Big Stink in St. Louis

View Larger Map

A mysterious mega-stink showed up in the greater St. Louis area on Sunday morning.  St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Carolyn Tuft attempted to track down the source of the foul odor.  She checked the with usual suspects, but both the gas company and a local sewage treatment plant said “it’s not us.”

Ms. Tuft followed up one rather unusual explanation: that the smell is from chemically treated road salt that’s been spread around recently.  That drew a denial from the Missouri Department of Transportation.

The online version of her story attracted nearly one hundred comments. Several people thought the smell resembled that of oil refineries in nearby Illinois.  Other suggested a more exotic source: sulphurous fumes seeping out of the ground as a result of recent seismic activity (the New Madrid fault, site of a devastating 19th century quake, runs close by.)

I emailed Ms. Tuft who continues to follow the story; she is looking into the seismic theory.

The online comments run from the usual jokes and posturings to local people simply adding their olfactory observations.  These latter are potentially valuable data points.  For example, Lulu C. says “I still smell it today everywhere from Sunset Hills to St. Ann.”

Being unfamiliar with the local geography, I decided to take all eighteen smelly locations specifically mentioned in the comments and map them.  The result is the Google map atop this post; it can also be found here.

To me, the odor locations form a remarkable pattern: they closely track the western bank of the Mississippi River.  Could the river be the odor source?

UPDATE 8:42 PM
On reflection, there may be a better explanation.  Look at a large version of the Google map; imagine a line running through the map pins.  It runs from SW to NE—pointing directly at Roxana, Illinois, which commenters “nickylouse” and “wmh95970” said is the home of oil refineries.  I don’t know the area but the Google satellite view shows what look like oil storage facilities in Roxana.  The wind during the smell episode was from the northest.  Could the Roxana refineries be the source of the stink?

UPDATE January 28, 2009 With a Whimper Not a Bang . . .
Here, in its entirety, is the followup to the Big Stink in St. Louis, from today’s Post-Dispatch:

Foul Odor Fades Away, at Last

A St. Louis fire captain said that the foul odor that permeated the St. Louis area Sunday and Monday has gone away, but no one knows what caused it.

St. Louis Fire Capt. Robert Keuss said Tuesday evening that there have been no more reports of the rotten smelling air. Yet, no one—from gas companies to sewage treatment plant operators—know what caused it.

“It just remains one of those mysteries,” Keuss said.

Well, there you have it. Despite a string of odor “sightings” aimed directly at the refineries of Roxana, IL, Fire Capt. Keuss declares it “one of those mysteries.”

I wonder if that’s what he tells his family when he cuts the cheese. I guess it’s better than blaming it on the dog.

Home, Sweet Home

This is cool.

Prolitec, Inc. today unveiled the Air/Q(TM) Whole House Air Freshener(TM) (WHAF) -- the first fully adjustable, HVAC-integrated home air freshening system.

Reminds me of the holodeck-like nursery in the Happylife Home, from a story in The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury.

The nursery was silent. It was empty as a jungle glade at hot high noon. The walls were blank and two dimensional. Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls began to purr and recede into crystalline distance, it seemed, and presently an African veldt appeared, in three dimensions; on all sides, in colors reproduced to the final pebble and bit of straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun.

George Hadley felt the perspiration start on his brow.

“Let’s get out of this sun,” he said. “This is a little too real. But I don’t see anything wrong.”

“Wait a moment, you’ll see,” said his wife.

Now the hidden odorophonics were beginning to blow a wind of odor at the two people in the middle of the baked veldtland. The hot straw smell of lion grass, the cool green smell of the hidden water hole, the great rusty smell of animals, the smell of dust like a red paprika in the hot air.

Kinda cool but kinda creepy.

Rudyard Kipling on Smell?

Rudyard Kipling wrote these well known olfactory lines:

Smells are surer than sounds or sights
To make your heart-strings crack—
They start those awful voices o’nights
That whisper, “Old man, come back!”

They are the opening stanza of the poem Lichtenberg. Set in South Africa during the Boer War, it’s about an Australian trooper who smells the blossoms of a tree called Golden Wattle and is reminded of his home in New South Wales.

The lines are often used to defend the notion that smell is a predominantly emotional sense. (A notion that has been tremendously overplayed in my view. In What the Nose Knows I point out the major role that cognition—thinking, remembering, comparing, evaluating—plays in the psychology of smell.) Reading beyond the first lines, however, it is clear that Kipling’s theme was that smell creates a sense of place and thus becomes a trigger for memory and home sickness.

