28 December 2008

That Smell

"Ooh, ooh that smell
Can't you smell that smell
?"
- Lynyrd Skynyrd, "That Smell" (1977)



This is a story relayed to me by my mother...

A little background first...
I grew up on the Front Range in Colorado - in Fort Collins, just north of Denver, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. While growing up many, many family trips were made up and down the I-25 corridor. North to Cheyenne, Wyoming and south to Loveland, Longmont, Greeley, Boulder, and Denver. Greeley is a town out on the plains east of the mountains and it is surrounded by untold numbers of feedlots and a beef processing plant. These produce quite a ghastly stench in Greeley itself at times, and occasionally to the surrounding areas as well. As I grew older I knew that on the rare days that we could smell this all the way in Fort Collins (roughly 30 miles), we would refer to them as "Greeley Days."

On one of our various journeys, we were on our way back home from Denver to Fort Collins. The year was probably 1973 or 1974 so I was quite young. My mother was driving and I was buckled (or not - it was the 70's after all...) into the passenger seat.

We had left Denver some time ago and were making our way up the interstate towards home. We passed the exit for Greeley. Soon my mother noticed that I seemed to be scratching at my nose and rubbing my face. I would scratch my nose and rub it and shake my head. Then I was still for a bit. But soon both hands were working my nose scratching and picking and rubbing at it. This went on for some minutes as my mother watched.

After a while I turned to her with a forlorn expression and said sadly,
"Mom, I think I have B.M. in my nose..."

KJT - Fort Collins (1974)
(Picture of my sister and myself in 1974, taken by my mother)

4 comments:

cae said...

Better yet, did your family ever visit the Greeley mall? I remember when that was the only mall in the area. Despite its distance, that and the Big R store would occasionally seduce my parents out of the Loveland/Fort Collins area. What shocked me was that, once you were in the epicenter, the smell faded away, somehow. I don't know if this is because you became used to the smell, that your olfactory became so overwhelmed by it that it shut down, or if Greeley itself was somehow "on the other side" of the stink, as if the stench was some kind of odoriferous wall or moat that protected Greeley from people not comfortable wading through cow shit.

KJT said...

I am happy to report that I never visited the Greeley mall... although I did frequent one of it's bars later on in life. Can't remember the name of the place, but we could get in once we were 18, so we drove over there quite a bit for a couple of years. Met a girl there who interestingly didn't have, um, a gag reflex...

cae said...

GT's. Went there a few times, myself. No gag reflex? Obviously a native ...

Lara said...

not necessarily

: )