Have you ever noticed how much your life is affected by what your nose knows?  Everyday aromas, when detected in the correct amount and location, bring back good memories and are able to enliven and beautify your day.

There are the smells associated with flowers after a rain, early morning perfumes, food, fresh mown hay, rain on dust, etc.

And then there are the other kinds.

Walk past a slaughter house or a rendering plant or a pig farm…on a hot day.  Or take a stroll past a stockyard where the animals are walking around knee deep in … effluent product.  Or dig a conduit trench across a stockyard.

One day I was called upon to work on a meat packing plant.  They had a smoke house that needed to be wired.  The wood used for smoking the meat has a nice aroma.  But it wasn’t enough to completely overcome the other smells associated with a meat packing plant, slaughter house and rendering plant.

For making bologna, wieners and sausage, at that time, they would use cleaned animal gut.  Getting the gut from the butchered animal to a cleaned condition produced a not so agreeable odor.

In the slaughtering house there was a separate room with an open blood pit.  As animals were slaughtered the blood would pour into the open pit.  Every so often someone would turn on the steam to cook the blood into a curd.  When I had to walk around that pit I was very careful not to slip or drop any tools into it.

There was also a rendering plant on the grounds.  At the rendering plant they took what was left of the animals and crushed the pieces, bones and all, into a fertilizer.

I noticed they did not place these buildings in close proximity to one another.  There was a good reason for that decision.

Somehow I was always tasked with the jobs in this area.  I guess they thought a “farm boy” could take the odors in stride.

At that particular plant I noticed that there were a large number of Native Americans employed there.  I was impressed with anyone that could work in those conditions, day after day, summer and winter.

A few times my boss’s son was sent to work with me at this plant.  His mother would complain that, for some reason, he wouldn’t eat wieners anymore.

I never invited her to accompany us to that job site.

Having grown up on the farm, I still have a farmer’s instincts.  A couple times I went out to help a farmer friend harvest.  It brought back fond memories.

I kept a few goats for some time and raised our children on goat’s milk.  Becky’s dad preferred cows.  And he knew horses.  We had some horses for awhile and he helped our boys learn how to train and ride them.

We always had chickens for eggs and meat.  One of my daughters liked sheep so we had sheep for awhile.  And we had a few ducks, and dogs, and lots of cats.  One of my daughters is deathly afraid of chickens.  One of our boys broke an arm when he fell off of the old gray mare.

One of our farmer friends taught me how to make wine out of chokecherries.  One time I had not skimmed the wine properly and it went sour.  This was in the fall of the year.  I had a buck goat staked out in the garden area, cleaning up the leavings.  I put the sour wine (approximately 2 gallons) in a bucket and placed it in the garden area within reach of the buck.

The buck stuck his nose in it up to his eyes and drank steady till he had drank every drop without stopping.  He lifted his head just enough to clear the bucket and stood there; spraddle-legged, not making a sound.  I took the empty bucket and went back in the house.

I came out two hours later and there he stood just as when I left him.  I don’t think he waggled an ear.  That was one happy buck.

I have seen a female goat drop a kid in a snow bank when it was below zero and the kid survived.  Goats are survivors.

Eventually the old gray mare we had died.  I did like any farmer would do.  I dug a hole in the garden and dropped her in it, feet up.  I hadn’t dug the hole deep enough.  Rigor mortis had set in, so I had to get down in the hole with her and bend her legs at the knee so we wouldn’t have four hooves sticking out of the ground in the middle of the garden.

You know what happens to old farmers?  They get old and bent and lame and shaky and weak.  There came the day my Dr. said I wasn’t to lift over forty pounds, so I had to get rid of my animals.  That wasn’t an easy job.

Being an electrician is much easier work.

Grain dust is one of the most explosive dusts in existence.  As you can probably speculate, wiring in a grain elevator is very particular, in more ways than one.  You have to be very particular about the materials and manner of wiring, and you have to work in an area of particulates.  One spark could blow the elevator to smithereens.  (I’ve always wondered where Smithereens are located.)

Grain elevators are not replaced very often.  They are built to last for many years.  One of the more common methods of building grain elevators is to lay 2×6 boards flat on top of one another and nail them together.  Other elevators may be constructed of poured cement.  As a result of the longevity of grain elevators, some of them are very old and do not have modern equipment, design or wiring.

One of the jobs I was given in Montana required me to rewire an old wooden elevator.  I had to use special, extra tough, wire and seal-offs.  These are materials commonly used in gasoline pumps, propane pumps and some manufacturing plants.  They are collectively referred to as “explosion proof” materials.

To get to the top of the grain elevator, I had to use a “man” elevator.  Well actually it was a little platform about 2 feet square that operated by a rope and pulley system.  The rope was run through a series of pulleys and allowed me to hoist myself to the top.  Coming down, I had to pull on a different rope, similar to some window shades.  There are times I still dream of riding that open elevator.

Now a passenger elevator in a multi-storied building is different.  They have the mechanism for running the elevator on the roof in a small building called a penthouse.  An older elevator will have cables, pulleys, contacts and controls.  I worked on an older one that needed regular repair work.

I would step inside the little penthouse and it was a cacophony of sound.  There were snaps, clicks, bangs and sparks flying everywhere.  I could see signs of a fire having burned inside the penthouse, but since it was built out of a non-flammable material, the fire had gone out.

I had to replace the points on a number of contacts.  It required that the elevator be shut down.  That was very inconvenient for everyone.

Now the newer elevators will have a long hydraulic shaft buried deep in the ground under the elevator housing area.  Usually these are a type of telescoping shaft.  They run much smoother and quieter than the older ones, without the need of a penthouse.

There are times I am utterly astounded at all of the equipment that is used to get us through an ordinary day.