Kipling traveled widely and wrote about many places and cultures. So we are not surprised when he is cited as the author of this popular quotation:

The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.

This aphorism is attributed to him in about a thousand places on the Web. Of course, repetition of a meme is no evidence of accurate citation. The fact that it shows up in carefully researched and edited books is more reassuring. The line is a popular epigraph to chapters in scholarly books. Tahir Shah uses it in Chapter 2 of In search of King Solomon’s mines (Arcade Publishing, 2003), as does James Mak in Chapter 6 of Tourism and the economy (University of Hawaii Press, 2004). Both authors cite Kipling as the source. Even more reassuring is Rosemarie Jarski, who attributes the line to Kipling in her reference compilation Words from the Wise: Over 6,000 of the Smartest Things Ever Said (Skyhorse Publishing, 2007, p. 447).

Yet something about this quote has always made the needle on my Bogosity Meter twitch a bit. It sounds too didactic and abstract for Kipling. Did he really write it? If so, where?

After a few hours of obsessive toil on the Internet, it becomes clear that no one quoting the line cites a specific poem, story, or novel by Kipling. The Bogosity Meter is showing levels not seen since the “happiness is a perfume” episode. I spend another hour in Google Books and then—paydirt! A lead worth tracking down in the real world.

Hunched over microfilm reader, deep in the bowels of the local campus library, I fast forward through a spool of Harper’s Magazine from 1942. I pause a moment to let the motion sickness pass, then advance slowly through the June issue to page 156. And there I find it, buried in a stuffy, convoluted, almost impenetrable essay titled “In praise of Kipling’s verse,” written by none other than T.S. Eliot.

For the masochists among you, here’s the line in context:

It should be said at this point, before passing on, that Kipling is not a doctrinaire or a man with a program. His opinions are not to be considered as the antithesis of those of Mr. H. G. Wells. Mr. Wells’s imagination is one thing and his political opinions another; the latter change but do not mature. But Kipling did not, in the sense in which that activity can be ascribed to Mr. Wells, think; his aim, and his gift, is to make people see (for the first condition of right thought is right sensation, the first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it, as you smell India in Kim.) If you have seen and felt truly, then if God has given you the power you may be able to think rightly.

So let’s see if I have this straight: Kipling’s gift is to make people see, which is why one must first smell a foreign country to understand it. Mixed metaphors, anyone? Is it just me, or is T.S. Eliot the most over-rated windbag of his time?

OK. Case closed. Time to put the Bogosity Meter back in its box and go have a brewsky.

Annals of Anosmia 3: The Slow Fade

The media’s enthusiasm for first-person essays on anosmia is driven by the drama of sudden-onset smell loss and the medical mystery of in-born absence of odor perception. What these stories overlook is a far more common experience: the age-related decline in smell ability known as presbyosmia.

The demographics are well-known—on average, smell sensitivity and odor-naming skill decline gradually with age; men are affected more heavily than women. Declines in performance can be detected as early as the fifth decade under laboratory conditions, but in everyday life a person might not notice anything until much later. I emphasize that these trends are group averages and that variation within an age group is large. A given 68-year old may be more sensitive than a given 28-year old. An element of use it or lose it may be in play; for example, many of the great perfumers work successfully into old age.

What causes presbyosmia? Scientific speculation points to cumulative wear and tear on the olfactory system: a lifetime of colds, flu, and sinus infections, along with the incremental impact of minor bumps on the head.

The slow fade of smell with age, although exceedingly common, has not inspired its own genre of first-person essays. This insight hit me the other day when I received an email from a reader. C. Rodney James wrote such a compelling account of his personal experience that I asked him to let me share it here on First Nerve.

Dear Mr. Gilbert:

Finished What The Nose Knows with great interest and more than a bit of sadness as it reminded me of what I have lost. As a teen I had a terrific sense of smell. At seventy it’s virtually gone. The fading, as I would describe it, began about ten years ago, perhaps a bit more. A few odors seem to come and go. I can (reliably) smell cat shit, hot paint when the furnace overheats as it did this A.M. and the odd whiff of the priming mixture used in English and some Mexican .22 rimfire ammunition. It has a distinctive tutti-frutti odor like old-time, public rest-room deodorant—unique in the olfactory arena of ammunition. Bad writers (who have never smelled it) include the odor of Cordite, which smells like many other types of nitrocellulose powders. Burning leaves, if the intensity is great enough is detectable, but little more. That’s about it . . .

