Free The Man Who Quit Money by Mark Sundeen Page B

with it for about a year. But I started feeling embarrassed because I couldn’t recognize my own friends at a distance, and they were thinking I was “stuck up.” I decided I wanted to see more clearly again, and I was mentioning it to a friend. Another friend, Holly, who worked at the local thrift store, overheard our conversation and told me they had droves of old eyeglasses people donated, and to go and see if any fit my prescription and I could keep them for free. So I tried on several pairs, and the one that I thought looked most cool (Buddy Holly glasses) happened to be just my prescription. I’ve been wearing them since.
    But the bane of Suelo’s moneyless existence is dentistry. “I have gotten a couple cavities the past decade because I’ve eaten too many sweets,” he writes. “Okay, I must be honest and say that teeth and mosquitoes are two things that get me to question the perfection of nature.”
    The remedy? Pine pitch—the same wonder sap from piñons that eases his intestines. Suelo claims that it is both a protectant and antiseptic, and he swears by packing the stuff directly into his teeth. “The summer I worked on the fishing boat I slacked in packing my first cavity in a molar and it grew until the pain was excruciating for about a day. I found my pinyon pitch and packed it again, and the pain vanished. But by that time the cavity was pretty deep, and half my tooth eventually broke off (without pain). I still have half a molar. Another tooth recently developed a cavity, which I’ve also been packing with pitch. It hasn’t been hurting me.”
    I eventually learned that the poor condition of Suelo’s teeth was not, as I had assumed, the result of living without money. Neither for that matter were they actually rotting. In fact he broke his two front teeth in a go-cart accident that occurred while he still had a job and a home. The reason he was unable to repair them was that, like many of us, he lacked dental insurance. In 2010, after years of suffering, Suelo got his teeth fixed. A friend of his parents, a member of their church who had traveled to the Third World to volunteer his services, offered to give Suelo fillings. “I’m not opposed to medical services if a doctor was willing to provide them voluntarily,” Suelo says. “Then I would take them. I don’t like a lot of organized do-goodism. The idea is take what’s voluntarily given—and the people giving it aren’t doing it because they’re getting paid.”
    There was one time when Suelo did, in fact, accept medical help that was not given freely. Visiting his brother Doug in 2004 and helping build shelves, he gashed his thumb to the bone on a shattered jar of screws. Suelo was fairly certain that he could give himself sutures, but his sister-in-law insisted on taking him to the emergency room. The doc cleaned the wound and stitched it up, and sent Daniel on his way. The bill: a thousand bucks.
    Suelo was not willing to just ignore the charge—at the root of his forsaking money is the desire to avoid debt. So he went back to the women’s shelter in Moab where he volunteered, and asked if they would tally his hours, as if he were an employee, and cut a check directly to the hospital. After he had worked off about four hundred dollars of the bill, Suelo wrote to the hospital, asking if they thought it was ethical to charge one thousand dollars for seven stitches. The bills stopped coming.
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    I T’S ONE THING to forsake material goods like food and a home, or privileges like driving a car or flying on an airplane, but I wondered how far Suelo would take it. Would he get sick and die rather than compromise?
    In the time I spent with him, Suelo caught a nasty flu that put him out of commission for a few days, but recovered without any medicine. Yet he is visibly aging. One night as we played a board game, he held the parts to within inches of his nearsighted eyes, complained that he was drowsy and “out of it,” and