The Man Who Quit Money

by Mark Sundeen

  Masseo did as he was told, spinning till dizzy, stumbling and getting back up. Finally Francis called “Stand still! Don’t move! What direction are you facing?”

  “Siena?” Masseo said, gasping for breath.

  “That is the road God wants us to take,” said Francis. And off they went.

  Juggling his two theories—Thoreau’s premise that living in nature made you stronger, and St. Francis’s belief that following chance brought you closer to God—Suelo soon had the opportunity to test them both.

  . . .

  AS HIS SOLITARY spring of 1997 turned to summer, Suelo met two artists at a local gallery. San Francisco native Leslie Howes was thirty-one and had worked odd jobs in Moab for half a decade, including her own stint grading English papers from Japan. Having graduated from Exeter and Berkeley, and possessing real talent as a writer, painter, and actor, Leslie was a sterling example of the polished flotsam that circles the Moab Eddy. Pedigree notwithstanding, Leslie worked as a river guide and waitress and dated guys named Larry who drove motorboats for a living. Among the traits that endeared her to Daniel was a rapid fluttering of her eyelashes when she was angry, and a propensity to snort while laughing.

  The other new friend was Mel Scully, a twenty-seven-year-old painter from Michigan who’d drifted into Moab for spring break, read a few Ed Abbey books, visited the co-op, hiked into the canyons, and called it home. “The middle of nowhere is fabulous,” she told a friend. “It’s the best place to be.” She stayed for a while in a travel trailer outside the youth hostel, with an extension cord that snaked through the window to a bare lightbulb. There was no running water, but in exchange for chores she stayed free and could use the hostel’s toilet and shower. Soon enough, she moved into a run-down A-frame with four vegans who forbade the cooking of meat on the premises. “Meat eaters are killing Gaia,” explained the woman who owned the pots and pans. “Eventually, I felt too guilty to even open a can of tuna, so I became a vegetarian,” Scully says, “but more out of fear and guilt than some profound insight into not eating meat.”

  When the two women met Suelo, there was magic between the three of them. Suelo was reading the Bhagavad Gita, Scully was reading Star Hawk, and Leslie was reading Virginia Woolf—somehow it all clicked. “My first human connection in eons!” he reported. Leslie told them about Alaska, where she had waited tables at a lodge the previous summer. She had photos: staggering mountains and green rivers and soaring bald eagles. It was a high-paying respite from the sweltering Moab doldrums. She was leaving in two weeks to go back. “If you bring black pants and black shoes, you can get a job in Denali,” Leslie promised. “They’ll give you a shirt.”

  “I’m in,” said Scully, bound to neither her vegan slum nor her waitress job. They turned to Suelo. “Come with us!” they implored.

  Suelo was enjoying his life in the canyon, and working hard to pay off his student loans. But then he started to think. Alaska! Wasn’t that the real place to test his mettle in Mother Nature? And what about Chance? Hadn’t he met these two women for a reason? Why be so attached to his plans? Why not go where the wind blew him?

  The next day he gave notice at the shelter. And off they went.

  “These are a couple of good women I’m motoring with,” Daniel soon reported in a postcard. Yet things were a little more complicated than they first appeared.

  It was true that Leslie wanted to return to her old job at the Princess Lodge, where senior citizens were deposited by train from the cruise ships for a glimpse of Denali and an evening of surf ’n turf and light opera. But it was also true that she’d fallen for an actor there, a member of the troupe that reenacted the 1913 first ascent of Mount McKinley. He was a strong-jawed, strapping fellow whose portrayal of expedition leader Harry Karstens included at least one singing tap-dance number: “Don’t let your feet freeze/Don’t let your feet freeze/Gotta get gotta get—to the top!” While there may have been more significant obstacles to her romantic union with Harry Karstens, the most daunting by far was the three thousand miles of highway between the Canyonlands and Denali. It didn’t help that Leslie was a notoriously poor driver, having wrecked a pair of vehicles in one-car accidents. “I partly invited Daniel to Alaska because I thought he would be a good driver,” she admits fifteen years later. “He’s very handy.”

