Following the riverbottoms, moving slow like a dung beetle, sleeping his old bones on the ground many nights, Scott Carrier is doing the low-paid, status-free work no one else wants to do.

The work of journalism of the most raw kind, finding people who will talk and letting them. Sometimes it’s a conversation and other times not. Editing makes it hard to tell which is which.

Sometimes he can’t stand it any more and has to shut off the recorder and flee. But the intermittent revulsion doesn’t stop him.

I admire that.

Sometimes I let much less stop me, and his work is an object lesson that schools me, reprimanding gently.

I won’t tell you what the people say, both because I don’t want to, and because you can just go hear it yourself.

I recommend that.