The Smell of the Dairy Air

I love the smell of manure in the morning. Well, not really. I don't love it, or even like it, in the morning or at any other time. However, the aroma of manure, emanating from a Wisconsin dairy farm and wafting through an open car window, does bring back pleasant memories.

A friend asked me not long ago why I enjoyed road trips to Wisconsin so much. This was during the summer when my wife and I had either been to or were going to visit Door County one weekend and an art festival in the capitol city of Madison on another weekend.

There's much to like about the Dairy State. The people are friendly, there are many picturesque places to visit and there are ample amounts of beer, fudge and cheese available, enough for everyone who lives there and visits from other states to get their fill.

I suppose, though, one reason I keep returning is a need to go back to where I had some of the most fun of my childhood. In my long lost youth of the 1970s my parents would take me once a summer, sometimes even twice, to Wisconsin Dells. The area was, and still is, sort of like Vegas for children; what happens there, stays there. At least until somebody cleans it up.

There was an attraction named Fort Dells, a cross between an amusement park and a replica of a fort from the 1800s where once an hour a bloodless shootout was staged between the notorious criminal Black Bart and the nameless good guys. We knew the good guys from the bad guys by the color of their hats, bad guys in black, good guys in white. Fort Dells also had a tower where you could ride to the top in a slowly spinning car and survey the surroundings. How this mini space needle fit in with the fort motif, I'm not sure, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

There was Tommy Bartlett's Water Show, boat rides on the Wisconsin River, a park with tame deer that would eat food bought from a vending machine stocked with deer chow right from your hand and the famous Ducks. These Wisconsin Ducks were World War II surplus vehicles that could drive on land and float on water. They had once sailed in Mediterranean waters and stormed the beaches at Anzio and now they were hauling kids and their parents through the woods and into the Wisconsin River. It was a lot of fun and I still remember the Duck driver saying, as he passed along side a steep ridge in the forest with nothing but chicken wire between us and the depths below, "If the wire can hold a chicken, it can hold a duck." Years later, when my wife and I went on a Duck ride, the driver told the same joke. It is, apparently, a tradition.

But I digress away from the foul stench of manure on a hot summer day. When one drives in Wisconsin one will pass dairy farms. Dairy farms often smell like manure. This is the aroma, the smell of the dairy air entering through the window of a speeding car on a summer day, that transports me to my youth. It does so whenever we drive somewhere in Wisconsin in the summer and I smell that smell. (I also remember the smell of my father's unfiltered Chesterfields, but the smell of cigarette smoke holds no sway with me; I just find it annoying.)

So there you have it. It is nostalgia for my youth spurred by a warm summer malodorousness that lures me to Wisconsin every year. That and the beer, cheese and fudge.