University education in the speech and hearing field taught me the dangers of exposure to loud and prolonged noise, and I had the wit to avoid exposure to same. As a result my hearing is still quite good. How unfortunate there seems nothing we can do to protect or conserve the sense of smell. There are no exercises or other regimens we could follow. If there are, or better yet some means of restoring this sense, I am ready to join the line. A similar loss happened to my mother so there is likely a genetic link of some sort.

At times I get what I think you described as a false-smell experience, as when I could clearly detect/re-experience the scent of fresh hay the other day—indoors in frigid weather. Very strange.

If anyone ever comes up with some genuine aroma therapy I hope you will get the word out.

Sincerely,
C. Rodney James

Mr. James’s observations on the smell of primers and gunpowder are those of an expert. He has written about firearms and ammunition as well as motion pictures.

The evocative power of smell anchors us in time; the longer we live the more meaningful recalled smells become. Mr. James’ wistful note reminds us all of what we stand to lose as age takes its toll.

Scent & Separation

A question for the ladies: Have you ever sniffed your man’s shirt to remember him while he was away? And have you ever worn it to bed for the same reason?

If so, you are not alone. That’s according to a new study by University of Pittsburgh psychology professor Donald McBurney and his colleagues Melanie Shoup and Sybil Streeter. They found that 77.1% of women have deliberately smelled another’s clothing to remember or feel closer to that person. And 81.8% of the time that other person was her romantic partner (BF, fiancé, or husband).

Similarly, 52.5% of women have slept with (or worn to sleep) another’s unlaundered clothing, which 89.4% of the time belonged to the men in their lives.

I don’t think anyone is surprised that women indulge in scentimental sniffing. However, the Pittsburgh results show that 66.7% of men sniff to remember, a proportion not statistically different from the 77.1% of women.

MSNBC contributor Linda Carroll found this to be quite remarkable. In reporting the study she wrote:

Even more striking was the data on men: A full two-thirds
of men admitted to cuddling with clothing.

The MSNBC headline stressed the same thing:

Going out of town? Leave your shirt behind.
Study: Most men and women snuggle the clothes of
far-away loved ones.

I think these characterizations are simply wrong. Linda Carroll and MSNBC distort the study results to hype the counter-intuitive image of guys curled up with their girlfriends’ clothes. True, two-thirds of men “admitted” to sniffing—but sniffing is not cuddling. In this context, cuddling is sleeping with, or wearing to bed, someone else’s clothing. And here McBurney’s results are clear: men don’t do it. Only 13.3% of men took another’s clothes to bed, compared to 52.5% of women.

In other words, scentimental cuddling is a female behavior by a four-to-one margin. When it comes to sniffing to remember, both sexes do it but women more often than men. (In an earlier version of the study the Pittsburgh team found that the female bias was statistically significant;
in the replication it was not. The difference apparently depends on the wording of the question.)

The new study adds a twist to the story, namely the relationship distance between sniffer and sniffee. Smelling and sleeping with someone else’s clothing happens most often when the sniffee is a first degree relative; it happens progressively less often with second and third degree relatives:

people commonly smell not only the clothing of their
sexual partners, but also that of close relatives.

In their earlier paper, McBurney et al. found that

smelling an absent partner’s clothing made [men and
women] feel happy, comfortable, and secure.

They coined the phrase “olfactory comfort” to describe the phenomenon. It captures nicely the wide range of circumstances where it occurs: a young man smells his recently deceased grandfather’s jacket, for example, or a mother leaves one of her shirts to soothe her baby at daycare.

Come to think of it, olfactory comfort may be self-induced. Perhaps the charm of a child’s teddy bear or security blanket is that it smells like the owner.

UPDATE January 23, 2009
Here’s a clever practical application of the “olfactory comfort” phenomenon. In today’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Allison Heinrichs describes how babies in the neonatal intensive care unit are given dolls with their mothers’ scent. The dolls, called Snoedels (Dutch for “snuggle”), are made of wool and flannel. The mother keeps the doll on her person for a couple of days, then leaves it with her newborn in the Isolette. I like the concept: at best it calms the baby, at worst it humanizes the ICU basinette.