Monday, April 18, 2016

A to Z Challenge 2016: O is for Odor




We are camped in a beautiful wooded campground by the Pacific Ocean.  We have been blessed with sunny weather.  The sky is bright blue, the birds are abundant, and the stars shine brightly at night.  As park hosts, one of our assigned tasks is checking each campsite after the campers leave to make sure everything is tidy.  We usually walk our route several times a day to pick up litter and chat with campers.

"Gawd, what's that smell?" I say to the spouse as we walk along the A Loop road.  "It smells like someone has been smoking weed all night!"

I look over at the folks in the campsite and they don't look like party animals, but since Oregon legalized marijuana, it has become more common to smell the distinctive odor in public areas.

After checkout time, the spouse and I went back to check the site.  The strong odor still lingered.  We looked around for the source of the smell.  No, we didn't find a bale of marijuana...that happens only once in a lifetime, but you can read about that experience here.  We found skunk cabbage!  Lots of skunk cabbage!






This stuff really smells, and it smells just like nasty, day-old marijuana smoke...or, um, I mean as I've been told.

It grows all along the Pacific coast in wet, boggy areas.  





When I made reservations for our camping trip this summer with the granddaughters, I avoided the A loop boggy area. 

I much prefer odor-free camping!



7 comments:

  1. Ha ha! I don't think I've ever truly smelled skunk cabbage before, or didn't know about the source if I did. Definitely good to know, Jann! I've had a strange day - work up feeling compelled to write a blog, so I did. And then decided to actually read a few blogs, and yours was the first one in my line up (also the most recent!) Enjoy your camp hosting gig! I think it would be a lot of fun . . . if I had a trailer to camp in! Hugs to you!

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  2. Ha ha! I don't think I've ever truly smelled skunk cabbage before, or didn't know about the source if I did. Definitely good to know, Jann! I've had a strange day - work up feeling compelled to write a blog, so I did. And then decided to actually read a few blogs, and yours was the first one in my line up (also the most recent!) Enjoy your camp hosting gig! I think it would be a lot of fun . . . if I had a trailer to camp in! Hugs to you!

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  3. I know about the funky odor of skunk cabbage but I have never really smelled it either. We do have a beautiful purple voodoo lily that, when it blooms, smells like rotted flesh, but only for a few days. I guess you just have to be there.

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  4. Pee-ewwww. Well, at least it wasn't the other.

    Liz A. from
    Laws of Gravity

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  5. I am ashamed to say I really like the smell of skunk cabbage, or what we have begun to refer to as "swamp lanterns." Never thought of old doobies smelling quite like that. :-)

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  6. I never heard of skunk cabbage, but the name tells me that I don't need to experience such a thing. However, I have been to many concerts and that other smell wasn't so bad.

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