The Smells of the October Road Trip

What can I say, life is full of smells, some good, some a little more offensive.

Mike Pence on his dairy farm channel often jokes about smell-o-vision, so one can enjoy the good and bad smells of life on a dairy farm from freshly chopped silage and hay to manure to sour silage. No smell-a-vision here either, only words.

Diesel Exhaust

Driving down along Interstate 88 you could smell the semi-trucks and diesel fuel and exhaust. Trucks certainly can smell although with the cleaner diesels not so much.

Chopping Silage

Silage has a very sweet smell when it’s freshly chopped. It’s a very farm-like smell but a nice smell.

Cow Manure

Hard to go many places in Upstate New York or Pennsylvania in good farm country and not smell cows and the even more pungent smell of cow manure.

Paper Plant

Paper plants have a distinctive sulfur smell. It’s really obnoxious if your not used to it, almost makes your eyes want to water and wonder when it.

Burning Garbage

Lots of folks in rural Pennsylvania burn their garbage. It’s a pungent, sharp smell, chemical but in some ways depending what folks are burning on a particular day, not that pungent.

Oil Wells

Oil wells in the Allegheny National Forest have a distinctive oil-smell like you might smell during an oil change, only sweeter. Sweet crude has a very distinctive smell.

Oil Refinery

Oil refineries smell a lot like the oil wells, although maybe a lot stronger and sweeter. I wouldn’t say oil or oil refinery exactly smells bad but it sure is pungent.

Chicken and Turkey Farms

Some of the chicken and turkey farms have a particularly earthy smell. Maybe not that pungent but what you might normally smell in a chicken barn.

Coal Stove

Anthracite coal and especially bituminous coal has a very distinctive smell. It smells like coal, somewhat like burning garbage or kerosene but not as strong or acrid.

Kerosene Heat

A lot of trailers and rural households use kerosene because it’s can be purchased and transported in a regular gas can, and works in both portable heaters and some small heaters in mobile homes. Kind of pungent sulfurly smell, but very different then coal.

Coal Fired Power Plant

Coal power plants have a coal smell, a bit of a sulfury, mechanical smell. A smell like old machinery and coal.

Chicken Processing Plants

Moorefield and Keyser West Viriginia are home to many large chicken and turkey processing plants. Depending on the breeze, they can be pungent, reminding me a lot of smell of raw meat you might get at the store.

Landfills

Landfills have a methane smell that is more chemical, more bleachy or toxic smelling from the landfill methane. Definately a lot more sour and less sweet then what you might smell on a farm or from sweet crude oil

Wood Smoke

A lot of households in rural Pennsylvania also heat with wood. Generally wood is a pretty pleasant smell although it depends on the concentration and what exactly folks are burning.