The Town Crier: Hold your breath

Published 8:00 am Monday, November 13, 2023

The Town Crier has often talked about the wonderful smells out there, everything from spring flowers to the smell of a fresh cut lawn to the seemingly endless scented delights of the Southern kitchen.

But let’s face it, there’s plenty of times when squeezing your nose firmly between thumb and index finger is definitely called for. They say scent is one of the most basic senses out there and the smell from Grandma’s kitchen can take you back decades and flood your head with memories. But the other side of the fragrance coin we tend to forget and try not to remember … that is until we get a good whiff again and we make a horrible face.

Several years ago the Town Crier covered some “Lost Smells” which included three biggies: Stinky Creek, Bowater and skunks.

Just to review, Stinky Creek was the name given to Drowning Bear Creek. Years ago a lot of sewage and corporate byproducts went directly into the creek. I didn’t know it had a real name other than “Stinky” until I was in my 20s. It was never fresh smelling, but it smelled especially horrible in the summer. Thanks to Dalton Utilities and the modernization of our water/waste treatment systems here you can now drive over the bridge that crosses the creek without tears running down your cheek.

Bowater was the name of the pulp mill up above Cleveland, Tennessee, back decades ago. Like Stinky Creek, back before the 1970s there weren’t a lot of concerns paid to commercial pollution. If the smokestacks were spewing that meant profits. If you’ve never been by a pulp mill, it has a distinct smell … and by smell I mean stench.

And finally, there was the skunk, aka polecat. I had heard of polecats but never knew they were the same as a skunk. It turns out they didn’t use Southern slang in Pepé Le Pew cartoons.

Smell out!

We’re the Carpet Capital of the World, and over in Gainesville they do pretty good with chickens. But we do have chicken farmers here and while living on the farm or next door might be occasionally strong-scented, come the springtime those chicken houses are cleaned and the chicken litter is used on fields all around as a fertilizer.

Chicken litter is one of the best natural fertilizers around, with higher levels of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium than other animal fertilizers. But once all that good-for-garden wonder-food gets spread around on fields and pastures, look out! Or whatever the olfactory nose equivalent of look out is. I’ve never heard anyone yell “Smell out!” when a stink was detected, but you get the idea. The smell usually lasts several days before it gets absorbed. I always hope it rains right after they put the fertilizer down, thinking that it will tamp down the strong smell. It seems a bouquet of bad, if you will. If it weren’t so good for the land, it wouldn’t be worth it.

And speaking of animal smells, while the smell of a horse or a puppy is warm and welcoming, the other end (literally) of the spectrum would be the unwelcoming smell one gets driving down the highway and getting behind a livestock truck with cows or pigs heading to (one way or another) greener pastures.

On the interstate, you’re usually driving faster than the truck ahead, so at first you just get a whiff here and there. You may think there’s a little something wrong with the air conditioner in the car, or perhaps you drove by some farm with a big operation going. But gradually, as you catch up with the truck, you realize things aren’t getting better, they’re getting worse … much worse.

If it’s summer and you’ve got to turn off the air conditioning to avoid passing out from the smell, you’ll soon realize you may pass out from the heat. You’re trapped! You can’t run the A/C and you can’t roll down the windows for fresh air. There’s only one chance, speeding up to pass the truck while risking a super-speeder speeding ticket from the cops. and somehow, the hundred dollar fine seems worth it.

And as a side note, remember that if it says “punishable by a fine,” that means it’s kinda legal … for a price. The problem with being behind a livestock truck is if you get stuck behind it. If it’s a country highway there may be no place to pass, and if it’s on the interstate it may be that whoever is in front of you gets past it and is so relieved they slow down once they’re in front of it, trapping you in a vortex of echh. If you do manage to set a new world land speed record to get past the truck and then a cop does pull you over and give you a ticket, you’ll be sitting there signing the citation as that truck passes you and you realize you’re going to be behind it once again.

Very dog-foody

Another Dalton lost smell, but that is still out there in various places, is the animal feed mill that was just south of town not that many years ago. The smell was very strong and very dog-foody. Most of the time it didn’t put out much of a smell, but in the summer, with the wind blowing toward town (and for some reason I remember it being mainly at night), the smell would waft up through town and put a grimace on your face. Overpowering can sometimes be as bad as, well, bad.

Driving down that way and past the feed mill, I was always surprised it wasn’t surrounded by a lot of dogs and cats and goats and deer and any other critters that would be interested in eating that kind of chow. It would seem completely understandable that a variety of animals would be sitting around the place, licking their chops, waiting for something like a busted bag of feed to get tossed out the back. It’s kind of like me at the Krispy Kreme shop when they have the “Hot Fresh” sign on.

Not a pleasant experience

With all the carpet mills around here, you’d think the whole area would have a carpety kind of smell, but lucky for us, carpet isn’t like the steel industry with black smoke belching out of smokestacks or like a giant industrial dairy operation or a tanning factory. You get a certain unspecific smell from dye houses sometimes, and unlike most of the smells we’ve been talking about that seem amplified in the hot, summer months, the dye houses can put out their odors in winter, with big clouds of steam billowing out of the rooftop vents.

It’s gone now, but there used to be a dye house just below the Walnut Avenue bridge and sometimes in the winter you would drive through the steam pouring out of the dye vats like a jet plane flies through clouds at 20,000 feet. But it seems you only smelled the dye steam as you drove through it and once the steam was gone the smell was gone.

The other smell that I associate with the carpet industry is one that is more overpowering than it is unpleasant. In the finishing process of carpet they used to primarily use latex rubber to back the carpet. If you’ve been where they use that product, it has an incredibly strong ammonia smell. The scent is not horrible, but it’s so strong and overpowering, stinging the nose as you breathe it in, that it’s not a pleasant experience. It will take your breath away, but not like a magnificent view of the Grand Canyon. If you work there, you get used to it after the first hour of the morning, but I’m sure when you get home at night, your significant other gets a big whiff of it on your clothes. It could be worse, though, you could work spreading chicken litter around.

From the kitchen

When talking about the good smells, we always cover those wonderful smells from the kitchen: fresh bread, roasted meats and anything cooked with chocolate. But let’s be honest, depending on what you do or don’t like, there can be some pretty unpleasant smells from the kitchen.

I’m not a fan of Brussel sprouts, and so if a big batch of them are cooking at my house when I walk in from work… yech! I’ve been married long enough not to complain, but I’m likely to either turn immediately around and head back outside or I’ll make a beeline to the bedroom, close the door, and bury my nose deep in a pillow.

Most foods I like, so foods I don’t like cooking are a rarity, but when something burns, that’s another story. The one that seems to get everyone is burnt microwave popcorn. and it’s a smell that manages to cover the whole house. Don’t throw it in the kitchen trash, though, get rid of it, tossing it out the back door into the yard if necessary. Let the neighbors put up with it while you … take a deep breath!

Mark Hannah, a Dalton native, works in video and film production.