  Mel Scully was also in love, and the object of her desire would prove even less attainable than the tap-dancing Harry Karstens. She had fallen, at first sight, hopelessly, madly, head over heels in love with the positively homosexual Daniel Shellabarger. And it wasn’t until twenty-four hours before their departure, as the threesome cruised a supermarket parking lot in the Golden Egg—the nom de guerre of Leslie’s Dodge van—that Daniel mentioned his ex-boyfriend and Scully realized that she’d made a grave error. “I turned bright red,” she remembers. She hid her face. But anchors had been pulled. There was no turning back.

  “Did you think maybe you could change his mind?” I asked her.

  “I guess I did,” she said. “I was young and naive.”

  The fact that the bond between Suelo and Scully was platonic did not curb their mutual infatuation. “You snore like a cute little kitten,” Daniel cooed after their first night of camping. Leslie slept alone on the narrow top bunk of the van while Scully and Suelo shared the lower deck. At a hot spring in British Columbia, the chaste lovebirds floated on their backs and passed a cigarette back and forth, blowing smoke toward the cosmos. Leslie couldn’t decide if she was jealous or plain nauseated.

  “Which way do I turn?” Leslie would ask at a highway junction.

  “Star Hawk says that East is Air, South is Fire, West is Water, and North is Earth,” said Scully.

  “Chance is our God,” Suelo added.

  Finally, when her shift was done, Leslie lay on her bunk with a pillow over her head as Suelo and Scully blabbed their heads off on the endless ALCAN Highway. Their point of most joyous consensus was that, yes, Everything Happens for a Reason. All sacred knowledge from Christ to Krishna, from the Wicca to the Spiral Dance, confirmed this. As did their encounters along the highway. Pounding over the potholes at dawn, they felt a lurch as part of the van’s undercarriage thunked to the road: they’d broken a leaf spring. Leslie panicked. They pulled into a diner and at just that moment some Canadian fellow came along and took a look. “I can fix that,” he said. And he spent the next two hours on his back under the van with his wrenches until it was good as new. They tried to pay him but he wouldn’t accept a cent.

  “You see!” said Suelo. “When we needed him, he appeared!”

  “That was no coincidence,” said Scully.

  The next day, after snoozing through another spirited roundtable on the generosity of the universe, Leslie poked her head into the cockpit to join a conversation about birth order. Suelo and Scully had discovered that they were repectively the youngest and middle children in their families, while Leslie was the oldest in hers.

  “Younger children start revolutions,” Suelo said.

  “True. It’s never the oldest,” said Scully.

  Leslie checked the map to find that they were forty miles from the nearest town, then examined the dashboard.

  “We’re out of gas,” she observed.

  They came across a tiny dirt road leading into thick woods.

  “Maybe there are some people down there!” Suelo predicted.

  Or maybe not. But they didn’t really have a choice. They turned off the highway and coasted in neutral down the slight grade into deeper and deeper forest. It was nine o’clock at night and darkness was falling. Had they run out of gas for a reason?

  “I think things happen for a reason if you have something to do with it,” Leslie says. “For instance, if you are too stressed you might get a chronic disease. They both believe if you run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, there will be someone at the bottom of the hill baking cookies. I don’t.”

  How wrong she was. Because as the Golden Egg sputtered to a stop at the bottom
of the grade, they perceived the outline of a ranch house. A lumberjack of a guy emerged, and when they told him their dilemma, he pulled a red gasoline can from his shed and filled them up.

  “Mother’s pulling a batch of cookies from the oven,” he said. “Come in and have a few.”

  . . .

  THEIR FIRST ALASKA destination was Homer, a fishing village on the Kenai Peninsula. Leslie vaguely knew a couple of people who lived there. That the men were gay was evidence enough that the town was some sort of bohemia. When I looked at a map, I saw that Homer was a full two days’ detour from Denali.

  “Wasn’t that a bit out of the way?” I asked her.

  “Was Paris out of the way?” she said.

