The Man Who Quit Money
Page 16
“I thought it was yours.”
“Well, I thought it was yours.”
They crept up on the bag to investigate. They looked around. The other campers had packed up and left at first light. They were the only ones left.
Ander reached into the bag and retrieved something. A bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans.
They looked at each other, shocked. They pulled out the rest of the contents. Sealed packages of exotic Indian food, Madras lentils and Punjab eggplant and spinach paneer. A jar of Thai curry paste and a can of coconut milk. And what was this spongy thing at the bottom? Suelo pulled it hesitantly.
A bag of marshmallows.
HAVING STRIPPED LIFE to its essentials, Suelo felt stronger, sharper, more resourceful than ever. Relinquishing control to Chance, he saw that the universe was providing. Or was it?
Suelo and Ander hiked out of the Resurrections and hitched toward Matanuska Glacier State Park, encountering staggering generosity along the way—people who not only gave them rides but took them into their homes for the night, cooked a hot meal. At the last outpost, they purchased a few basic provisions and then camped at the mouth of the glacier. The blue water poured from beneath the ice into a swift, frigid river. And then things started to go bad.
“Let’s cross the river and camp on the other side,” Suelo said.
The river was too deep and fast to wade across. As they explored upstream, they found that in the transition zone between glacier and river, shallow water poured over a series of ice ledges. The men had no crampons or climbing gear, nor any experience on glaciers, but they decided they could cross. They waded across a cold channel and climbed onto the slick glacier, their toes instantly numb as their boots filled with ice water. The glacier was smooth and undulating, with a series of rivulets and pools where the runoff swept across. They took long steps over the cold channels. But then they reached a wider rivulet. The crystal water was so clear that Suelo couldn’t tell how deep it was. Maybe two feet. Maybe six? The only choice was to jump. Suelo gathered his courage and with a few baby steps leaped across the gap, splatting on the ice on the other side but sliding chest-deep into the freezing pool. The cold water knocked the wind from his lungs. His clothes and backpack were soaked, adding another fifteen pounds to the load, and he clawed his way up and out onto the ice. Now Ander made the same jump, and was submerged over his head into the basin before Suelo pulled him out. Surging with adrenaline and panic, the men darted across the ice field, both dunking a few more times, before scrambling up the banks to dry ground—wet, shivering, and scared.
They built a fire to warm themselves and dry their clothes, but as soon as the flames flickered, the clouds darkened and rain began to fall. Suelo didn’t see any chance of getting dry. They were too cold to cross the river back to where they started. He and Ander squatted over the fire as the raindrops spat on the branches. Both men understood that if they didn’t do something soon, they could freeze to death.
“I’ll go look around for shelter,” Ander said. He trudged into the woods while Suelo wrung out his wool sweater and held it over the flame. After a while Ander returned.
“I found a cabin!” he called. “And it’s open!”
The men packed their wet gear and jogged through the underbrush. Sure enough: a hunter’s cabin was tucked in the woods. Inside were stacks of split fir and a cast-iron stove. Still shivering, they balled up bits of paper and kindling and stuffed in a few logs. Before long, they were warming their hands over a roaring fire as the rain pounded on the roof.
The storm lasted three days. Suelo and Ander strung their soaked sleeping bags and wool pants from the rafters as they fed wood to the fire. It was sobering to realize that they would not have survived in the cold rain with their wet gear. They ate all their provisions, not bothering to forage or fish in the pouring rain. On the fourth morning, the rain eased up and a hint of dull sunlight emerged. They heard the unmistakable buzzing of a Cessna overhead. It circled closer and closer. Were they being rescued? The men bolted out the door and waved. The plane was so low they could hear the hollering of the pilot. It sounded like cursing. And as the plane lifted a wing they heard it distinctly.
“Get the fuck out of there!” yelled the pilot. “Yeah, you! Get your ass out of my cabin!”
Then the pilot buzzed even lower and thrust some dark object out the window.
“He’s got a gun!” said Suelo.
The men scurried back in the cabin, slammed the door, and hit the floor. Suelo felt his chest pounding. The buzzing of the Cessna and the tirade continued for a while, but at last the plane lifted and quiet returned.
Their clothes were dry and the rain had ceased, so Suelo and Ander packed up. Finding pen and paper, Suelo wrote a long note of thanks to whoever owned the place, apologizing for trespassing but noting that the misdemeanor had saved their lives. The men shouldered their packs and hurried back to the river, hoping to cut their losses and get back to safety.
Sheets of summer rain had swept across the glacier for days now, melting tons of ancient ice, and the river had swollen seven feet. The clear swift channel was now a frothing torrent, gray and cloudy as it churned up silt. It had not only deepened but widened to nearly a quarter mile. Swimming was out of the question.
The men explored the bank until they found a cable stretched across the river. On the distant shore was a rowboat tethered to a cable. But they had no way to retrieve it. Nonetheless, the cable glimmering in the sun above the white water looked more promising than the river.
