by Mark Sundeen
In short, the desert draws a different type of person than the mountains, one whose place in American lore has been largely ignored because it doesn’t fit the Manifest Destiny mythology of the industrious settler cutting a civilized swath in the savage forest.
When I first rolled into the desert at age twenty-two, it was more by accident than design. My attempt to move to the Rockies had failed, and when the road to my second-choice destination was closed, the hitchhikers I’d picked up suggested Moab. That sounded fine. I wasn’t out looking for America, or for myself: I was trying to get away from both. Judging by the cluster of billboards and drive-thrus we encountered on Moab’s main drag—even then, in 1993—I hadn’t gone far enough. But eventually the remoteness of the place became clear. Grand County is the size of Delaware, yet contains fewer than ten thousand humans. When I moved there you had to drive more than an hour to see a movie or buy a pair of shoes. So I stayed, and soon fell in with others like me, and like Suelo, who’d abandoned professional ambitions to wait tables or collect rocks or build adobe houses, who were drawn here partly by the grandeur of the place, but more by the sanctuary it offered from the world outside, or by some dissatisfaction with the place they’d been before, or by just plain restlessness.
These, it turned out, were my people.
While the mountains have their Lewis and Clark and Theodore Roosevelt—mature, reasonable, moralistic—the icons of the desert are different: a mixed bag of dreamers, pilgrims, outcasts, and wanderers. Brigham Young brought his flock out here not to establish an American foothold, but to build a kingdom outside the country that had persecuted them. “The desert and the parched land will be glad,” predicted the prophet Isaiah. “The wilderness will rejoice and blossom.” (While no one could argue that the Mormons’ vast empire around the Great Salt Lake is impermanent, its outposts in the southern canyon country, more than a century after their settling, remain that: outposts.) The land’s native sons, Cochise, Geronimo, and the Mormon cowpoke Butch Cassidy, navigated the wilderness mazes as a fortress from the invasion of modernity. Georgia O’Keeffe and Frank Lloyd Wright were drawn to the otherworldly geometry and isolation, and former park ranger Ed Abbey’s hymns like Desert Solitaire almost single-handedly transformed the perception of the place from a wasteland best left to dirt bikes and miners to a mecca of untamed wonder. And then there is the California teenager Everett Ruess, perhaps the desert’s most enduring saint. Ruess wandered the desert alone in the 1930s, seeking art and inspiration, declared to his diary, “I have seen almost more beauty than I can bear,” then sank into Glen Canyon and was never seen again.
Which is not to say there have been no achievers in canyon country. Padres Dominguez and Escalante set out in 1776 to find a route from Santa Fe to California. The prospector Charlie Steen made a fortune when he struck uranium, and built himself a cliffside mansion that he christened Mi Vida after the mine that helped usher in the era of American atomic power. But for all its discoveries, the Dominguez expedition eventually failed, and looped back to New Mexico. And Steen lost his millions on high living and bad investments; his trophy home, long since sold, is now a steak house called Sunset Grill, with a row of flags out front and a sign proclaiming TOUR BUSES WELCOME! Each spring a new crop of gift shops and eateries in towns like Moab cut their grand-opening ribbons, and each winter an equal number close up shop for good.
We don’t come to the desert seeking the square-jawed ranger and rustic old lodge that invoke the settling of the frontier. We come because the desert feels not yet settled, like another country—or another planet. Its hardscrabble shacks and trailers are as puny as the price sticker on a painting. The scenery is too large to comprehend. It clobbers us. And instead of being inspired to make some permanent mark on the landscape, we sense the permanence of the landscape itself, and the fleeting nature of all human endeavor. In the desert we see the eternal. So while the mountains became a proving ground for manhood, the deserts remain the proving ground for the spirit.
