Scott Carrier is simply the best writer on the topic of
America today. This may seem to be an over-statement, but if you read his
essays or listen to him speak you know that he
embodies the
soul of
America, or at least that of the
Great American Southwest.
I first heard Carrier on Ira Glass' program This American Life. He was explaining how he and his brother were trying to hunt an antelope by simply running longer than it could. Someone even attempting this lofty goal stunned me. He later said:
"I found an ethnography.. on the Tarahumara, one of the tribes my brother said can run down big game."
"[It] describes races where a group of men from a village eat peyote and smear themselves with white grease and run as a team, tossing a leather ball the size of a hackeysack down a trail with their toes. They run for three days, close to three hundred miles, and the winning team gets to sleep with all the available women in the local village.
"This is the way I want to live."
But he is more than just this one story, he seems to live the way most of us wish we could, simply following the stream of life wherever it takes him. As
David Sedaris put it, "When I call Scott Carrier's essays sad and spooky I mean it in a good way.
Running After Antelope grips, shocks, and then settles in for a long and satisfying haunt."