The Man Who Quit Money

by Mark Sundeen

  Nobody on the ferry would even look at him, much less smile or say hello. He wondered if he smelled bad from the bus trip. He had never felt so unwelcome. Disembarking in Nova Scotia, he started to hitchhike. No one picked him up. He stood there all day. Did he look strange, or dangerous? Finally an old Christian couple stopped for him. He told them about his quest, and they seemed to understand. They took him all the way to the final spur road, wishing him the best.

  Only ten more miles. Daniel began walking on the dirt road and put out his thumb. An occasional car passed him but none even slowed down. The woods became deeper and darker. Children playing in the yards of farmhouses scurried behind trees when they saw him. He walked and walked and walked, pack straps digging into his shoulders and his heels rubbing to blisters.

  It was dusk when he reached the private road to Gandhi Farm. Naked maple branches hung low over a carpet of brown leaves. Despite the bad vibe he’d gotten all day, he was still thrilled. But when he rounded the final bend and the farmhouse came into view, a shudder raced down his spine. The hulking Victorian farmhouse was a black silhouette against the twilight, windows smashed and curtains shredded to ribbons whipping in the wind. It looked like something out of a Stephen King movie. He took a few steps backward, reassured himself. Finally he climbed the steps to the porch. Shards of glass crunched beneath his boots. The planks creaked. The door hung open on battered old hinges, groaning in the wind.

  “Hello?” he called. “Anybody home?”

  Just the groan of the hinges and the whistle of the wind and the flutter of the curtains.

  “Is anyone here?” he called out. The hair on his neck stood up.

  He pushed through the door. He flipped a light switch but it was dead. He tore through his backpack for a flashlight, panting for breath. He swept the beam across the room. Not much to see. He found the remains of an old ledger. He recognized the name of the farm’s founder in the scrawl. October 21, Philip’s parents came by to pick up his belongings. No more entries. More than a month of empty lines on the page. Upstairs he found a wall calendar inscribed with someone’s scribbling. August 21. Dug for water but well is dry. August 22. Dug for water but well is dry. August 23. Dug for water but well is dry. This went on for weeks.

  Suelo wanted to flee, but it was cold and dark and he had nowhere else to go, so he spread his sleeping bag on a cot and lay down. He didn’t sleep much. At first light he packed his bag. He lifted his boot and took a step down the road. Then another. Again he walked all day with no rides.

  At dusk someone stopped. “I saw you on my way to work,” said the driver. “Now I’m on my way home, and you haven’t gotten very far. No one’s going to pick you up out here.” The man went out of his way to drive him to the nearest town.

  Daniel considered the fifty dollars in his pocket. If this wasn’t the Bad Thing, it would do until one came along. Now what the hell was he going to do? With a glimmer of hope, he fired off an email at the public library to a guy he knew in Halifax. Within a few days they had met up, and his friend said there was this girl, Lorelei, he wanted Daniel to meet. A kindred spirit.

  And sure enough, it was like he and Lorelei had known each other forever. She was a fiery redheaded sprite who had been living on the road for years. She talked about past lives and energy and harmony with plants and animals. Turned out she had spent some time at Gandhi Farm the previous year. So Daniel didn’t feel self-conscious about telling her his quest.

  “I want to live without money,” he said.

  “Me, too!” she said.

  Off they went. With enough faith, the universe would provide. It was dangerous—an urban and industrial landscape, with “No Trespassing” signs everywhere you looked, far from his wide-open canyons and mountains. But the rides came easy. People were much more likely to pick you up when you were traveling with a girl. Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York. Oh, it was glorious, tumbling southward with the falling leaves. “Life has been magical for us,” he wrote. “Fantastic things happen when you’re at the mercy of chance! One couple who picked us up told us all they asked is that we do something for somebody else. They said this is a concept few understand, but that it is most important.”

