The Rockford airport is situated in the middle of a nearly direct line that connects the local waste treatment plant to the north in the city of Rockford itself to the prominent garbage dump located in the countryside to the south. These locations are only a few miles away and this obviously creates a unique set of unpleasant scents while working.
There are a few pleasant smells at work: sometimes you can smell someone mowing their yard if the winds are right. People grilling, people having bonfires: these smells are especially prominent in the cool and crisp evenings of autumn. Sometimes you could smell the delightfully pungent scent of either cow shit or pig shit; I don’t even know where a cow or pig farm is nearby to the airport but you can’t argue with your sense of smell in that regard. Not that those smells are enjoyable, but over the miles of distance the scents needed to travel they were diluted enough to give the air just a tiny hint of cow excrement. I also find the smell of burning jet fuel to be vaguely enjoyable as well. But some of the other scents you find out at the Rockford airport are…less enjoyable.
If there’s a northerly wind (which is thankfully rare) you’d have the scent of sewage permeating the work day. It’s hard to explain what raw, mid-processed sewage smells like from a few miles away; it doesn’t smell like an outhouse by being pungently-awful but it also doesn’t smell good either. It’s an off-putting smell that is kinda sweet, tangy, and stinky, with a slight hint of rotten eggs to it. It’s not an overpoweringly disgusting I-gotta-puke smell, but it doesn’t smell good either.
A southerly wind from the south brings up the smell of trash which isn’t much more appealing than sewage — in fact I think it’s worse than sewage. While sewage smells kinda sweet in a way, garbage smells sour. In a way I think I’d prefer the smell of the sewage treatment plant over rotting garbage for some reason. This might be due to sewage having a somewhat “natural” smell; it is shit but shit is something you’re used to smelling. Garbage? I don’t even know what that smell consists of really. It’s like a combination of rotting food (vegetables, meat, dairy, etc.), random chemicals, shit-filled baby diapers and whatever else can smell in everyday garbage. It’s a strange mix of scents that just seems like it has too much variety to smell good at all. With sewage you know you’re smelling people’s shit, with garbage you don’t know what you’re smelling. It could be dead bodies for all you know. And it might actually be dead bodies.
This is made worse by the strong southerly winds that pump warmer temperatures and humidity from the Gulf of Mexico. As stated earlier, a northerly wind a rare thing so the sewage smell is also rare. A northerly wind usually brings colder, drier air which also serves to deaden the smell of the literal shit. But the southerly wind? Any cold front that moves through always brings with it a strong southerly wind. At first the air comes from the southeast, then the south, and then the southwest (usually gusting). This serves to bring both warm and humid air to us, and as this air passes over the garbage dump it carries the smell right at us: hot, humid, trash-smelling air carrying the scent of whatever-it-is-that’s-in-trash right upon us in seventy, eighty, or even ninety degree heat. It’s a disgustingly complex, pungent, and horrific smell.
It was usually the newer people mentioned the various smells. They’d kinda state it aloud to no one in particular. “What the hell is that smell?” I’d take note of the wind and (usually) mention that it was the garbage dump to the south of us or the shit from the north of us. From where we worked you could even seen the hundred-foot mount of dirt and trash to the south of us. If it was night you could also see the flame of the natural gas being flared off (as decomposing trash — whatever trash is — makes methane aka natural gas. This is a potent greenhouse gas that needs to be flared off. Why we don’t capture the gas and use it to heat houses? Who the fuck knows…). Especially in the winter this flame took on a starkly-shimmering reddish light in the distance. It looked like a big, wavy, red star shining on the horizon that instead of burning hydrogen in the core of stars was burning methane released by the decomposition of the city’s endless pile of consumerist garbage that was left to rot.
And we continued to ship tons of consumerist garbage to those who purchased it, myself included. Not that the stuff we shipped typically consisted of organic, possibly-decomposable material, but the fact still remained: much of what we actually shipped could very well end up inside the two-hundred-foot mound of dirt south of Rockford. Even if it didn’t end up in that mound of dirt, it would end up in some other mound of dirt elsewhere. And even if the workers at the airport fifty or one-hundred years from now didn’t smell the items decomposing in a southerly wind, they would still be there. Just kinda sitting there waiting for some future archaeologist or alien civilization to find them and wonder what the hell we actually did during the course of our lives.
theblackhairedguy 