University of Akron Press | 2020 | 150 pages
Something about Ohio settles in your bones—something besides the wet chill of lake-effect snow. I know this because I was born there and lived there for 22 years. On the day after Christmas each year, my family drove from our home in the rural fringe of northeast Ohio to my grandparents’ house on the west side of Cleveland. Those days wore the rich perfume of horse manure. Then, the sulfur scent of a cold-rolled steel mill. Intangible and ineradicable as a hatch of midges, these smells stayed with me even after I left, a gossamer sheen on my heart’s vinyl siding, a chorus of wood frogs and peepers in March—unseen, but singing.
It’s this whiff of eau-de home, this tizzy in a dim, yellow porchlight, this yammering of amphibian chatter that wafts, shimmers, and echoes through Jen Hirt’s collection of personal essays, Hear Me Ohio. None of the 15 essays take place in Ohio—the book swings like a rollicking yo-yo from Pennsylvania to Idaho and a place or two in between—but the Midwest is clearly imprinted on the stories, as if Hirt has knelt in the loam of her homeland and walked off into the world with patches of wet denim on her knees.
The book is a menagerie, but not one that houses typical or alluring megafauna. On exhibit instead: a ragtag assemblage of half-drowned spiders, exoskeletal dobsonflies, lopsided deer, and a Labrador with dermatitis. Hirt is not a khaki-ed naturalist collecting impressive specimens. On the contrary, she repels along unromantic, cobwebbed crags, reaches shoulder-deep into dark interstices, and pulls out what she finds—a dented kayak, a fake unicorn, and a glowstick glued to a bat. To read the book is to enter a cave of the uncomfortably captivating, each essay an antechamber, cavern, or grotto gleaming with the unexpected and surreal.
In “Collide with Me,” we follow Hirt onto the Susquehanna River at night, along its shallow course of submerged tires, between the pontoons of booze-cruising Harrisburgers, and into a scouring swarm of bugs. She is our prophet of the nonfungible wild and we are her disciples. She uncovers the nature living deformed among us, pinched between our apartments and alleyways like the sewage-mud squelched between a waterdog’s toes. This is what I admire most about the collection. There is no trace of American environmental mythos. Even when Hirt takes us out West in “Idaho Fell,” it is to tell the tale of binge-drinking youths and venomous spiders, to refute the persistent sermon of the limitless, idealized frontier. Hers is no sentimentalized McCandless journey to self-reliance. It’s savings-depleting unemployment in the face of big-box corporate creep and religious exclusionism. What’s harder than leaving society? Staying in and keeping your soul.
For much of the book, Hirt searches a marred and underwhelming world for things left to love. Several of the essays take place during her time as a writer-in-residence at Bernheim Arboretum in Kentucky, during which she confronts unsettling situations—as we all do—with the knowledge of life experiences. One such essay, “Arrived to Find,” reads like she’s thrown a bucket of water at a map hung on the wall. Though she’s far from home, Ohio bleeds down and finds her, holed up to the South, in the memory of an old boyfriend and a drive on a rainy backroad. It’s a moment of bungled mercy and morbid horror, the boyfriend unwilling to spare her the grief of dealing with a car-struck possum. This potent moment is mirrored in the Arboretum when a fisherman accidentally hooks a young turtle. The ensuing confusion is punctuated by precision heartbreak, the feeling of the entire book in one microcosmic moment.
Reflecting on the event, Hirt writes: “Humans are the spiders who get stuck in our own webs. We forget the violence of our legs. We are brigades of unintentional actions.” The collection feels like pacing the earth in the wake of a storm, the difficult truth being that sometimes we are the storm, ourselves perpetrating or witnessing a multitude of small tragedies. But Hirt is adamant that loveliness can be found despite—and amidst—the aftermath in which we live. She struggles with self-doubt and indirection, with knowing whether or not she has “arrived” as an artist. She writes of indecision and hardship, but it’s this same writing which betrays her true identity—a writer who doesn’t shirk reality and finds great value in it as well.
Hirt asks if she’s “arrived.” If one possible destination is the honest American landscape, the answer is yes. Between concrete jungle and the last morsels of wild country is her territory: miles of ignored not-quite-either. Maybe it’s her Ohio upbringing that makes her the perfect ambassador of this space. Daughter of the north-coast, eastern-Midwest, heart-of-it-all state, Hirt is well positioned to find the unsentimental, to scoop it up, buff it off, and proclaim it beautiful. With an Ohioan’s eye, she gives the world a second look. She re-sorts the wheat from the chaff—the pig iron from the slag.
Read Jen Hirt’s Letter to America, “I am the Witness, Accidents in a Time of Trump,” and an essay, “Students of the Route,” appearing in Terrain.org.
Brendan Curtinrich holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University. His nature writing and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Appalachia, Flyway, Birdcoat, Split Rock, Sierra, The Hopper, and elsewhere. Find more of his work at curtinrich.wixsite.com/brendan.
Header photo by jplenio, courtesy Pixabay.
