The roar of the truck and tractor engines in Cookshire could be heard east of Island Brook. Then, when their multi-ton pulls paused, the thumping of the bass music also filled the night air, Thursday through Sunday this beautiful mid-August.
Someone on a local social media site asked, “Just a little question, do you get many raves around here? Is there a special occasion happening this weekend?” (That’s the thing about Facebook and the others: if you spend all your time on it, you might actually not know what’s going on.)
The Cookshire Fair is close to if not the largest event on the annual calendar of our Upper Saint-Francis region. It started in 1845. And this year’s happy and indeed special occasion ended on Sunday, August 18, “with a bang and a whisper,” as Alberta singer-songwriter Corb Lund wrote in his poignant song “The Rodeo’s Over.”
Whispering in the ears of their horses were the women and men whose relationships with their animals are so close you could see that at times they are one. Dressed to the nines, draught horses, sometimes four abreast, trotted their proud partners – also all dickied up – before the grandstand for show upon show during four days of the fair. In the light-horse arena, the whispers could sometimes be heard as spectators were briefly hushed in awe and anticipation – then, the beauty of the quiet, intense performance occasionally so great that we would erupt in cheers and clapping.
And the bangs, oh, the bangs and the roars! Country line dancers had their music cranked to the max as they shuffled and spun under the Winslow Dancers’ tent, the largest I’ve seen at the Cookshire Fair. Their finale in front of the grandstand Sunday, moving to the groove around the horse droppings from the parade just moments earlier, featured a one-man flip as they all danced their reach for the stars.
I watched all of this mostly as sideline observer, the local newspaper reporter taking in the sights, the smells, the sounds… and the great lunches put on by the Quebec Farmers Association, Bulwer Branch. I tried an awkward dance lesson, chatted with a few truck and tractor pullers, filmed as horses and cattle sidled right over to me at the fence, curious about my camera or perhaps the way I was jaw-struck at their presentation and husbandry. But after a few truck and tractor pulls, I would retire to my quiet road in Newport. There, hearing the engines still roar, I could swear I also got a whiff of diesel, as if it too had drifted ten crow miles, beckoning me back to the fairgrounds and fun.
“So take from the lessons and be glad for the memories,” Lund also wrote. The Cookshire Fair was a success by our modern standards, at certain times filling the parking fields and the grandstand, when just down the road some folks had no inkling a fair was even going on. But as the years go by, the numbers of farmers and animals dwindle. The lineups for the rides aren’t as long. The grandstand often has too many empty benches.
The contrast between the quiet morning farm-animal shows and the evening orgy of diesel engines couldn’t be greater—kind of like the difference between reading a newspaper and scrolling through social media feed.
Each has their place now, inevitably. There is a time to nurture and cultivate. And there is a time to dance, roar, and celebrate. Balancing opposite ends and bringing together vast differences is no small feat.
Kudos to the folks at the Cookshire Fair this year for pulling that off, with flare!