What’s that smell?

One day last week, I got a whiff of something noxious nearby. The smell was not unlike ones I’ve sniffed driving through Pennsylvania farming country— fertilizer, maybe. A bitter, acrid smell invaded my senses. I felt it in my nose, mouth and throat. Jack can’t smell, so I let him know. “There’s an awful odor,” I said. “I hope it’s not something dangerous.”

I closed the windows of our house, but the odor permeated. “If It doesn’t go away, soon,” I said, “I’m going to do something about it.” What I would do remained to be seen.

Between the front of our house and the road, a vegetable farms spreads out for approximately two hundred-fifty yards on the right of our driveway. Rows of lettuce, peppers, cabbage, squash, cilantro, and cucumbers climb from the driveway to the edge of the mountain, another 75 yards. Opposite the veggies is a coffee plantation. Beyond the vegetables, cows have been installed, to eat the high grass that grows there. The cattle also live off to the side of our yard, beyond another 75 yards of vegetables.

I’ve never noticed any malodorous fumes wafting our way from the cows, or, before that, the pigs. But I see the farm workers spraying the vegetables, and I think: fertilizers and insecticides. I’m not keen on inhaling either of those chemical combinations. A little research into fertilizers shows that Costa Rica is fourth in the world in fertilizer use and first in pesticides. A plethora of diseases are caused by these two essential farming aids, including various cancers.

I decided to ask one of the farm workers. “It’s the rotten fruit,” he said. Jack confirmed that fact. “There are about two hundred sacks of wet plantain peels around here,” he said. The plantain peels are fodder for the cows, we learned.

After a few days of cowering inside the house, I saw Oldemar, the local guy who collects our rent every month. He has planted beans along one side of our house and in the back. “Algo huele malo,” I said. Something smells bad.

Oldemar agreed.

“¿Qué podemos hacer?” I asked. What can we do?

Oldemar said he would talk to the farm owner, and he did. We don’t know how they accomplished the feat, but within a day or two, the scent of rotting fruit was gone, replaced, happily, by the sweet perfume of blooming canes. That’s more like it.