What the...?

On Monday we awoke to a terrible odor. The smell seemed to be coming from the basement. Oh no! How could this be happening? I’m still half asleep. “Stop the furnace recirculating fan!” barked Wendy “Open the doors and windows. Start the kitchen and bathroom exhaust fans.”

Déjà vu? Like a bad recurring dream, all this would have been more terrifyingly mysterious if it hadn’t actually happened before.

Ten years ago we were awakened from our sleep by some sort of fumes that were so strong they literally made your eyes water. The odor in the fumes was so intense that we could not distinguish what it was. Remarkably, there didn’t seem to be any smell outside. The air in the house seemed to be slowly changing from almost a coffee-like but sickeningly, musky, reek to more of a sharp, acrid, burning rubber sort of aroma. The fumes irritated the eyes and they were so strong that they woke you from your sleep. We opened the doors to try to dilute the stench. What was it? A leaking natural gas line? Sewer gas? At a total loss for an explanation, we made an emergency call to the gas company. The voice at the other end (those were the days when you got a human) said they would send someone. Incredibly, the person on the phone didn’t advise us to evacuate.

About a half hour passed. The sun was just beginning to rise as the gas serviceman’s truck pulled into our driveway. I met him outside and explained that we had no idea what has happened here. Without hesitation he said “You have a skunk. I could smell it before I even turned in.”

Our back patio deck is a wooden structure, elevated a foot or so off a gravel base on wood columns. Under the deck, our clothes dryer vents outside. This arrangement is probably not allowed by today’s codes, but our house was built in the fifties and has other unorthodox idiosyncrasies. It seems the skunk must like to crawl under the deck and probably finds warmth near the dryer vent. I don’t know what provoked the skunk to spray, but it must have let go into or very near the dryer vent. The odor traveled into the basement laundry room and was dispersed throughout the house by our furnace fan.

The amazing thing is, everyone in the world knows what a skunk smells like. How could we not recognize the stink?

A skunk’s spray has a totally different smell from a distance, outside, where it is diluted with fresh air. Just ask anyone who has been sprayed. Confined inside our house, the scent was concentrated so much that our senses seemed to be overwhelmed and we were unable to tell it was a skunk. I’m sure others could smell it on our clothes, but we became fairly sensitized to it.

The first time this happened, we were completely baffled as to what had happened. This week, we instantly recognized what it was when we awoke.

The smell has faded out now, but the memory lingers. When will Pepe LePew strike again?

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