Our first spring here, Steve came home from work one day and asked me if I'd ever seen the shit truck. He told me that it is a truck that sprays a kind of liquid concentrated manure on the fields and the smell is unbelievable. Soon after that I bore witness to a shit truck spraying a field at a distance. I wouldn't have believed it if Steve hadn't told me about it first. The smell is the olfactory equivalent of someone running their fingernails across a chalk board, but worse. A hundred times worse. No - a thousand times worse.

I encountered it a couple more times that season. I'd find myself thinking about it the way you would think about some horror - like what it feels like to be burned alive, or have your eyeballs pulled out. I wondered what people who lived near a shit field did when the shit truck came around. Did they get any warning? Did they go stay in a hotel or with a relative who didn't bear the same misfortune of living in the shit truck's path? Imagine buying a house near a shit field. You'd have no way of knowing what you were in for untill it happened. I guarantee that realators don't tell you about it. Someone was complaining to me that the realators don't mention the freight and passenger trains that run right through the middle of Chatham to prospective homebuyers. I'd take ten trains over one day of the shit truck.

My interest in the shit truck crystalized one day when my brother was visiting from L.A. and we got caught behind one on a winding county road. I couldn't pass it for all the curves in the road and it moved slowly, the way a dump truck or a cement mixer might. Now I had a witness from the outside world and my brother, an aspiring screenwriter, vowed to put the shit truck in a movie. It belongs in something dark and twisted like Requiem for a Dream.

I had a lot of questions about the shit truck. If it's cow manure, why does it smell so vile? I've driven past dairy farms in the summer, and they do indeed stink, but it's a different kind of smell, it's earthy and more natural. I don't want to romanticize dairy farms - especially the more "modern" factory farm kind, the cows pretty much stay in a barn and eat grain, so their shit stays there too and it is pretty foul, but it's a conceivable smell. The shit truck smell is inconceivable, concocted by some evil mastermind bent on destroying the world.

I ask people around here about it all the time, approaching it with some modesty, the way you might initiate a conversation about yeast infections or a sexual problem. I am amazed that many people don't seem to know what I am talking about. How is it that I've only lived here a couple of years and I've encountered this thing several times and some people have lived here their whole lives and never smelled it? I asked my friend Melinda, lifetime resident and novice farmer. She insisted it was the factory farmed manure from dairy farms, but didn't really know what I was talking about, having never seen the shit truck. Is it an apparition reserved just for my family?

I hit the information jackpot the other day when I asked my friend, Donna, who is an environmental engineer. The contents of the shit truck is sewage sludge, made famous when the federal government got involved in certifying organic food. They wanted sewage sludge to be an acceptable ingredient in organic food production. People who eat organic food, who pay extra money for it, didn't like that very much. Donna had been involved in a proposal to construct wetlands as a sort of a natural sewage treatment system, but the way that the laws in New York State were written, there was not enough financial incentive.

Sewage sludge is the solids that get pulled out of people's septic tanks and municipal waste facilities. It can either be sent to a treatment plant or spread on fields as fertilizer. I wondered if the farmers pay for it as fertilizer or if the septic companies pay the farmers for providing disposal of it. Donna didn't know. What's amazing to me is that it is a serious environmental issue that directly affects this rural area, and so few people know any thing about it.

I've read about what nasty things septic tanks are, but encountering the shit truck really clarifys that. In this area, health official have resisted approval of composting toilets, for fear that they might not be safe, so it is hugely ironic that sewage sludge is sprayed in open fields here.

There is a huge disconnect in our modern, sophisticated society between our lives and the waste that our lives produces. Since we moved here, I have valued the effort that we have to put into garbage disposal. Garbage has to be driven to the dump and paid for by the bag. This causes you to be tremendously sensitive to how much waste you produce. When we first moved here, we didn't have a compost pile and we weren't aware of the extensive paper recycling that was available. Once we began fully recycling and composting, our contribution to the landfill shrunk by more than half. We also became more sensitive to the packaging that came with anything that we bought. I now try to dispose of bulky packaging at the store where I bought the item.

I can't help but think that if everyone had to deal with garbage in this way, that we would produce much less of it. Consumers would demand less packaging and second hand goods would be a popular alternative to new products. We often talk about encouragement of a less consumer driven lifestyle as an ecological or financial choice, but it might just be a matter of making people deal more intimately with their own garbage and making it harder to just throw things away.

There is a similar, perhaps deeper disconnect with our sewage. Part of what makes sewage sludge so toxic is all of the chemicals that we pour down our drains. If people had to experience the results of this more directly - the way that all of the households in the communities that are subject to the shit truck do, perhaps people would opt for safer alternatives to the products that they are using. The way things are now, most people suffer no direct consequenses from these kinds of choices, so it's no wonder that change is so hard.

Besides making our sewage less toxic, there are alternative ways to deal with it. Composting toilets could be encouraged rather than shunned and constructed wetlands could be studied and financed. And everyone should know about the shit trucks. It wish I could include a link to a smell file so you could smell for yourself. I guess you wouldn't download something like that. You'd never visit my webpage again.