993 New Year, Suelo typed a note to his friends:
Daniel Shellabarger has boycotted his native ¿civilization? and receded into the primitive desertlands of the Anasazi for a life of disciplined vision-quest.
And then in smaller font:
and/or fun–in–the–sun and debauchery.
With that, Daniel set out through the desert, crossed the rushing waters into Moab, and began his journey.
7
. . .
Let right deeds be thy motive, not the fruit which comes from them.
—The Bhagavad Gita
A CONFESSION: I like getting my annual Social Security statement. Each year when it arrives, I tear open the envelope eagerly, to see how I’ve done. The numbers—the list of my earnings for every year I have worked, and the benefits to my survivors should I die this year—tell a version of my life story. And the story is largely optimistic. They show a gradual increase in my taxable earnings, from a mere sixty dollars the year I turned sixteen, soaring into triple digits during my tenure as a work-study dishwasher, hovering around ten grand in my decade as a seasonal river guide and underemployed drifter, then finally, in the past couple of years, as I was paid to write and teach, ramming through the poverty line into the realm of respectability.
Daniel Suelo gets a Social Security statement each year, too, delivered to his parents’ house. When he showed it to me, the exquisite column of zeros from 2001 to 2010 sent a shudder down my spine. That numeric representation of nothingness made him seem so fragile, as if the slightest breeze could whisk Daniel into oblivion. But then I felt something like elation. According to the tax man’s definition of work—the tasks you do in exchange for money—these numbers told Suelo’s story of liberation. He had freed himself.
The Social Security statements, however, tell only one side of our work story. As much as Americans gripe about wanting to take this job and shove it, work provides rewards beyond money that are difficult to find elsewhere: the satisfaction of competence and achievement, the bond of a community, the pride of recognition and acclaim. What’s more, many don’t accept the strictly monetary definition of work because it excludes a host of unpaid activities like parenting, volunteering, and writing poems.
Some people reject the American concept of work altogether. “I didn’t want a steady job in an office or a factory,” writes Lame Deer, the Sioux medicine man. “I thought myself too good for that, not because I was stuck up but because any human being is too good for that kind of no-life, even white people. I trained myself to need and want as little as could be so that I wouldn’t have to work except when I felt like it. That way I could get along fine with plenty of spare time to think, to ask, to learn, to listen, and to count coup on the girls.”
A
nd then there’s Thoreau. “For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms,” he claimed, “and did my duty faithfully.” For him and for many who’ve followed in his tracks, work is the tasks that give life meaning, regardless of whether money is earned.
Suelo, with his philosophical opposition to gainful employment, still seeks the rewards of meaningful vocation. He just finds them in different ways. He certainly does the kind of work of which Thoreau and Lame Deer might approve. “I watched a daddy longlegs bug crawl out into sun from the cave,” he wrote one crisp February morning. “I decided to follow him.” Suelo was impressed by how the spider, with no possessions nor even any food, seemed to wander without destination. “I must have followed him for four hours.”
Suelo tends to speak of his vocation in more abstract terms:
I’m employed by the universe. Since everywhere I go is the universe, I am always secure. Life has flourished for billions of years like this. I never knew such security before I gave up money. Wealth is what we are dependent upon for security. My wealth never leaves me. Do you think Bill Gates is more secure than I?
But the truth is, Suelo does a great deal of what would more conventionally be recognized as work—he just does it without pay.
Damian Nash, in the wake of a 2009 newspaper article that elicited attacks on Suelo as a freeloader, itemized the ways in which Suelo “adds value” when he visits. Among Suelo’s contributions—in addition to the fresh watermelons—are pet watching, tree pruning, car repairing, and spiritual counseling. “I’ll let the accountants of human value put a price tag on all of the above,” wrote Nash. “My estimate is that he gave back at least twice the value he received.”
Removing money from the equation, Suelo’s use of his time might be seen not as adventure or creative expression, but as unpaid labor for projects he deems worthwhile. The three months perched atop that hemlock tree on the Oregon coast ere an endeavor to prevent it from being logged. Painting murals for Moab’s Youth Garden Project is an act of service. When he volunteers at the shelter for women and children, he does the same work he used to be paid for.
Other times, Suelo has taken what most would consider a “real job.” A friend in Moab owned a salmon boat in the Bering Sea, and in the spring was always recruiting deckhands for the summer season. “I’ve always wanted to go to the Aleutians since [I was] a kid,” Suelo wrote. “What was holding me back was I didn’t want to spoil my moneyless venture.” In the summer of 2007 Suelo signed on under one condition: he wouldn’t get paid. Captain Rayburn Pride paid Suelo’s round-trip airfare, and off they went. The crew of three worked around the clock in the notoriously dangerous conditions of an Alaska trawler. On days off, while the others hit the bars, Suelo slept out in the woods, looking for bear and foxes.
When word got around Port Moller that this eccentric gray-haired dude who camped with the grizzlies was working for no money, something like outrage spread across the docks. The young bucks earning their living and their pride in the salmon fleet dubbed him “Free Bird.”
The experience was eye-opening for a man who hadn’t held a regular job in some time. “The hardest part of this has been living under such restriction, especially since I haven’t had ‘gainful’ employment nor a boss for the past 7 years,” Suelo wrote. “My life has been under the captain’s authority 24/7—for this is how a boat must run. The first few weeks were really hard for me, like I had reverted to bumbling childhood & adolescence again.”
