Friday, November 03, 2017

The air in Ayer

There’s not to much to Ayer, Massachusetts. It’s most well known (at least locally) as the home of Fort Devens. Devens was a big deal at one point, but now it’s a relatively small US Army Reserves installation. There’s also a Federal prison facility there – it’s most notorious resident was Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Patriots Day bomber, who was housed at Devens while on trial.

In our family, Fort Devens was famous for having been the spot where my Uncle Charlie served during his short-lived Army career during World War II.

The Army was pretty hard up for soldiers by the time they got around to drafting Charlie.

He was well into his thirties, and the Selective Service was no longer being quite as selective as they had been at the outset of the war.

Amazingly, my father – three years Charlie’s junior – had been rejected (for flat feet) by the Army when he tried to join up shortly after Pearl Harbor. The Navy did take my father, and the rest is (family) history.

But Charlie was not an eager beaver when it came to the service. In fact, pretty much the only thing the man was an eager beaver for was goldbricking and cadgery, which he had down to fine arts.

By the time Uncle Sam caught up with him in late 1944/early 1945, they didn’t even have any uniforms or arms to issue, at least not to the likes of him. The stories were that Charlie trained for a few months wearing his Chesterfield overcoat, and carrying a fake wooden rifle. Or was it a broomstick? In any case, Charlie was only in a couple of months when he received a medical discharge for being hard of hearing. I believe that, thanks to this, he collected Army benefits for the rest of his life.

Anyway, that’s pretty much the sum total of what I know about Ayer, Massachusetts.

But it’s apparently home to a few factories, one of which is a plant that produces tofu. Which is not such a great thing, Ayer air-wise.

The smell reminds [residents] of rotten eggs, sewage, or fermented dairy. Neighbors also used words like rancid, nauseating, and foul.

The source of this stench? A tofu plant, whose emissions have been assaulting the town’s olfactory senses off and on since May.

“It’s ungodly,” said John Doherty, 19 . “It just smells rotten.” (Source: Boston Globe)

As they say, a factory smell means jobs. As does despoiling the environment. But at least Nasoya Foods isn’t doing that.

I know what a factory-smelling town smells like.

My friend Joyce’s sister was married to an attorney who, early in his career, was a Legal Aide lawyer in Berlin, NH in the 1970’s.

Berlin was home to paper mills, and not only did the town smell awful, the river that ran through it, the Androscoggin, was a roiling mass of putrid looking white and yellow guck.

I was only in Berlin a couple of times, and never during the height of summer, but, boy, did that town reek.

Nasoya acknowledges that they’re the ones causing the problem:

“We apologize to the neighborhood and I empathize with the neighborhood. It’s unacceptable,” Gatta said Thursday in a telephone interview. “We have zero tolerance for this kind of thing.”

Well, neither do the folks in air who can’t breathe the air, and who categorize it as a “serious quality of life issue.”

Unfortunately, despite the two scrubbers that Nasoya has going, things sometimes gang agley and smelly. And sometimes the smell disappears immediately, while other times it lingers – and floats into neighboring towns.

They’re working on it, including looking at replacing the existing scrubbers with something more high tech.

Meanwhile, residents  - in their homes and businesses - are “burning patchouli-scented incense” and “pumpkin pie scented candles.”

Patchouli? Scented candles?

Remind me to stay out of Ayer.

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