Through the cracks Department:Books

Running After Antelope

Scott Carrier (2001)

 

Those of us who came of age during the 1960s (which began in 1968 and ran mostly during the 1970s) look back on that era with varying degrees of fondness, embarrassment, and regret. In those days we lived in “houses” in ever-shifting constellations of male and female friends. We volunteered at the coop and ate brown rice at the Earth Kitchen, convinced that it was not only healthy but virtuous to do so. We communed with nature, hitchhiked with heedless abandon, read Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki, marched against the government, and studied arcane and even frivolous academic subjects and languages not because they were practical but because we found them interesting. The voting age was lowered and the drinking age was raised. Paranoia was rampant among the young, (often with good reason), radicalism was chic, and plastic recycling bins were a welcome novelty—a sign of better things to come.
I remember one late-summer evening in the early 1970s. My brother had just rented an apartment on 4th Street in Dinkytown, and I had gone down to spend the night with him. Anti-war protests had taken place that afternoon, and as we drove through campus we saw a large pack of growling police-dogs behind the fence at the impound lot of Kohler’s Towing Service. As it turned out, they were never unleashed, but that image of potential violence stayed with me.

Later that evening, as I was helping my brother clean up his new apartment, I noticed a phrase penciled faintly, but precisely, onto the pale green paint of the kitchen wall in capital letters.

LESS IS (MORE OR LESS) MORE

Thirty years later, that adage still returns to me from time to time. Beneath the vision of new-found simplicity that inspired the hippie movement lay the awareness that in the end, life can be complicated. There is humor in this line, I think, and self-depreciation, and perhaps the recognition that when the sons and daughters of affluent suburbanites go to college and learn how to “drop out,” a degree of contradiction, evasion, and delusion may be involved. But also a degree of truth.

As it turned out, the age of Aquarius didn’t blossom with quite the inevitability that some of us imagined it would. Where did disco come from, anyway? And what about Farrah Fawcett Major’s hair-do!! Ouch!! Did we really need those Pershing missiles in West Germany? And how did it happen that average SAT scores and the gasoline mileage of American cars started to drop?

Looking back on it all, it seems to me that the instincts and values that animated those times were sound. Nor did the youth of my generation fall away from them with quite the materialist gusto you see in a conservative manifesto like The Big Chill. On the other hand, take a look at the 50-somethings we’ve become. Jobs, mortgages, kids, summer camps—is it really that much different from the way our parents lived?

One of the pleasures of reading Scott Carrier’s Running After Antelope is that it reacquaints us with the dangers, the freedoms, and the truths to be met up with on the fringes of bourgeois American life. Carrier writes with deadpan sincerity about his experiences as a journalist, his hitchhiking treks, and the various unglamorous jobs he’s taken to make ends meet, making no attempt to make them sound more adventurous or important than they were. It’s as if he were committed, with every line of prose, to say to us, “This is what happened to me then.” or “This is how I felt,” without elaborating overmuch or making an effort to extract any deeper moral or sociological significance out of the events. Though many of the themes are the same, Carrier’s style bears little resemblance to Gonzo journalism.His book spans thirty-five years, from 1963 to 1997, but as a result of this terseness, it can be read in an hour or two. In this case, less is (more or less) more.

Some of the stories collected here appeared originally in Harper’s and Esquire, and some were broadcast on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and Public Radio International’s This American Life. But Carrier himself appears dead-center in all of them, and the pieces are arranged in chronological order. This gives the book the flavor of a bildungsroman rather than a miscellaneous collection.

In one early story, the narrator, captain of his high school defensive football squad, has a moment of transformation:

I was standing there spacing out with everyone else, and then I had this new feeling: I was conscious of being inside a shell, and looking out at the world like my uniform and even my body were just protective packaging. I was in love with the air, the smell of the grass, the warm light in the cottonwood trees and the edge of the field.