After Suelo and the crew met their salmon quota a few weeks early, the others decided to fly directly home. But Suelo wanted to hitch around and see the country. Captain Ray insisted on giving him five hundred dollars for his travels. (The other deckhand had earned ten thousand dollars for his season.) Suelo refused it, but Ray pressed, so Suelo solved the problem by hiding the cash on the boat as they locked it up for the season. The men flew to Anchorage, and when they parted ways in the airport, Suelo admitted what he had done. The captain was mildly annoyed, and pushed another two hundred into Suelo’s pocket. Suelo followed the men as far as the gate and hugged them good-bye. Then he stepped outside, deposited the two hundred dollars in a bus shelter, and set off walking along the railroad tracks, living the next few weeks off wild peas, berries, dandelion greens, wild mushrooms, and salmon plucked from the streams with his bare hands.
Suelo’s various volunteer labors should not, however, obscure his true vocation, which is something like freelance philosopher. He spends his days in conversation, with friends or with strangers, talking politics, economics, love, and God. He is a patient listener, and people who might otherwise lack an audience take full advantage of this trait. On the many days I ate with him at Free Meal, I had to check his forehead to see if there wasn’t an invitation stamped there: PLEASE TELL ME YOUR CONSPIRACY THEORY.
Occasionally some dreamer who has heard about Suelo will arrive in Moab looking for enlightenment. Suelo will spend a few days with the pilgrim, share his food, play tour guide to the best dumpsters and the prime caves. One woman who took the bus from New Orleans had never slept outside or seen snow, did not like walking long distances, and was afraid of bicycles. A more promising student, Roy Ramirez, was a twenty-four-year-old professional poker player from East Los Angeles, one of the few male members of his family to avoid the illegal drug trade and its inevitable incarceration. After a short stint in the military and a custody dispute with his ex-girlfriend, Roy began to seek a more spiritual, less materialistic life. One day he typed the words “living without money” into Google, and was directed to Suelo’s site.
Roy bought a backpack and some outdoor clothing, and his parents delivered him to Moab, where he pledged to live an entire year without money. Roy didn’t love the silence of the canyons, so with Suelo’s guidance he squatted in an abandoned house. He was clean-cut, handsome, charming, and articulate, the kind of guy you’d put on a poster for achieving the American Dream. Roy became a regular at Free Meal, poised on one knee in the grass in his sleeveless shirt like the high school linebacker he once was. He set off for a moneyless adventure, hitching to New York and Washington, sleeping in truck stops and eating from dumpsters, proudly posting photos on his blog. His tutelage was earnest, if a bit remedial.
Roy: “The Bible doesn’t say anything about Noah taking dinosaurs on the ark.”
Daniel: “Oh, yeah! Of course, I tend to not look at it literally.”
When Suelo is not talking, he’s writing. When he was in his twenties, his goal was to “settle down (if that’s possible for me) and work on my writing, which I consider to be my true career.” By a circuitous route, he’s achieved that. He has chronicled his entire adult life in Proustian detail: fifteen years of handwritten letters—thousands of pages—to family and friends, and another fifteen years of mass emails and online journals. He tried his hand at a few books over the years, but he burned the manuscripts before seeking publication. Some of his writing is plain great. If somewhere in the Smithsonian there is a collection titled Americana: Hard Times, Poetic, I nominate this letter for inclusion:
I went down to the train tracks and ran into a 60-something toothless hobo I’d met days before. He was nursing a beer and setting up camp at the underpass. “I was surprised when you came up and talked to me the other day. People usually don’t talk to me,” he said. I vented my cop woes onto him. He asked if I had a Bible. “Yeah, I found one in a dumpster,” I said. “I like to read the Bible,” he said. “Keeps me from getting lonely.” He told me I could hop a train all the way to Bakersfield.
. . .
THESE DAYS Suelo is a fixture at the Moab Public Library, where he maintains his blog and website, and responds to hundreds of emails from all around the world. For years, he sent group emails reporting his travels and musings, but then began posting on the blog instead. His website is a permanent information clearinghouse that outlines his philosophy. It includes quotes from Lame Deer and Abraham Lincoln and the Apostle Paul, a detailed set of Freque
ntly Asked Questions (“You look well-dressed and well-fed; are you a trust-funder?”), and a library of Suelo’s own essays, with esoteric titles like “The Seven-Headed Dragon: World Commerce” and “Contradiction Between Eastern Religion and Christianity: Non-Dualism Embraces Dualism?” And thanks to public libraries, and free net services like Gmail, Blog*Spot, and Google Sites, Suelo has set up his cottage publishing industry without paying a cent.
Though he has published a few pieces in arcane journals, it goes without saying that Suelo does not get paid for his writing. But that’s not uncommon in this line of work. And unlike many so-called legitimate authors, Suelo can boast of an audience. He garners a few thousand readers per month, and his blog posts usually draw a couple dozen comments. Having myself been paid to deliver fastidiously researched and revised articles to national magazines, only to have them hit the newsstands without a blip, I envy Suelo his passionate, if adversarial, readership.
Never one to shy from debate, Suelo cruises chat rooms and his own comment threads, responding to questions, clarifying, or just plain bickering. On a website called MatadorChange, people were discussing whether Suelo was a “social rebel or simply a mooch.” A commenter named Jane came down on the side of mooch. “If you want to have something, then do your part to make sure others can have that thing too,” wrote Jane. “If you eat an apple, then plant the seeds or water the tree. If you consume a resource, find a way to replace it or come up with an equivalent so that the person whose resource it was could replace it for you.”