Suelo clasped his hands over the steel, and with his pack straining against his shoulders, hooked his heels and inched his way along the cable. Ander followed. But after twenty feet, Suelo realized this was a terrible idea. The cold braids of steel dug into his palms, and the pain was unbearable. It took all his effort just to keep his grip. And then with a desperate yelp, Ander slipped off the cable, and the rebounding snap pried open Suelo’s fist. In a jumble of arms and legs, both men plunged into the rapids. Suelo held his breath as the icy water pulled him below, then popped up for a breath and swam back toward shore. Luckily they weren’t far. Both men crawled up the bank a hundred feet downstream from where they’d started. Ander was inconsolable.
“Eso es,” he coughed, beginning to weep. “Our lives are over.”
Suelo was thirty-seven and Ander was twenty. For the first time in his life, Daniel felt his paternal instinct kick in.
“We’re going to be fine,” he lied. “It’s all part of the adventure.”
“I don’t want to die,” wailed the Basque.
“No matter what happens, it’s fun,” Suelo insisted.
Their chances of crossing the river alive were about fifty-fifty. If they both went for it, they might both die. But if Suelo went alone and died, at least then Ander would have Plan B. Whatever that was.
“Stay here and don’t worry,” Suelo said. “I’ll go get help.”
Luckily it was warm and sunny. He peeled off his wet clothes and emptied his pack. He discarded all cotton garments that would only soak up water and keep him cold. He dressed head to toe in wool: socks beneath his boots, pants, a sweater, a knit cap and gloves. Then he hiked upstream to where they had crossed four days before. He would stick to that strategy—crossing where water rushed between fins of ice. He waded across the first channel and climbed the glacier. This time he encountered between ice fins not rivulets that could be leaped across, but deep, swirling trenches that had to be swum.
Here goes, he thought, and plunged into chest-deep water, dog-paddled for his life, then dug his fingers into the ice and belly-flopped onto the slab. That wasn’t so bad. But the next swim was worse. The bathtubs gave way to swimming pools. Each time he clawed up the ice, he was sure he must be approaching the far bank, but each time when he stood for a view, the river seemed wider than ever. In the biggest pool yet, he groped up the ice, but it was too steep and slippery. He slid back in. The swirls held him under and he burst to the surface
gasping for air. His backpack, filled with water, pulled him back below.
Your pack or your life, he thought. And in an instant he slipped his shoulders from the straps and let the current take the pack. Free of the load, Suelo scratched his way onto the ice and lay there panting. Surely he must be almost across. But he wasn’t. He was less than halfway, perched on a block of ice in the middle of the river.
Gasping there on his knees, Suelo dropped his head to the ice and began bawling. The show of confidence he’d made for Ander was gone. He was cold and shivering and scared. Upstream, the glacier appeared as a living beast—a dragon—opening its jaws to consume him. He was going to die here.
But then something occurred to him as he lay there sobbing in a heap. I have finally, literally, reached the point of having no possessions, no attachments, no relationships. I have nothing but the clothes on my back. I have hit bottom. It is just me and Nature. This is the point I’ve been trying to reach all along. And with that realization, a burst of energy shot through his veins. I am alive. All those years of wondering whether or not life was worth living, of thinking God had condemned humans to living hell—that was nonsense. I want to live! The desire was new and exotic, and filled him with power.
Suelo stood. He faced the ice dragon.
“Fuck you, glacier!” he called.
Abandoning his plan of pool-hopping across the ice, Suelo dove headfirst into the river and swam. The current swept him quickly downriver as he kicked his boots and crawled with numb hands. Suddenly, though, his mittened hand scraped rock. Then another rock. He opened his eyes and saw alder brush. He hoisted himself by a branch and wormed onto the shore, panting, weeping, overjoyed.
Ecstatic though he was, Suelo was not yet, as they say, out of the woods. He jogged through the forest to a campground where he found a gathering of gray-haired tourists picnicking beside their motor homes. Breathless and delirious in his soaked woolen rags, Suelo bounded into their site.
“Hello!” he called. “I need help!”
One of the land yachtsmen glanced up from his sandwich, then continued eating.
Wow, thought Suelo, experiencing sudden culture shock. He ran to the next campsite.
“Can you help me?” he cried. No one said a word.
At the third Winnebago, Suelo marched right up beneath the extendable awning, dripping and trembling. “I just came across the glacier, I have hypothermia, my pack is gone, and my friend is across the river and he’s going to die. I need help.”
With excruciating hesitation, the campers offered him the backseat in their car, fed him a sandwich, delivered him to the lodge, and drove off. Suelo lumbered inside, his toes squishing in his boots. Behind the counter was a hearty sourdough type—mustache, flannel shirt, knife on his belt. He would know what to do. But as Suelo approached, the guy gave him a cold stare.
It was the pilot.
Before Suelo could speak, the man rose in anger.
“You stupid idiot!” cried the man. “That’s private property. You have no right being over there.”
Suelo slunk back and fell into a chair like a boy in the principal’s office.
“All you dipshits from the Lower Forty-eight,” lectured the man. “You come up to Alaska for some dickhead adventure and expect us to bail you out when you get in trouble.”
