Title: The Inner Coast
Author: Donovan Hohn
Themes/Subjects: Hoarding, Family Trauma, Family Relations, Teamwork, Ice Canoeing, Climate Change, Study of Literature, the Art of Collecting, the Art of Writing, Teaching and its Effects on younger generations
Three Words to Describe the Essays: Scientific, Dense, Wordy
Favorite Essay: ‘A Romance of Rust’
Blurb from Back of Book: “Writing in the grand American tradition of Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez, Donovan Hohn is an “adventurous, inquisitive, and brightly illuminating writer” (New York Times). Since the publication of Moby-Duck a decade ago, Hohn has been widely hailed for his prize-winning essays on the borderlands between the natural and the human. The Inner Coast collects ten of his best, many of them originally published in such magazines as the New York Times Magazine and Harper’s, which feature his physical, historical, and emotional journeys through the American landscape.
By turns meditative and comic, adventurous and metaphysical, Hohn writes about the appeal of old tools, the dance between ecology and engineering, the lost art of ice canoeing, and Americans’ complicated love/hate relationship with Thoreau. The Inner Coast marks the return of one of our finest young writers and a stylish exploration of what Guy Davenport called “the geography of the imagination.”
Summary and Comments: If I am being honest, the first and foremost reason that I picked up this book was because of its captivating front cover. A simple, two-photograph cover, the top of it features a still-picture of waves, all of them a deep blue, which gives way to the lower part of the cover, a photograph of the outside of two rooms in dingy motel and its parking spaces. It is simple but unique, and the juxtaposition of nature and something man-made, one on top of the other, is visually stunning to the eye.
Unfortunately, I can’t say that the essays within the collection were as captivating. Now, don’t get me wrong—I rated this 3 out of 5 stars, so it’s not that they were bad. Some of them, such as ‘Falling,’ just seemed to drag on and on and on, long past when Hohn should’ve stopped the essay, and others, such as ‘Four Lights,’ simply are boring.
The essay collection starts off with a bang: ‘Snail Picking,’ at a length of two pages, is short and somewhat horrifying. It details an instance of animal cruelty committed by Hohn when he was much younger against snails, and it jarred me if I’m being honest. Its message about humanity’s relationship to nature—that of a God-like status—was overpowered by the imagery of Hohn crushing snails, and it was more disturbing than anything.
The next essay, titled ‘A Romance of Rust,’ is my personal favorite from the collection. Over the course of forty-six pages, Hohn recounts going tool-hunting with his uncle across much of the Midwest, and its an exploration of not only the bizarre field of literally collecting old, rusted tools, but also a recounting of the auctioneering scene throughout many of the Midwestern states, and a rumination on the idea of hoarding, building a personal museum, and what happens to our earthly possessions after we die. Even the concept of tool-collecting was weird to me, but Hohn describes it in such a way that it doesn’t come off as too eccentric—his uncle, named Tom, has been collecting old tools for the past several decades, and he mostly searches for tools that were created by hand. Eschewing the mass-produced tools of today’s world, they travel up and down Michigan and throughout much of the broader Midwest in search of older tools, ones that were made around the turn of the twentieth century or even earlier, and Tom buys them in bulk at auctions at times. Hohn then recounts returning home with Tom and then watching as he catalogs all the tools he’s purchased and the way that he displays them in a building out back behind Tom’s and his wife’s home in Michigan. While Hohn could’ve condemned the whole activity as one of hoarder insanity, writing that his uncle has become preoccupied with a pointless activity for most of his life, Hohn writes from both a scientific and nostalgic angle when writing about not only his travels with his uncle, but the whole concept of personal collections and the idea of handmade versus mass-produced goods. It’s part-memoir, part-scientific recounting of the art of toolmaking, and it was the perfect essay to truly begin the collection with.
From there, things were a lot more hit and miss. ‘Revival of the Ice Canoe’ was interesting, as it described the sport of ice canoeing in Canada along the St. Lawrence River, but it’s written in a way that is a little bit too technical for me. Instead of being a travel essay, Hohn turns it into a part-travel, part-science essay, and he writes using technical terms that almost no lay person will know when he speaks of the canoes and how they’re made, their components, and what their individual parts are called. It was hard to follow at times, his language being bogged down in jargon and technical terms, and the essay does much better when it turns away from the scientific explanation of how ice canoeing actually works and focuses instead on his personal journey watching several ice canoe races and personally taking part in a recreational ice canoe trip one winter.
