Forty eight-year-old American Daniel Suelo is the ultimate economic rebel. He is also the subject of an interesting case study on how to live without money; a single coin, in this debt-ridden day of mortgage foreclosures and looming recession.
Since 2000, Suelo has been living in a cave in the Utah mountains, eating grasshoppers and foraging the meagre land. He sleeps next to a nest of scorpions who seem to ignore him. Suelo has watched mountain lions come to drink from a brook that flows below. But he isn’t afraid or insecure. He is the man who decided to stop using money.
In 1999, Suelo traveled from a Buddhist monastery in Thailand to India, where he sought the company of sadhus. From them, he learned the freedom of being poor, yet unfettered. “I wanted to be a sadhu,” Suelo told Details magazine in an interview. “But what good would it do to be a sadhu in India? A true test of faith would be to return to one of the most materialistic, money-worshipping nations on earth and be a sadhu there. To be a vagabond in America, a bum, and make an art of it — the idea enchanted me.”
The exile’s home is hidden high in a canyon thundering with the sound of waterfalls, and an hour’s walk from the desert town of Moab, Utah. “From the outside, the place looks like a hollowed teardrop, about the size of an Amtrak bathroom, with enough space for a few pots that hang from the ceiling, a stove under a stone eave, big buckets full of beans and rice, a bed of blankets in the dirt, and not much else. Suelo’s been here for three years, and it smells like it,” Christopher Ketcham describes Suelo’s dwelling in Details magazine.
It's not as if he doesn’t like his home. Recently, the suntanned lanky exile built a new staircase using huge boulders. “His hands are black with dirt, and his hair, which is going gray, looks like a bird’s nest, full of dust and twigs, from scrambling in the underbrush on the canyon floor,” Ketcham describes his first meeting with the modern day cave dweller.
Suelo uses an old cookie tin as a stove, and has devised a string of empty soup cans fitted to a hole in the rock that’s serves as a chimney. His food comes from the land, his drink from the cool creek below his cave, which is also his swimming pool.
“When I lived with money, I was always lacking,” Suelo writes. “Money represents lack. Money represents things in the past (debt) and things in the future (credit), but money never represents what is present.”
Suelo’s distaste for money and modern economics was the result of a life-changing experience in an Ecuadorian mountain village. The anthropology graduate from University of Colorado wanted to be a doctor. But in 1987, he joined the Peace Corps and was sent to a village high in the Andes mountains.
His task was to monitor the health of tribal villagers, teaching them first aid and the benefits of nutrition, and giving them medicine when they fell ill. He even played midwife, delivering three babies. The inexorable march of modernity was coming to the village too.
Suelo discovered that the money the villagers got from selling produce from their fields — quinoa, potatoes, corn and lentils — was used to buy things they had never needed: soda, white flour, refined sugar, noodles and artificial flavors. Soon they acquired television. Strangely, all this increased expenditure was telling on their health. He used charts to correlate their spending and well-being.
“It looked like money was impoverishing them,” Suelo told Ketcham.
The experience shook Suelo. He worked at a women’s shelter in Moab for five years. He felt, being paid for helping people seemed dishonest, somehow. Help had to be free. “Giving up possessions, living beyond credit and debt,” Suelo writes on his blog, “freely giving and freely taking, forgiving all debts, owing nobody a thing, living and walking without guilt... grudge [or] judgment.” If grace was the goal, Suelo told himself, then it had to be grace in the classical sense, from the Latin gratia, meaning favour, and also free.
Suelo lives like a prince of the wilderness: his morning tea is brewed from piñon and juniper needles. His meals are made with mustard plants that grow among the rocks, watercress from the creek and wild onions. When the weather is unfriendly, Suelo lives on ants, grubs, termites and lizards, probably the result of having previously lived in South East Asia.
“Hardship is a good thing. We need the challenge. Our bodies need it. Our immune systems need it. My hardships are simple, right at hand — they’re manageable,” he told Ketcham. Suelo learnt an invaluable lesson from an alcoholic panhandler who used to live in a neighbouring cave. When he would get enough gold from the stream, he would sell it and get drunk with the proceeds. “What if we saw gold for what it is?” Suelo wonders. “Gold is pretty, but virtually useless. Somebody decided it has worth, and everybody accepted this decision. The natives in the Americas, thought Europeans were insane because of their lust for such a useless yellow substance.”
A common image is of the seeker who is searching for the meaning of life, climbing a mountain to reach the sadhu at the top. In this case, the sadhu of Utah may have the last word.