|
|
Poopoo Land
By Memphis Saltos During the summers, when there hasn't been a rain for months and the grasses turn yellow and the rivers dry up, there is patch of highway on California Hwy 580/80 just when you pass into Emeryville which becomes what my kids call the "Poopoo Land." It is the stretch of highway where the world smells not unlike a wicked fart let loose in a closed car. I believe there is a sanitation plant nearby collecting all the bay area number twos for processing. It is surprising that Berkeley Bay Area scat, which is made up of organic clean living and other nonfat sissified eats, all put together in one spot can make such a stench that even a Southern gal, who is used to diets of gumbos and peppers and lard and all manner of serious strong gas producing spices, will scream, "PeeeeeYeeewwww!!" Unfortunately, we must pass to this area to get to my house after picking up friends at the Oakland Airport. "Oh, we are just passing near the sewer plant," I'll explain. I don't think anyone believes me despite my girls, with their fingers tightly clasping their respective noses, yelling a muffled and strange sounding, "We are now entering Poopoo Land!" And no matter how many times I tell my dad, he will always cock an eyebrow north a notch and glare at me when we pass through the stench. "It wasn't ME! Well, maybe I'm mixed in there somewhere ... but it isn't ONLY me!" I try to tell him even though I easily haven't inhaled for over a minute by then. To my dad, I'll never live down all the times I used to torture my sister by eating just the right combination of foods and drink that would keep me burping and tooting all the way through her favorite TV programs. My sister's angry hysteria over this olfactory injustice was one of the few benefits of being little me, the type of girl who can discuss things like bowel obstructions and frog guts at the dinner table. Of course no one else in the family saw this character trait in darling Memphis as an "eccentricity" or "lovable oddity" but rather "a sign that she is crying out for help and needing the comfort that only sitting alone in her room grounded for a week could provide.” Poopoo Land isn't the only stinky area near Berkeley. There is a little entrance to California Hwy 80, right next to a famous teenage submarine watching area, where by August the pond has gotten shallow and all the algae starts blooming and dying. The scientific name for this is eutrophication and the resultant mass death from this creates a smell just like a world of lactose-intolerant farts. We haven't created an official name for this area yet, but you can be sure when my sister visits come summer that we'll pass this pond and Poopoo land, and my girls and I will merely pass each other quiet knowing glances and wry grins. |
|