Suelo watched the angry lips move but heard nothing. He shriveled. Just minutes before, he’d slain the dragon, swimming that river to save his life, and now he felt like a runt. He recalled his moment of hitting absolute bottom on that hunk of ice. This was worse. In fact, this was worse than death. Would he never put an end to that nagging childhood feeling of being the weakest? Well, if he could stand up to the glacier, he could stand up to this guy.
He lifted his trembling body out of the chair. He walked resolutely toward the man. He inched close enough to smell him, and to drip water onto the wooden counter between them.
“I don’t care what you think of me,” Suelo said. “I need help. I’ve got hypothermia and my friend is dying across the river. Whatever you think, put it aside and help me.”
Something clicked. The man called his wife to fetch some food and dry clothes. He called a geologist he knew who could operate the cable car. He took Suelo back to the river, and they sent a package of food across the cable, with a note saying to hang tight, that help was on the way. The geologist arrived and brought an elated Ander back in the mining car. He even retrieved Suelo’s backpack, which had snagged in a thicket. The lodge owner offered them a place to stay while their stuff dried. The next day the owner went out to the cabin, found Suelo’s note of apology, and then apologized himself. He said they’d had trouble with vandals at the cabin, and when he’d seen smoke rising out the chimney from his airplane, he’d assumed Suelo and Ander were the troublemakers.
Safe and warm and dry, Suelo and Ander set out for the Yukon, heading back to the Lower 48. The hero had slain a pair of dragons, another trial on his journey.
“I felt like I was discovering my own manhood,” Suelo says a decade later. “First the physical thing with the glacier. Then with the lodge owner. I realized I’m a man and I can talk to a man face-to-face. No man can humiliate me. I felt like it was kind of a late time in life to learn that—but that’s when I learned it.”
The most important result, however, of Suelo’s experiments with nature and chance through 1997 was a deeper analysis of his longtime spiritual hobgoblin: money. “I’m realizing that anything motivated by money is tainted, containing the seeds of destruction,” he wrote from Alaska that summer. “That’s the struggle—guess that’s why Van Gogh couldn’t sell his paintings—they had to be pure. There is no honest profession—that’s the paradox. The oldest profession [prostitution] is the most honest, for it exposes the bare bones of what civilization is all about. It’s the root of all professions.”
Part Three
11
. . .
Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work came
from a man’s envy of his neighbor.
This also is vanity and a striving after wind.
—Ecclesiastes
AT FIRST GLANCE, the late 1990s would seem the oddest of historical moments to become disillusioned with money, for the mere fact that there was so much of it floating around. After the fall of the Soviet Union, capitalism reigned triumphant, and America embraced it more firmly than ever. While the culture wars raged over social issues like homosexuality and abortion, in the realm of economics, there emerged a peculiar consensus. With Bill Clinton as their captain, Democrats rallied to causes that CEOs had championed for decades. Clinton and a Republican Congress united to deregulate industry, reduce the welfare state, and open foreign markets by reducing tariffs. The result of the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1993, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (to deregulate broadcasting), the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 (to deregulate banking)—in concert with the boom in computers and finance—was a historic spike in gross domestic product, stock prices, and corporate profits.
Suelo parted with his final dollars in 2000, the same year that the dot-com bubble peaked, NASDAQ reached its all-time high, and Forbes reported, “There’s more money at the top than ever before: a combined $1.2 trillion for the 400 richest Americans, up from $1 trillion last year.” (If instead of foolishly dropping that thirty dollars in a pay phone, Suelo had bought a plot of dirt—and then cannily sold his nano-acre before the crash—his net worth today might surpass one hundred dollars!) At number one was Bill Gates, whose fortune had topped $101 billion, making him the world’s first “centibillionaire.” Meanwhile, his business partner, Paul Allen, was about to drop a cool $100 million for a 301-foot, five-story mega-yacht that housed a movie theater and two helicopter pads. Another significant economic event of that year, in addition to the windfall to whoever found Suelo’s cash in that phone booth, was the largest corporate merger in history, between Time Warner and America Online, to the tune of $152 billion.
Judging by the performance of those candidates at the polls, only a minority of Americans agreed with them. But in the nineties, with the advent of the New Democrats, the opposition to greed seemed to have evaporated altogether. Bill Clinton allowed his party members to straddle a wide chasm—they could still call themselves progressive when it came to fraternizing with gays and listening to Lauryn Hill’s latest disc, but also be “fiscally conservative” and support NAFTA, legislation that a decade earlier would have been decried as rank colonialism. Business kings like Gates and Richard Branson and Larry Ellison were lionized. “Our billionaires were no longer slave-driving martinets or pump-and-dump Wall Street manipulators,” writes Frank. “They were people’s plutocrats, doing without tie and suit, chatting easily with the rank-and-file…. pushing the stock prices up benevolently this time, making sure we all got to share in the profit-taking.”
At the heart of the new consensus was a belief that money itself carried some wisdom. We all want money, went the reasoning, therefore money is good. And if only government with its do-good moralizing would just butt out, we would all prosper. “From Deadheads to Nobel-laureate economists, from paleoconservatives to New Democrats, American leaders in the nineties came to believe that markets were a popular system, a far more democratic form of organization than (democratically elected) governments,” concludes Frank.