  By the time the Golden Egg rolled into Homer, the fractures in the trio’s pilgrim spirit had cracked wide open. Suelo and Scully were keen to stay in a funky farmhouse where you could bale hay for room and board, a regular Alaskan kibbutz, a manifestation of the pie-in-the-sky they had been incanting for three thousand miles. Leslie took one look and thought otherwise: “It was a godforsaken youth hostel where everyone stole from each other.” She departed in the van in search of Harry Karstens, and left Suelo and Scully on their own.

  The budding best friends stayed together for a few more weeks. Suelo got the idea to work on a salmon trawler and tried to persuade Scully to join him. But by now, the hopelessness of her cause was apparent. “That’s when I realized I didn’t want to work on a fishing boat with the gay guy I was in love with.” So they parted ways, with Scully finding a job in a lodge and Suelo alone in Homer, contemplating his options. “Money’s almost gone,” he wrote to Tim Wojtusik. “But I kinda get a kick out of flirting with chance.”

  He still wanted to test his theory, that if you stopped worrying and lived like the birds in the sky, the universe would provide. But he was afraid. “Well, Timo, I gave in to the stupidity,” he wrote. “I put my ideals on hold, lost courage—and now I’m selling my self and my dignity to Snug Harbor Seafoods in the vile town of Kenai.”

  Suelo was slinging salmon from the tanks of ships into the big brailers that dumped them at the cannery. It was bottom-of-the-barrel manual labor—dirty, smelly, and wet—with low pay and no benefits and cramped living quarters, on call twenty-four hours a day.

  Like most of the crew, Suelo bitched about conditions: “We work our asses off for little pay, with little sleep and little dignity—and I’m starting to realize how bad this is for my soul. I get into the work itself, in a Zen sorta way, but being under the authority of some pricks, just because they own more than I, whittles away at my spiritual health.”

  What differentiated Suelo from his fellow fish-slingers, though, was how he spent his free time: “I keep studying the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, the Sermon on the Mount, and the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, and I’ve been reading bits and pieces of and about Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, and Tolstoy, and I’ve written pages and pages in my journal, outlining what I’m supposedly learning.”

  He labored on for a month, hating himself for his compromises, confirming that this sort of worry was not adding a single cubit to his stature. Then one day the motorboat broke down. The boss had no choice but to charter as a replacement the skiff of his teenage son, and Suelo found himself taking orders from a thirteen-year-old. In the middle of a shift, he threw down his apron and walked off.

  He hitchhiked across the peninsula to Seward, more determined than ever to put his hypothesis about Nature and Chance to the test. “I’ve thought about every single bit of work I’ve done for money, or even for barter-trade, that I’ve done in my life,” he wrote to Wojtusik, sitting out the rain in an old church converted to a coffeehouse. “And I can’t help but see and feel deeply that it is all wrong—totally wrong…. The way out is still foggy to me, but now I feel it in my bones. I just have to step into the fog—either that or die.”

  And with that, he hiked into the Resurrection Mountains. “Seek first the kingdom of God, all these things will be added to you.” Millions of people quote that bit of Scripture, but how many really try to prove it out? He had saved a few hundred dollars from his last paycheck, but intent on testing Providence, he didn’t bother stocking up on food. In fact, at the trailhead he determined he had packed too much food, and deposited half of it on a picnic table. He knew the human body could survive a few weeks without food. “Look at the birds of the air,” said Jesus. “They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.” He hoisted his soggy pack and marched into the woods.

  The evergreens dripped with rainwater. The path wound through tufts of wet grass and thick alder brush. Moose pellets and bear scat dotted the trail. Dense fog seeped between the trees, and on the occasions when it lifted in the breeze, he could see jagged glacial mountains cutting into the sky.

  And, yes, the Lord provided. Along the trail Suelo found plump berries bursting on the vine. He gorged himself. “I learned some amazing things eating raspberries in the woods,” he wrote. “I mean these raspberries teach earth-shattering principles. We just don’t see the simple truths (the power of Nature) when we get our food from the Supermarket.” He feasted on blueberries, too. Low-lying orange berries with crunchy seeds were particularly nutritious.