  And then at a truck stop on some Pennsylvania highway, he crossed the final threshold. He and Lorelei had been waiting for two hours with no luck. Flurries of snow swirled in the gloom. His coat was thin. Rows of big rigs rumbled in the parking lot, rainbow splotches of diesel seeped across the asphalt, paper soda cups lay flattened beneath tire tracks in the slush. Once again, anxiety threatened, this worry about some imminent Bad Thing. The Bad Thing that only money could remedy.

  Suelo removed the fifty dollars from his pocket. He went into the truck stop, spent a dollar on a stamp and envelope, and mailed twenty dollars to his sister—he still owed her for that parking ticket. His final debt was paid.

  He returned to the parking lot. Motorists came and went, pumping gasoline into their vehicles and pouring coffee into themselves. Suelo regarded this scene of mundane commerce with agitation. As he sank deeper into concentration, he felt a growing thrill, as if some revelation were near.

  And it hit him: the fifty dollars was not the cure for his anxiety, the fifty dollars was the cause of it. The Bad Thing would happen, sure. No amount of money, not fifty dollars, or a million, could keep it at bay. Because after all, what was the worst Bad Thing? Death. Mortality. The End of Time. That was the thing he was afraid of. But the Bad Thing came to everyone eventually, and when it arrived, not even money could buy it off.

  Money perpetuated the fantasy of immortal earthly life, the illusion that we could determine the future. Suelo was ready to reject this illusion once and for all. The fifty dollars was merely keeping him from what he needed most: faith. If he wanted to know true faith, he had to accept that there was nothing in the material world to fall back upon. Faith was the only salvation from the Bad Thing. So let it happen. “If we embrace holy poverty very closely,” said Saint Francis, “the world will come to us and will feed us abundantly.” If Suelo believed that Providence would carry him safely, then it didn’t matter what came next. He would be fine, with or without a bit of cash in his pocket.

  He took his last thirty dollars into a phone booth and left it there, folded it on top of the telephone.

  “Somebody has to take the first step to escape from servitude of money,” he would later write. “Digging a tunnel out of the prison, and then showing fellow prisoners that life outside the prison is abundant, without judging the fellow prisoners—that is the challenge.”

  Suelo turned and walked across the parking lot, leaving the money behind.

  The heavens broke open. It was mere rain, but to Suelo it felt like something warmer than honey pouring over his head and coursing down his shoulders. He stood paralyzed in ecstasy, embraced by grace, by the love that flows freely across the cosmos. Forgive our Debts, Cut the Tangle, Break the Circle. And when the baptism was over, when the tingling subsided in his trembling limbs, he knew he had arrived in the right place.

  It doesn’t matter where I am, he now knew. Wherever I am, I’m at home.

  13

  . . .

  another year is gone

  a traveler’s shade on my head,

  straw sandals at my feet

  —Basho

  IN 1953 A woman set off on foot from Los Angeles with nothing but a toothbrush and a sheaf of leaflets calling for an end to all war. Dressed in a plain blue tunic with PEACE PILGRIM printed on the front, the woman, who would not give her birth name, crisscrossed the country for three decades, walking more than twenty-five thousand miles before she stopped counting. Peace Pilgrim never earned or spent money, relying on people she met for food and shelter. Sometimes she went days without food, and slept by the side of the road.

  Those like Suelo who imitate Peace Pilgrim’s most radical version of the simple life generally do so alone or in very small numbers. A German woman named Heidemarie Sch
wermer has lived without money for fourteen years, and an Irish man named Mark Boyle has been moneyless for two. Suelo traveled for a few months with a band of Jesus Christians who call themselves a “live-by-faith, work-for-God-not-money Christian community.” Despite the similarities, one would be hard-pressed to argue that a handful of moneyless individuals constitutes a movement.