Inspired by this intuition, Carrier calls a new “haiku” defense. The team will line up in a 6-3, then start moving around at random while he (the captain) recites a haiku. “The wind brings dry leaves, enough to build a fire.”
The coach immediately blows his whistle and asks Carrier what the hell is going on. Carrier explains that it was a Haiku defense.
“It was just as idea,” he tells his bewildered coach, “It didn’t really work out like I thought it would. I’m ready to move on, if you are.”

Several stories describe Carrier’s less-than-exemplary climb up the employment ladder. At one point we find him working as a carpenter for his younger brother’s construction company. The work itself isn’t so bad, but he’s distressed to find, again and again, that the men alongside whom he’s pounding nails are inspired by one or another religious cult. As an attempt to come to grips with this phenomenon, Carrier explores the idea that these men are so uniformly extreme in their religious views because they, like Jesus, are all carpenters. But this theory leads nowhere.

...these men were not interested in philosophy or metaphysics. And they were not even interested, it turned out, in stories about Jesus and his teaching of compassion. Far from it. They were all into the Book of Revelations; they were all religious for reasons of revenge.

The author eventually realizes that at this point in his life, he’s a lot like them—an unhappy slave with no real idea of what to do about it.

In one piece Carrier hitchhikes from Salt Lake City to New York to see a publisher about some assignment or advance. (Why not just call him on the phone?) Along the way he gets picked up by a Serbian truck driver. They have some trouble at a weight station when the authorities spot Carrier in the passenger seat. After conferring with the officer the trucker returns to the cab.
“....its against the law, even in my own truck,” the driver says, “for me to give you a ride. He told me to drop you at the next exit, and I told him I wouldn’t even consider it. This country is becoming a police state. I know, I’ve seen it all before.”
During the long lonely cross-country trip the two get to talking about music, eternal forms, and religious art, and the trucker reveals that his cousin in a painter. Carrier eventually agrees to go to the trucker’s Pennsylvania home to examine his cousin’s paintings, which are on display in an upstairs gallery. (How could he refuse? The guy has just risked his license to driven him a thousand miles?)
While the two of them are viewing the works a tactful conversation takes place, on the order of—

“Your cousin may be a great genius...but it seems like he might be insane as well. He paints like he has fire in his eyes and lightning shooting out of his fingertips.”
“Yes, it’s true, he does.” The trucker agrees.
Carrier asks how much the cousin is asking for his canvases.
“For the larger ones, between one and two hundred thousand dollars.”

‘It seems like a lot,’ I said. ‘but I suppose if you were rich, and wanted one, then it would be nothing.’

In the end Carrier admits to becoming a bit flummoxed.

I didn’t really know what to say—the Old Testament done in the Dutch Baroque by a modern-day Serb and hung in a former pizza parlor in Hazelden, Pennsylvannia, by a truck driver... this seemed beyond my ability for comment.

The experiences described in this collection are diverse, ranging from childhood memories to travels in Cambodia and Chiapas. In the travel pieces Carrier wisely avoids making sweeping judgements of a political nature. As always, he contents himself with describing what he sees and how he feels, though rumblings of moral outrage are everpresent.
One unusual thread resurfaces repeatedly in the course of the book—a quest to run down an antelope. Carrier’s brother had come up with the idea as part of graduate program in physiology or biology. The theory, based on a few scattered anthropological records, is that humans used to capture their prey by chasing it until it collapsed due to exhaustion. Carrier himself—by his own admission not a very good runner—is recruited to help with the experiments. It’s an interesting project, and Carrier keeps at it intermittently long after his brother has moved on to other things.
Does he ever succeed in chasing the svelte pronghorn—the fastest mammal in the Western Hemisphere—to the point of collapse? I’m not going to spoil the fun. Let it suffice to say that these Antelope tales, like most of the others in the collection, have an element of latent absurdity which Carrier sweeps aside in his efffort to forge quietly ahead in pursuit of truth.
But perhaps it would be more accurate to say that absurdity is simply the flip-side of convention, and Carrier has little time for either.