It’s no surprise, really. Historically, deserts are where religions are born. “I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way,” says the prophet Isaiah: “A voice of one calling in the desert.” That voice is understood to be John the Baptist, who lived alone in the desert, eating locusts and wild honey. It was during Jesus’s forty days in the desert that he faced off with the devil and resisted the temptation of a human existence. The holy cities of Mecca, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Bodh Gaya are all in the deserts. One might argue that this is only a historical coincidence, the result of Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed being born in the desert. To which I say: what if Jesus had been born on the Oregon coast? You can bet he would have started chopping down trees and building cabins to get out of the rain—and history would have been very different.
. . .
THREE ELEMENTS MAKE Moab singularly attractive to those looking to get lost. First is its geographical isolation and wildness: “The country was almost inaccessible and it was a bold sheriff who would follow the sandrock trail in search of his man,” wrote historian John Riis. “So Moab became the rendezvous for gunmen and robbers.” Butch Cassidy’s Robbers Roost was nearby, and his notorious Wild Bunch would now and then ride out of the canyons and shoot up town. One of them even killed the sheriff. (This sort of thing continues. On November 19, 2010, a man shot a ranger just outside of town, fled into the canyons, evaded a posse of 130 officers, and hasn’t been seen since. When Moabites studied the comparable topography of Afghanistan where U.S. forces were for so long hunting Osama bin Laden, they shook their heads and concluded, “They’ll never find him.”) The isolated residents apparently preferred it that way. In 1897—the same year builders broke ground on that icon of modernity, the Eiffel Tower—Moab still had no road or railway service, and the only way to cross the Colorado River into town was by ferry. Boosters added to the ballot a ten-thousand-dollar bond to build forty miles of road to the railroad depot. Voters swatted it down by a tally of 74–6. A graded road and river bridge did not arrive until 1912.
Second, Moab has always had a reflexively antiauthority bent. People came here to do whatever the hell they wanted. When in 1878 a settler named Arthur Barney crossed the Colorado where Moab now sits, he and his men found a sign on the bank reading NO CAMPING ALLOWED. In excellent Moab form, they threw the sign in the river and crossed. Half a mile later they met a homesteader woman and asked her about the prohibition on camping. “This is a free country and you can camp where you please,” she said. When Barney mentioned the sign, the woman snapped, “You ought to have throwed that notice in the river.”
The third and final defining element of Moab was a certain, not to say “sloth,” but people here were just different. They worked as hard as it took to survive, but not a lick more. They didn’t have that drive that made frontiersmen famous. As early as 1900 a local doctor diagnosed Moab Fever. “Its chief symptom was laziness, and it was prevalent locally because it was so easy to survive in Moab but so difficult to get wealthy there,” reports historian Richard Firmage. In modern times, that ailment has been renamed the Moab Eddy, after the river feature in which water circles indefinitely without venturing downstream. It has caused many a young man and woman to squander a college education working low-status, low-stress, and low-paying jobs such as waiting tables, monitoring campgrounds, or rowing boats.
As a result, Moab attracts plenty of hermits, and it’s natural to list Suelo in their ranks. But a hermit is someone whose mistrust of humanity is so complete that he chooses isolation. The hermit will barter for sustenance, but considers the process a necessary evil, the weak link in his quest for total independence. Suelo’s rationale for giving up money is the opposite. “In America we have this idea that everyone should be self-sufficient, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps,” Suelo says. “A lot of people think that’s why I’m doing this. But really it’s about acknowledging that there’s not a creature or even a particle in the universe that’s self-sufficient.
We’re all dependent on everybody else. I’m dependent on the hard work of other people, just like they’re dependent on mine. But to say we’re all dependent on the money system is a different thing.”
Quitting money has not impeded his ability to join a community. Quite the opposite—Suelo is a social butterfly. When he and a friend, a Buddhist monk, were camped in Marin County, California, they would pore over concert listings in the city weekly, then pedal their clunkers across the Golden Gate. Parking their bikes (unlocked, of course) at the box office for a Ravi Shankar show, the monk explained to the bouncers that he and Suelo lived without money, and would like to see the show. The doormen whisked them on through. When in Portland, Suelo is a regular cook and participant at the Food Not Bombs free meal served in a city park. The month he squatted on the University of Florida campus proved a cultural smorgasbord. “I’ve gone to free films, some talks, Quaker services, Krishna feeds and events, Jewish events, a Muslim event,” he wrote. “I even got to hear a talk by Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor & Nobel-laureate author. I also get free personal concerts from guys who come out to the forest boardwalk to drum, as well as a righteous bluegrass banjo player who comes out to pick for fun. I’ve made nice friends here.”