  That said, the spectrum of those who practice voluntary simplicity is wide, and not all do it alone. In 2000—the same year Suelo quit money—a punkrocker calling himself “koala” outlined an emerging anticonsumerist philosophy in a pamphlet titled “Why Freegan?” “If you are an anti-capitalist,” he wrote, “what better way to protest the economy than withdrawing from it and never using money?” The pamphlet offered tips on dumpster diving, shoplifting, squatting, and foraging, and concluded, “There are two options for existence: 1) waste your life working to get money to buy things that you don’t need and help destroy the environment or 2) live a full satisfying life, occasionally scavenging or working your self-sufficiency skills to get the food and stuff you need to be content, while treading lightly on the earth, eliminating waste, and boycotting everything.”

  Freegans, like the WTO protesters of 1999, were reacting to boundless consumption and ecological waste. The website freegan.info defines the goal as “a total boycott of an economic system where the profit motive has eclipsed ethical considerations and where massively complex systems of productions ensure that all the products we buy will have detrimental impacts most of which we may never even consider. Thus, instead of avoiding the purchase of products from one bad company only to support another, we avoid buying anything to the greatest degree we are able.”

  By decade’s end, the ethos had gained enough adherents to be identified as a movement, particularly in coastal cities like San Francisco, Portland, and New York. Freegans are the latest in a tradition of radical simplicity dating back to the Shaker colonies of the eighteenth century and to Thoreau and the Transcendentalists in the nineteenth century. Its modern practitioners vary widely. In the 1940s, a band of nude long-haired young men known as Nature Boys roamed the canyons of Southern California, sunbathing, sitting in lotus, and browsing raw fruits and vegetables. In the 1960s, a San Francisco anarchist group called the Diggers—they took their name from the seventeenth-century radical communitarians—opened free stores and gave away food and medicine. Each year since 1972, busloads of hippies have congregated on public lands for Rainbow Gatherings, weeklong spiritual and artistic celebrations in which the exchange of money is forbidden. Abbie Hoffman’s 1970 manifesto, Steal This Book, preached revolution through free food, housing, and transportation: “In a country such as Amerika, there is bound to be a hell-of-a-lot of food lying around just waiting to be ripped off.” In 1981, a band of antinuclear protesters collected and served vegetarian food at a protest in Harvard Square beneath a banner demanding FOOD NOT BOMBS. The loosely affiliated group has since disseminated the message—and the meals—worldwide.

  In 2007, a young man named Brer Erschadi hitched into Moab. A native of Oklahoma, he had cooked and served at Houston’s Food Not Bombs, and thought Moab was ripe for something similar. By then Conrad Sorenson’s freewheeling food co-op had folded, replaced by a retail food store, and the town lacked an off-market food source. Working with his new girlfriend, Heila Habibi, Erschadi rode his bike around to restaurants, asking for leftover food.

  “What group are you with?” they asked, raising an eyebrow at this lanky bearded fellow with size-fourteen shoes towing a wooden cart behind his junker. When he replied that he was working on his own, he got mostly slammed doors. “We asked for donations from churches but no church would help us,” he says today. “Didn’t want us in their kitchen.”

  Brer and Heila were not easily discouraged. “Our first free meal was straight out of the dumpster,” he says. On a spring day in 2008, he and Heila hauled their grub back to the shack they shared with five other people and began cooking. There was a sense of urgency—the place didn’t even have a fridge, and the food was already ripe. They cooked up a pot of soup and tossed a salad. Then they loaded up the bike carts and rode to the corner of Main and Center and commandeered the sidewalk.

  “We didn’t have tables or chairs or cars,” he remembers. “We set the pots on concrete. Twelve people came. It was really fun and inspired.”

  Tourists and passersby looked on with curiosity at the ragged band of bean-eaters. Those in attendance were rock climbers and transient kids. Erschadi is as handsome as a movie star, and with his flecks of gray hair and the gangly body of a teenager, it’s hard to determine his age. Heila is also a stunning beauty, and has the same black hair and olive skin as Brer—both of their fathers were born in Tehran. Parked on a sidewalk in rural Utah, they were downright exotic. A cop asked some questions, but as soon as he found they weren’t charging money, he backed off. “He had a bowl of potatoes with us and went on his way,” says Erschadi, who had been hassled by plenty of Houston cops at Food Not Bombs.