The next two essays, titled ‘Watermarks’ and ‘Midwest Passage,’ read as something straight out of a science journal or something like Harper’s. They are scientific-based essays on the idea of water in the Midwest—how it was used for travel, agriculture, and leisure, and how we humans have poisoned so much of it since the first French fur traders started to exploit the fresh waters of the area in the 1600s—and, while they are a little technical, they are interesting. ‘Watermarks’ explores the idea of the Midwest being the ‘inner coast’ of America, noting that its rivers and lakes are virtually the heart of America, connecting the rest of the regions of the country via waterways and how important they were to the country’s early days. ‘Midwest Passage’ is similar in vein, but concentrates more on Lake Michigan and one of its tributaries, and how political and business magnates destroyed and polluted nature’s natural ways.
‘The Zealot’ is the second-best essay in the collection in my opinion. Following the prior two, it is an exploration of the Flint, Michigan water crisis, and frames it through a recounting of Virginia Tech professor Marc Edwards' past and his actions related to the situation (Edwards is the man who blew the lid on the crisis and brought national attention to the Flint water problem). It is both a recounting of what actually happened during the crisis, and an exploration of Edwards’ personal life and events related to his work on the crisis, but it doesn’t necessarily take a stand either way in regard to Edwards himself. In the years since the crisis, Edwards has come under fire for being sexist, misogynistic, belligerent, and flexible with the truth, and Hohn does mention some of these claims. What he doesn’t do, however, is pick a side in the debate, and, in most cases of journalism, which this piece feels like, that’s okay. Journalists are supposed to not take sides and simply recount the facts. Hohn should’ve done the opposite in this case though—this is an essay in his collection, not a journalistic piece in The New York Times, and his waffling over whether or not Edwards is a fundamentally good man or a blow hard comes off as weak and ineffectual.
The rest of the essays kind of blurred together for me. ‘Mammoth Fever’ is about wooly mammoths, engineered fakes, and the art of displaying them in museums, but there’s nothing particularly compelling about it. ‘Four Lights’ is a study of four authors (Evan S. Campbell, Marilynne Robinson, Matthew Power, and Henry David Thoreau) that are well written, but without any kind of other context, such as the pieces being attached to a book review of a specific book or something like that, they come off as disconnected and too technical. The aforementioned ‘Falling,’ clocking in at forty-three pages, is the most ambitious essay in the entire collection—it attempts to recount Hohn’s childhood spent in San Francisco, the son of a detached father and a severely depressed mother, and he frames it via a telling of the history of the mountain (Mount Davidson) that they lived on with his brother and the monument on the mountain itself—a towering, one-hundred-plus feet tall metal cross. The reason the essay doesn’t work, for me at least, is not only because it goes on well past the stopping point that it should’ve ended at, but also because it doesn’t do a good job balancing the personal and scientific aspects of the essay itself. Hohn mixes personal history with the history of the mountain and the cross, and throws in some observations of the natural world of the mountain itself, and he tries to connect thin threads and themes between the three subjects without much success. Comparing his mother’s failing mental health to a cult that would gather around the base of the cross for a period of time that they lived there seems a little crass as well, and it just didn’t hold my interest or attention. The writing is also very technical, the prose dense and heavy, and it was just an honest slog to get through.
The last essay of the collection, titled ‘And Yet,’ is an essay that is loosely about Hohn’s time spent teaching writing to younger students and what it means to live in Detroit, Michigan after everything the city has been through, but, with its placement after ‘Falling’ and the fact that it ends the collection, I just read it more to get through it rather than enjoying it. I feel like Hohn should’ve made a different stylistic decision and included this essay towards the front of the book, and I would’ve liked it a lot better.
Overall, this is not a bad collection. The topics that he covers, for the most part, are interesting, and my attention didn’t start to falter until the second half of the book. I can also appreciate how this seemed to be a collection of essays that attempts to be a love letter to the Midwest, Hohn’s ancestral lands (in as much as a white man can call land in America his ‘ancestral homelands’), and I appreciate that as someone who has moved away from the Midwest but felt the tug of its culture and people pull me right back after years away. Perhaps instead of focusing on the scientific and natural aspects of the Midwest, Hohn would’ve done a better job to focus more on the humanistic aspects of it, exploring the culture and people who live there today, such as he did with ‘A Romance of Rust,’ or at least combine the three aspects into one.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Where to Find It: Library Catalog, Amazon, Boswell Books
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