Finishing the Year with Susan Fenimore Cooper
The wintry conclusion of Rural Hours
A Note as 2024 Closes: Thank you for reading Taking Bearings. I’ve sent out almost 150 of these essays. It astounds me that people keep signing up and reading them. What a gift it is to be able to share these perspectives with you! I am grateful for your support. In 2025, I’ll be making some adjustments to Taking Bearings. Subscribers will not have to do anything, but sometime in January, things will begin to look slightly different. I hope you’ll stick around to see what else is coming.
The year has come to its end according to my calendar and according to Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours, that I’ve been reading this year. (Click for Spring, Summer, and Autumn.)
For The Library this week, I reflect. Read on!
Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Achievements
Having now finished it, I can say that Susan Fenimore Cooper produced a book that justifies its celebrated status as “the first piece of nature writing by an American woman” (according to the back of the book). It’s a good book, as well as being a historic one.
She could craft a pleasant sentence and metaphor: “Despite the colorless face of the country, everything looked cheerful, as though the earth were sailing on a prosperous voyage before a fresh, fair breeze.”
She could be insightful about people: “It is one of the most extravagant follies of man that he constantly avows opinions of the attributes of his Maker fashioned by his own miserable, puny facilities.”
She could provide glimpses into her society and culture, in this case children: “As for Santa Claus, they understand him well enough; they feel his kindness and they respect his reproofs, for these are always made with justice; they know he is a very great friend of children, and chief counsellor of papas and mammas; they are perfectly sure he will come to-night, and that their stockings will be filled by him.” (The entire section around Christmas is fascinating from a historical viewpoint.)
If you read Rural Hours as a writer, your time will be repaid well. If you read Rural Hours as a historian, you will nearly drown in opportunities to understand slivers of another world.
A chief purpose of reading historical books and classics, of course, is just this: to study fine writing and glimpse into other times and cultures.
Diminishing Returns
Rural Hours does all of this, naturally.
“Winter” merely extends her observations of New York into the snowy season. As she did earlier in the book, Fenimore Cooper attends to wildlife closely. A panther visited her neighborhood, prompting great interest. Two eventually killed someone, recounted with some vividness.
As tragic as this event was, even sadder was the slow violence being done to wildlife. She tells of one species after another that had become rare, typically within the lifetime of her neighbors. All the big mammals were in decline, and all the ones with marketable characteristics were very much diminished. (Beavers, she reports, were “extremely rare.”)
Fenimore Cooper expected “the rabbit, and hare, and squirrels, . . . the important quadrupeds of this part of the country,” which were already diminished, to disappear entirely from her region. “They have already become so rare in the cultivated parts of the country, that most people forget their existence, and are more familiar with the history of the half-fabulous Unicorn, than that of the American panther or moose.”
Quite the statement. Quite the nature of “progress” she observed, self-consciously. (This reminds me of the Lost Words projects spearheaded by the writer Robert Macfarlane.)
Fenimore Cooper’s reports on wildlife, along with her careful botanical notes, make her book valuable for those seeking to understand environmental change over time. Her laments were real.
At the same time, she reported a certain pride in the census report of her county, sharing in great detail the products of the land. Nearly $1 million in poultry; almost a quarter of a million sheep; bushels of potatoes clearing 1.2 million. On top of this were the manufactures, including cotton goods (wrought from enslaved labor) valued more than $100,000, and almost $20,000 worth of hats and caps!
This is, perhaps, the American story, regret accompanying every step of so-called advancement. That’s a rough way to run a country.
Rural Hours seems more aware of the costs of these transformations than most books of its time.
Seasonal Reading
I have written here before about trying to get time rhythms off the clock, something especially prominent during the holidays. Reading a book organized around the seasons has been a good way to reinforce the lesson that the earth does not work 40-hour weeks and that the first of the month is a random date. The seasons, though, are real.
I am glad to have journeyed with Fenimore Cooper through this year. I think I’m ready in 2025 to follow along with Edwin Way Teale and his A Walk Through the Year (1978) to keep up the practice. His book, at least, starts in March, so I have a breather.
Happy New Year!
Closing Words
Relevant Reruns
You could check out the previous newsletters about Rural Hours linked above. Here is a story I wrote about another 19th-century writer who thought about the paradox of progress.
New Writing
I wrote a short account of an environmentalist action from 1989 and it’s now available here. It tells of an interesting approach to generate interest in logging old-growth forests in the Northwest taken to the people across the nation.
As always, you can find my books, and books where some of my work is included, at my Bookshop affiliate page (where, if you order, I get a small benefit).
Taking Bearings Next Week
The Wild Card returns. Stay tuned!