  Suelo strung his tarp between two trees by a lake and quickly finished his reserves of store-bought food. He had no fuel or stove. In the pouring rain, it took only a few days for doubts to creep in. “I started to think I was crazy,” he says. “I was embarrassed.” Chatting with other backpackers—the ones sautéing gourmet meals on their ultralight stoves—he did not mention that he was deliberately starving himself to test the message of the Sermon on the Mount.

  This is really stupid, he thought. He was hungry. He couldn’t stand the thought of another berry. His mind wandered to his college anthropology courses. Humans aren’t supposed to live alone, he remembered. We’re social creatures. Anthropologists have compared us to animal societies. Humans are in some ways closer to wolves than they are to apes. Biologically we rely on social interactions. Take the hunt as just one example—working together to bring down an animal. That’s how the wolves coalesced as a pack. Suelo could see spawning salmon literally bubbling as they squirmed up the stream into the lake. Of course he had brought no rod or tackle. He tried halfheartedly to stab them with a stick but had no luck. He remembered reading somewhere about how the Inuit made pronged spears for catching fish. He looked dumbly at his pocketknife. What I as a social creature really need, he determined, is for some Inuit to come along and teach me to spear fish.

  As he wallowed in self-pity, a young guy who had set up camp not far away sauntered up. “¿Hablas español?”

  “Sí,” said Suelo reflexively, then reflected on the coincidence: a dozen miles from pavement, three thousand miles from a Latin country, and the first guy to talk to him spoke the one foreign language he knew?

  The man smiled and continued in Spanish. “I’m out here trying to live off the land. And I want to learn to spearfish. Do you want to come spearfish with me?”

  Suelo leaped up. His doubts evaporated. The experiment resumed! Things were unequivocally Happening For A Reason.

  The two men sharpened their sticks and began stabbing at the thick flow of salmon. After some trial and error, they lashed their pocketknives to the points of the spears, and before long they were hauling fish to camp and roasting them over a fire. The meat wasn’t great—the salmon had gone to spawn and their flesh was past prime—but it provided protein the men craved. They sat contentedly beside the fire.

  Ander was a twenty-year-old Basque from the Andalusian mountains in Spain. Like Suelo, he’d traveled to Alaska with some raw ideas about testing himself against the land. The two got to talking about Nature and Chance. Ander dug it. They decided to travel together. Between them they had no groceries, save a bottle of cooking oil that Ander had brought, which proved handy for panfrying salmon when they got tired of roasting them over an open fire. With their
newfound spearfishing talent, Ander’s expertise at foraging for wild mushrooms, and Suelo’s familiarity with berries, they ate well.

  And they could not escape the sense that some unseen hand was guiding them. One night as they finished another dinner of salmon and mushrooms, they got to talking about the foods they missed. Ander yearned for paella and Christmas dinner, but said what he missed most of all was coffee: dark roasted Colombian, steeped in a glass press and blended with cream. Suelo praised Thanksgiving turkey and stuffing and gravy. And s’mores.

  Ander didn’t know what a s’more was.

  “You know, you roast a, how do you call it, marshmallow, on the campfire, press it between two graham crackers with a square of chocolate—”

  “What is this—marshmallow?”

  “It’s white, fluffy, chewy,” said Suelo. “Made of puffed sugar.”

  “I do not know this thing.”

  Suelo went on at length trying to explain a marshmallow. But it proved indescribable.

  “Someday I’ll show you one,” he said. “Then you’ll understand.”

  The men left their dishes by the lake as the rain poured. In the morning when Suelo went to wash them, he noticed a paper grocery sack. It was dry, meaning it hadn’t been left out all night. He was curious. He peeked inside and saw what looked like groceries. That was awfully strange. Had Ander been holding out all this time? He decided not to let it bother him. Back under his tarp, he watched Ander walk to the shore to retrieve his plates. Ander did the same thing: peeked into the bag, then flashed a dirty look Suelo’s way. All morning the men were standoffish. After all this talk about subsistence, one of them had apparently been hiding an entire sack of food in his pack. Finally Ander crawled out from under his tarp and said, “What’s with this bag?”