What Does Your Town Smell Like
Joey Hedger
I read somewhere (probably an ad) that the town of Hershey, Pennsylvania, smells like chocolate. The Budweiser brewery in St. Louis supposedly gives off a Cheese-Its odor, according to one Redditer who lives nearby. Anyone who resides close to a McDonald’s knows how the smell of French fries can stain the air. I also recall thinking I could smell red tide from my childhood back yard in Seminole, Florida, whenever the murderous algae blooms reached our coast.
Smell is powerful, and we tend to associate it with everything. Food. Rot. People. Place. I started writing Deliver Thy Pigs with Place in mind. Capital-P Place, as in the locations that give us our identities, the ones that sort of ride on your shoulders for the rest of your life, tattoo themselves to your forehead, make a home in your accent and voice and mannerisms and food preferences.
It’s interesting starting a story with Place in mind, because I began with a description of an Illinois town and sort of watched as the town unfolded and formed itself in front of my eyes. One of the first things I did was draw a scrappy map to give myself a better sense of how I wanted the setting and plot to unfold. From there, the identity of Place grew and grew, and I suddenly had a very Midwestern story, inspired by my wife’s hometown, and had all these characters who both could be anybody’s neighbors yet could simultaneously only exist in this one specific location.
I also started writing Deliver Thy Pigs in the beginning of the pandemic, when our Places either swallowed us up or spit us out due to closures and travel bans, when we started losing people, losing health, losing access to the public, losing our sense of taste and smell.
Prairie Ridge, Illinois—the fictional town in which my novel takes place—smells like dead pigs. Like the Hershey factory in Pennsylvania or, to an extent, Budweiser in St. Louis, this town is bound to a large-scale industry, a slaughterhouse factory, and is therefore overrun by the stink and pollution of sausage production. Of course, the locals don’t like it very much because it’s disgusting, but most of them work for the factory and eat from its production, so what could they do?
I had been thinking about coal country in West Virginia—the idea of Place that both hurts you and feeds you. It’s a contrast of identity and setting. The Appalachian Mountains are contrasted with catastrophic environmental destruction. Hometowns are contrasted with capitalistic abuse. Coal miners’ occupational identity is contrasted with carcinogens and black lung.
But I know very little about coal country.
So I eventually thought about different kinds of contrasts and eventually came across one that made me chuckle: A Chicagoan who hates bratwursts. Or, maybe, a vegetarian who loves them but won’t eat them. That’s where Marco Polo Woodridge came from—contrasts. He lives in a town (and works in a sub shop) reliant on a meat factory that he hates. He bears the name of a traveler but has never traveled. He has ready access to community but is still lonely, grieving.
Grief has a smell, too. Maybe it’s reheated casserole or sanitized funeral homes. Or, maybe, it’s lingering laundry detergent, the smell of returning to a childhood house. In my book, stink is communal, shared by everybody who lives there, as is the trauma of the slaughterhouse and the hurt it’s caused. So I tried to make a pseudo-exodus story, what with fake plagues and rivers of blood; what exists beyond the “deliverance” is still, unfortunately, wilderness. But what does wilderness smell like? Does it reek, or does it smell better? Is it familiar?
Editor’s note: I lived in Denver for a long time; there's a Purina factory east of town and when it's rainy the city smells like dogfood. You can also sometimes tell if it's gonna snow if you can smell the Greeley (cows, poop, death). —AG
Joey Hedger is author of the chapbook, In the Line of a Hurricane, We Wait (Red Bird Chapbooks) and Deliver Thy Pigs (Malarkey Books). A former Floridian, avid nature lover, and amateur birder, he currently lives in Alexandria, Virginia. You can find his writing at joeyhedger.com.