And while he’s home, his social calendar is packed. He’s been known to play poker, losing the buy-in floated by a friend. “He’s a fabulous dancer,” reports Melony Gilles. When a good band is playing at the bar, she offers to pay his cover charge. I’ve attended music night in Conrad Sorenson’s lair, with Chris Conrad and Brer Erschadi blowing didgeridoos, Suelo banging a gong, and Sorenson lying on his back under the piano, howling into the reverberating strings. For Suelo’s fiftieth birthday, he invited friends on Facebook to a potluck at the home of Damian Nash. BYOB, naturally.
The Moab community that embraces Suelo did not hatch overnight. And the reason I return to Conrad Sorenson is that the health food store he operated there for two decades was the hub of the town’s bohemian subculture, a beacon toward the moneyless life that Suelo has since adopted.
By the time Sorenson arrived in 1974, the quiet farm town had emerged as the uranium capital of the world. In 1956, McCall’s magazine reported that, as home to between twenty and thirty millionaires, Moab had the world’s highest concentration of them. The most notorious, Charlie Steen, liked to charter his airplane to circle above the valley so he could watch television—the town was still too isolated to pick up broadcast signals. The uranium frenzy brought booming business in the mills and mines, and workers flooded in from out of state. Local kids dropped out of high school to earn twenty dollars an hour and buy their first house. And with the establishment of Canyonlands and Arches national parks, in 1964 and 1971 respectively, the town became a seasonal magnet for visitors, and a year-round residence for rangers and administrators. This influx of tourists, rangers, and miners gave Moab further diversity, and even tolerance.
Conrad and Gerda launched Moab’s first health food store, which, in addition to the spelt and quinoa, served her home-baked pies and distributed his eclectic taste in literature. The store closed after four years, but by then hippies had gained the critical mass to form a cooperative, purchasing bulk oats and polenta and selling them to members from a small storefront three days a week. Conrad volunteered to manage the floor, and after some disagreements with the directors, dissolved the board and took the helm. As a result, although Conrad was able to sign checks and access the bank account, he was never legal proprietor. “It was an unowned business,” he says. For almost two decades, the Moab Co–op was a case study in utopian anarchy, with Conrad as the benevolent dictator. Nobody—including Conrad—was ever paid a wage. Volunteers recorded their hours in a ledger and were then allowed to take approximately four dollars’ worth of food per hour. The system was loose. “I never looked at the book,” Conrad remembers. “We got ripped off regularly. But something was working.
“My mission was to provide organic food at cost,” he says. Any profits were either poured back into the business or outright given away. Living rent-free in his sod hut, Conrad could afford to give away hundreds of books and loads of food. He particularly prided himself on sussing out a stranger in a few short minutes, and then gifting an appropriate book. Among the browsers at his first store was noted author and philanderer Ed Abbey. “I had a sexy woman behind the counter,” Conrad says. “He came in to chat up the boobs.” Conrad gave him a book about feminism.
“By giving things away right and left, by having no interest in turning a profit, we had loyal customers from Salt Lake City and Colorado who came to shop,” he says. “They saved so much on food that it paid for the price of the drive—and they got a little vacation. I put thousands of dollars into the library. Despite all that, we grew twenty percent each year.”
The co-op ultimately rented an entire building—an old plumbing shop constructed of World War II wooden ammo boxes with a canopy of trumpet vine shading the porch. More than half the building was dedicated not to retail, but to community space. There was a free lending library with thousands of titles, an art and dance studio, a xylophone gallery. On the back sofas you might find women nursing babies, couples making out, somebody waking up after crashing there for the night. Conrad lingered nearby—he says he worked about eighty hours a week—offering free advice on herbal remedies and love affairs. Below the surface of Moab’s Mormon ranching and mining establishment lay a counterculture, and the co-op became its den, Conrad its Fagin.