  “I was actually aching for a confrontation,” he admits now. “I was pretty angry at the time. I wanted to unload on someone.”

  He would get his chance. The first meal was a success, and they made it a regular gig, collecting more cooks and dumpster divers and regular diners. Then one day the health inspector asked to see their permit. Erschadi announced that he didn’t need a permit because he was merely having a potluck. The inspector insisted.

  “If I have two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches in my backpack,” said Erschadi, “and go on a hike and want to give one to my girlfriend, do I need to get your fucking permission?”

  The health inspector decided not to push his case with a crew of irate anarchists. “He told me I had to call some number and apply for such and such permit,” says Erschadi. “But I never did.”

  When Brer and Heila had a baby, a firefighter named August Brooks took over Free Meal. His connections to civic leadership brought new legitimacy. Restaurants and even the school cafeterias donated food. Throughout 2009 and 2010, volunteers collected and served a meal every single day, rain or shine or snow.

  Free Meal was revolutionary in its simplicity. All the food that would otherwise crowd the landfill instead ended up in people’s bellies. No one was turned away. No money changed hands. The food varied day to day from marginal (elementary school cafeteria pork and beans) to passable (day-old pizza) to inspired (prime rib and potatoes.) Unlike Food Not Bombs, Free Meal was not vegetarian. They would eat anything, as long as it had been discarded and was headed for the landfill. The program accepted no cash donations and no purchased food.

  “People think this is a soup kitchen, but it’s not,” August Brooks says. “This is about getting people from all walks of life together.”

  Indeed, what sounds radical on paper felt more like a picnic: a friendly gathering of all sorts of people, from homeless drifters to nine-to-fivers on their lunch breaks. The unintended consequence of choosing not to eat one’s own food, in home or office or restaurant, was the fellowship of sharing a meal with strangers, of making new friends.

  “People get a meal out of it, but that’s not why they come,” says Suelo. “They’re craving a social interaction that’s just gone from most of our society. It feels like real community.”

  I agree. I had found that as I gained some semblance of financial independence, I’d begun to miss the community I’d created when I had less. Throughout my twenties, my goals were minimal consumption and maximum freedom. I worked part-time seasonal jobs and spent the rest of the year traveling and writing. I earned so little money that I hardly paid taxes. All of my possessions fit inside a truck. I lived communally, not exactly by choice, but because I couldn’t afford my own place. During guiding season, I camped out for weeks at a time with teenagers, only to return for days off at a crusty staff house where, if I wasn’t lucky enough to score a bunk, I unrolled my sleeping bag on the floor.

  I loved this life. But as the years rolled on, I
found myself yearning for my own space. When I was thirty-five I finally got it: I bought a small house on a tree-lined street where, for the first time, the room where I wrote was not the same as the one in which I slept. Although I lacked collateral and income, I qualified for a loan at low interest. I worked from home, no longer forced to leave my castle to earn money.

  The costs of living the dream, however, were great, and I don’t just mean the mortgage, property tax, home insurance, utility bills, health insurance, and retirement savings. I lost the freedom I’d had to stop paying rent and spend a few months in the truck. But the most surprising by-product of my economic independence was this: I was lonely. I became restless and anxious. I yearned for the inconveniences of having to put up with other people.

  Study after study shows that the accumulation of wealth and goods is accompanied by a decrease in happiness. And so it’s no surprise that in the boom decades, the spectrum of those drawn, like me, toward a simpler life has widened. The ideas put into radical practice by Suelo have also seeped into the mainstream. Amid the decade’s economic convulsions, you didn’t have to be an anticapitalist to surmise that the system wasn’t working. In 2001, the dot-com bubble segued into the real-estate bubble, and easy credit enabled more buying while masking the financial risk. Between 2005 and 2009, publishers brought out no fewer than four books with the title Affluenza—defined in a PBS documentary as the “epidemic of overconsumption.” Other alarming titles included The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (1999), The High Price of Materialism (2002), and Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (2005).