Paper Mills

In 1969, our family took a three week trip to Yellowstone, over to California to the Redwood Forest, down through Eureka to San Diego and home.  Katie was a freshman in college, I was in high school, and Bart was in elementary school.

One of the reasons for going to Eureka, California, had to do with the paper mills there.  A group was wanting to bring a pulp mill to Bernalillo, and one of the objections to it was the smell of the mills.  The mill owners assured the group of Albuquerque businessmen that the mills no longer smelled, as the new technology in scrubbers kept the smell out of the air.

Dad was a part of the group making the decision about the plant, so on our trip, he decided to find out if it was true.  Eureka was the home of several pulp mills, so we stayed there a night to "test the scent."  Yech!  If that was clean air, we didn't want any part of it, and eventually, the vote for the pulp mill went down.

Fast forward to Monday night in Prince George.  Something smelled awful.  It smelled like a sewer system, but it wasn't just in our RV park.  It was everywhere.  And suddenly from the deep recesses of my brain, I remembered that smell.  It wasn't sewer gas - it was a pulp mill.  Checking the map of Prince George showed that indeed several pulp mills operated there.  

I know that pulp mills provide many jobs and are necessary to our way of life.  But I am surely
glad that they never came to Albuquerque.