Sunday, November 6
SIQ Scale
El Centro is in the desert, but it's a desert that's almost entirely effaced by agriculture. The Colorado River provides lots of water for this area, and that water has transformed the Imperial Valley into a huge agricultural center. Now, the history of all this agriculture--and what it has done to the environment--will be the topic for another day. But one facet of agriculture in this area that I have to mention is the wide variety of smells that float over this city and region. Depending upon where you stand in this city, it can smell like boiled cabbage, super-sweet peanut butter, the most disgusting garbage ever conceived, and any one of a thousand other mostly-horrid smells.
Luckily, where my wife and I live, we're surrounded by trees and grass and a nice, happy park, so the smells usually don't filter into our backyard with any regularity. In the morning, at times, we'll smell peanut butter or boiled cabbage or a few other things, but it dissipates quickly. At other locations, however, the smells grow as the sun grows in the sky, making for some rather unpleasant experiences and making for a distinct desire to stay indoors.
The smells are basically from agriculture, so they are probably pretty familiar to anyone else who lives in an agricultural region. However, they're not all agriculture. Some are from the rather nasty smells that float through the valley in the form of the New River, one of the most polluted rivers in the country. Other smells waft down from the Salton Sea, which is where the New River empties. These are nasty smells, the garbage smells, and they make life in the valley rather irritating at times (though more irritating for people who live close to the sea, in towns like Westmoreland, Salton City, Niland, and Calipatria).
So I'm going to try and narrate the smells of the Imperial Valley for you on this site. I don't have a particularly vivid nasal palate. But I know what I smell and I can describe it, and I'm going to use two very simple rubrics for smell identification (or what I will call the Smell Intensity & Quality Scale):
So right now I'm in my house; outside, it's overcast and cool (in the low 70s, which is fairly cool for this area, actually). The SIQ reading right now is 9, which means I can smell fertilizer in the air, but it's not really unpleasant because the trees and grass surrounding me dominate.
Luckily, where my wife and I live, we're surrounded by trees and grass and a nice, happy park, so the smells usually don't filter into our backyard with any regularity. In the morning, at times, we'll smell peanut butter or boiled cabbage or a few other things, but it dissipates quickly. At other locations, however, the smells grow as the sun grows in the sky, making for some rather unpleasant experiences and making for a distinct desire to stay indoors.
The smells are basically from agriculture, so they are probably pretty familiar to anyone else who lives in an agricultural region. However, they're not all agriculture. Some are from the rather nasty smells that float through the valley in the form of the New River, one of the most polluted rivers in the country. Other smells waft down from the Salton Sea, which is where the New River empties. These are nasty smells, the garbage smells, and they make life in the valley rather irritating at times (though more irritating for people who live close to the sea, in towns like Westmoreland, Salton City, Niland, and Calipatria).
So I'm going to try and narrate the smells of the Imperial Valley for you on this site. I don't have a particularly vivid nasal palate. But I know what I smell and I can describe it, and I'm going to use two very simple rubrics for smell identification (or what I will call the Smell Intensity & Quality Scale):
- Smell Intensity: 1 (no smell) to 10 (eyes-watering, lungs burning)
- Smell Quality: 1 (pleasant smells, like grass or flowers) to 10 (disgusting, vomit-inducing, garbage smells)
So right now I'm in my house; outside, it's overcast and cool (in the low 70s, which is fairly cool for this area, actually). The SIQ reading right now is 9, which means I can smell fertilizer in the air, but it's not really unpleasant because the trees and grass surrounding me dominate.
