We were just getting out of the hospital when …

We were just getting out of the hospital (Buck and Joan in the Wars) when …

… Joan gasped, holding her hand to her face.

“Buck, what in the world is that smell?” Buck, quickly holding a handkerchief to his face responded, “That, my dear, is the lovely odor of ‘Cloquet’ (pronounced ‘klo…kay’). The locals claim it does not happen much any more but in my time that smell of rotting ‘yuk’ was a regular.

“I am going to chunder,” Joan replied, still gasping. Happily, she did not for we were standing in the foyer of the local hospital.

Thus Tamar Valley residents, Buck and Joan, were introduced to the smell almost everyone said did not happen anymore. It DID happen…at one of the most modern pulp mill towns in the USA.

I repeated the smelly story to a number of locals, who when told of the happening, seemed to suddenly remember that ‘Sometimes we get a whiff of it…but you get used to it. Should have smelled it a few years ago!”

“Cloquet” once used to shut down baseball games, football matches and chase people inside while at a family barbeque. The smell that day was like the ‘Good old days!’ Then the locals always chimed in with, ‘There are a lot of jobs at the mill you know…’ Which was true. No one in those days talked about ‘fugitive emissions’. Instead it was referred to as the #@$%#ing Cloquet Stink!

We have been talking about moving back to Minnesota sometime next year. Perhaps we will. Probably not. Being an expert at emigrating to other countries I know it gets more difficult as you get old. One thing we DO know is that if we move back to Minnesota it will NOT be to Cloquet, lovely town that it is.

But this is what will probably happen if the Tamar Valley gets the ‘Most modern and best equiped pulp mill in the world’!