The Man Who Quit Money Read Online Free PDF Page A

into that neighborhood!”
    While I ask him what he has learned from living without money, he beats back a column of smoke from the second round of tea. I note that he has taken on a certain Oz-like appearance, answering from behind the curtain of smoke. He waves his hands like a sorcerer and intones in a wizardly voice, “Now I have entered the mystical realm!” He busts up at his own joke. “I am a genie in a bottle!”
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    W ITH FOUND AND discarded objects, and a construction budget of zero, Suelo has turned his current cave into a postconsumerhobo paradise. When he first discovered it, the floor was rocky and uneven, so he hauled buckets of sand to level it. He piled boulders at the mouth to block wind and visibility. He collected discarded pots, pans, bowls, plates, knives, forks, spoons, and spatulas. In a sealed plastic bucket he stored rice, flour, noodles, oatmeal and grains, as well as root vegetables like potatoes and carrots, which can last for months in the dry, cool cave. Now fresh groceries hang from the ceiling in a cotton bag, safe from mice and ringtail cats.
    Tucked beneath a north-facing cliff, the cave never gets sun, and even in the daytime it is chilly. As darkness falls, he lights his lamps. While Suelo sometimes finds functional flashlights, the batteries eventually die. Oil lamps arranged on small rock ledges around the cave are a more reliable light source. To make one he simply fills a glass jar with vegetable oil, then inserts a short length of cotton cord into a wine cork, which floats on top. A tinfoil barrier keeps the cork from catching fire, and the wick burns for days.
    That night I unroll my bag across the fire ring from Suelo and, gazing out the cave and up at the bright silent stars, quickly fall asleep. When I awake just after dawn, Suelo is sitting cross-legged on his pad with his sleeping bag draped over his shoulders. He sits perfectly still facing the canyon as the sun creeps down the far walls. Then he lies back down and sleeps awhile longer.
    After morning tea we move out of the cave onto the sunny rock ledges where Phil, the apprentice, leads a session of Qigong, a meditative Chinese martial art. We cycle through such postures as Embracing the Tree and Catching the Ball. With sunlight pouring over the rim and wrens singing, the moment swells toward unreasonable bliss, until Suelo swings at me with somehonky karate chops and blurts in his best Bruce Lee accent: “Now we fight a match to the death!”
    Although he lives with great intention, Suelo seems to go whichever way the wind blows. When he finds binoculars, he takes up birding. When he finds a guitar, he takes up music. When a martial artist arrives in his caves, he takes up Qigong. And so on. “Randomness is my guru,” he told me.
    As such, canyon life is idyllic. Once it warms up, he will take a dip in the creek. When he doesn’t feel like going to town, he can survive for a week or more on his stores and what he forages. As we sit there in the sun he plays a melody on a wooden flute someone carved for him. Juniper and sage and the spindly reeds of Mormon tea shrubs rise out of the bench.
    Yet Suelo does not become too attached. He knows that at any moment a ranger could arrive and whisk him along. The cave does not belong to him. His residence here is explicitly against the law.
    “This is a nation that professes to be a Christian nation,” he tells me, surveying his temporary kingdom. “And yet it’s basically illegal to live according to the teachings of Jesus.”
    Expecting anybody to follow the teachings of Jesus—least of all the United States government—sounds like a pretty naive view of the world. Yet that’s how Suelo was raised, in a family of religious idealists who, like him, don’t accept that modern times are fundamentally different from the times of the prophets and heroes.

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    O NE DAY WHEN he was eleven years old, Daniel returned from playing in the yard to find the