Cochrane Times — Gather a bunch of folks together who have had "the funky smell of animal semen" on their hands, and you’ll have gathered a community not dissimilar to Cochrane.
The history of this town was built on such aromas, and I’m sure the clan Boothby collectively guided more than a few eager males to their mates over the years (be they equine, bovine, canine, or feline).
While the boys were at their business, the matriarch of the clan was busy guiding eager readers to the funky smell of books and her name now graces the library that stands in this town.
On a Wednesday evening at the end of November, we gathered at said library to hear a reading by the award winning Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod.
The decidedly mischievous author of "No Great Mischief" was lured away from his late autumn stint as the U of C’s Markin-Flanagan distinguished writer by our own writer-in-residence at the Nan Boothby – Marina Endicott. She treated Mr. Macleod to a home-cooked dinner and all of us to him.
After an eloquent introduction (wherein the author spoke of how we ‘cannot not know what we know’), he read one of his short stories – in its entirety, mind you – entitled "As Birds Bring Forth The Sun".
In the story, the father of the clan sought to breed his rescued dog with a male, and – in due process – became familiar again with the "funky smell of animal semen" on his gentle hands.
Macleod reads with the steady cadence of maritime waves lapping up to the shore, and his descriptive line carried me out to sea for a few moments, leaving me nodding my head in recognition.
I’ve never spent much time on a ranch; my hands have never held what the fictional father’s hands did, but there was something hauntingly familiar about it and I could not (and still cannot) let it go.
Great literature (coupled with equally great reading) can do that: make you feel you know something that you know you don’t know.
Such was the nature of that line, that story, and that writer; greatness three times over.
Macleod writes with a keen sense of metaphor, and upon reflection, I understood a little more of why his image sunk its teeth so deeply into me: the funky smell is also the regenerative life force – the dark, often dirty ‘we-don’t-talk-about-such-things-around-the-table’ necessity that moves this stubborn, recalcitrant world forward. It’s the only thing that ever has and ever will.
The funky smell was in the library that night -- pleasantly pungent -- due not only to the presence (and oh, what presence indeed!) of Macleod, but a gathering of many hands whose owner’s names adorn the spines of the Boothby’s collection: Fred Stenson (author of "The Trade" and "Lightning") and Peter Oliva ("City of Yes"); Marina, of course ("Open Arms"), and the emerging writers of her Tuesday morning writers group.
The funky smell is on many hands in this town. Truth is, Madge, as soon as your hands open a book (or borrow or lend or buy or sell or write one), you’re soaking in it.
As the political landscape stays the same over and over again (Alberta), or -- worse -- steps horrifically backwards (USA); as basic rights of minority groups continue to be challenged and denied in the name of ‘traditional Christian values’; as so many cling to definitions of words as a way of denying their fellow human beings those basic rights, it’s more than refreshing to get a nose full of the funky smell… it’s life-giving.
It reminds us that words are malleable, full of a myriad of meanings, and that they can be used to bring forth the sun, or block it out entirely. We’ve known this since the dark ages. We cannot not know it no more.

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