Man trading up from paper clip to house

Next up was Shawn Sparks, who was packing up to move from Amherst, Mass., to Alexandria, Va.  Sparks, 35, is a huge fan of Craigslist barters, having acquired his 1993 Chevy Blazer in a trade for a used laptop.

Sparks offered MacDonald a Coleman camping stove.  Sparks had two, and didn't want to lug both on his move. And he needed a new knob for his espresso machine.

Done.  The men celebrated with a barbecue at Sparks' house.

MacDonald gave the camping stove to a Marine sergeant at Camp Pendleton, Calif., getting a generator in return.

East again. MacDonald swapped the generator for an "instant party package" — an empty beer keg, a neon Budweiser sign and a promise to fill the keg — proffered by a young man in Queens, New York City.

Before the trade, MacDonald left the generator in storage in his hotel.  When he went to claim it, he was told it had been confiscated by the fire department because it was leaking gas.

"If there was ever a movie based on all that, that would be the closest to losing it all," he said, recalling his anguish. 

But more on movies later.

MacDonald reclaimed the generator by tracking it to a firehouse in lower Manhattan, where he got a Tootsie Pop from the crew and petted their Dalmatian.

The beer package went to a Montreal disc jockey, in exchange for a snowmobile.

Here's where the project's grassroots purity may have gotten compromised.  MacDonald's blog was attracting attention, and MacDonald was invited onto Canadian television. Our wandering man was asked if there was anywhere he wouldn't go to trade the snowmobile.

An obscure place came to mind, so he spit it out: Yahk, a hamlet in the Canadian Rockies.

Some publicity-seeking ensued.  A snowmobiling magazine offered an expense-paid trip to Yahk in exchange for the snowmobile.  The trip went to Bruno Taillefer, Quebec manager for the supply company Cintas Corp.  He got headquarters to let him give MacDonald a 1995 Cintas van that he had been planning to sell.

MacDonald gave the van — stripped of Cintas logos — to a musician seeking to haul gear.  In turn, the musician, who works at a Toronto recording studio, arranged a recording contract, with studio time and a promise to pitch the finished product to music executives.

MacDonald handed the contract to Jody Gnant, a singer in Phoenix who owns a duplex.

And that is how Kyle MacDonald has turned a paper clip into a year of shelter in the desert.

Where it goes now, who knows. He says he has offers from Hollywood studios to turn his story into a film.

But he pledges not to accept gifts or overly lopsided trades that would undermine the peer-to-peer joy that he says has animated his journey. Asked what he has learned from all this, he responded:

"If you say you're going to do something and you start to do it, and people enjoy it or respect it or are entertained by it, people will step up and help you."

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