It was through these doors that Daniel Suelo walked in the winter of 1992. Damian Nash had invited his friend to come live with him while he recovered from depression. On the evening of Suelo’s arrival, Nash was screening movies in the back room. Suelo found the old building. The wooden door creaked and as he crossed the concrete slab floor the place smelled of tamari and lavender oil. In the aisles, men in cutoffs and flip-flops stocked the shelves with hand-packed baggies of granola and dried mangoes. Behind the counter, a dreadlocked girl in flowing skirts, baby on hip, weighed out grains on a stainless-steel scale and punched the numbers into an antique register.
“People who live this lifestyle ended up at the co-op,” says Suelo. “And of course that planted ideas in my head. Showed me that there were alternative ways to live.” Moab provided the community that Daniel had sought. Soon he began working the floor in exchange for food, one of his first steps toward forsaking money.
Beyond the co-op, Suelo found other sectors of the Moab community where the value of money wasn’t a given. He landed a job as a prep cook in a health food café. “It feels really good doing mindless work,” he wrote to a friend. “And the people I work with are great people. So many folks in Moab are so down-to-earth. It’s refreshing.” Chopping spinach and boiling beans in Honest Ozzie’s felt more like hanging out in the family kitchen than going to work. “It really feels nice getting my concentration off ‘career’ and onto life,” he wrote. He felt “more and more a part of humanity, with no hierarchy—not separate from, not above or below anybody—just a common member of humanity. Loving our neighbor as ourself! That is what life is all about.”
This was where I met Daniel in the summer of 1993, on my own nebulous quest to pursue life instead of career, and I can attest that Honest Ozzie’s was a good place to do it. Ozzie’s was situated in a converted old cottage with plenty of outdoor seating, and it specialized in natural foods like locally grown pinto beans, whole-wheat pancakes, and all things soy-derived. Having worked a summer flipping burgers, I was hired on the spot as breakfast cook—the previous guy had quit to float the Grand Canyon. (Nobody asked for my résumé, with its bachelor’s degree in English literature.) With waiters and cooks like me more interested in living than working, Ozzie’s was the kind of place where forty-five minutes after the waitress took your order for veggie enchiladas, you might get up to investigate and find her doing cartwheels on the lawn with a golden retriever.
But the food was great and who cared about the customers, right? It was a fine
time to be footloose in Moab. By then the Atlas uranium mill was boarded up, and in that brief window between the uranium and mountain-biking booms, one could live virtually for free in the most spectacular place on the planet. Jobs were plentiful and easy to get—in cafés and bike shops and white-water raft outfits. Wages were strictly minimum, but rent was negligible. Mere river guides were buying cinderblock homes for no money down, just picking up the hundred-dollar mortgage payment after the miners packed up and left.
And once it got hot, who needed a house anyway? A few newly met friends and I circled our dented station wagons in a thicket by the creek and lived in our tents all summer. All our needs were met. We bathed in the river. Food was easy enough to come by—guiding and restaurant jobs fed us on the clock—and the co-op was dirt cheap, or even free if you volunteered. Each night during happy hour at the Rio Bar and Grill we drank dollar pints and ate half-price nachos and chicken fingers—a fine meal for less than five bucks.
Suelo did not simply decide one day that he’d live in a cave. Just as giving up money was an incremental journey over many years, giving up a home was something he did gradually. In the same way that men who are obsessed with prostitutes become vice cops, Suelo’s fascination with the homeless had led him to work in shelters, and while he’d been working in Denver, something happened that changed his perception of charity. He’d been invited to sit on a panel on homelessness for a sociology course at CU. The students invited a handful of social workers and a handful of residents of local shelters. To spice things up, they also trawled the Boulder Mall and brought back a smattering of punks and hobos panhandling on the streets. All three groups sat onstage together.