Mudflats smell like nature

Last Sunday afternoon my wife and I went out to the Billy Frank Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge and took a walk out to the end of the boardwalk. It was a warm sunny spring day and the tide was out. We both commented on how the smell of the salt marsh mudflats was actually rich and very pleasant; that it smelled like, well, ...the sea.

Driving home, we passed the mushroom farm corner near the Regional Athletic Center and experienced one of its periodic “funky” odiferous episodes. It was appallingly bad smelling, rotten and offensive.

After getting home, I happened to read a letter to The Olympian stating that returning the Capitol Lake to its original estuary condition is “...without question the most destructive idea I’ve seen for this community in (those) 45 years.”

How can the natural smell of an estuary be so unacceptable to some people while in another part of our community the regular occurrence of rotting compost that can be smelled sometimes a half mile away be accepted as just a byproduct of business?

I would suggest that people who are concerned about the smell of marine mudflat ecosystem in downtown Olympia merely take a walk out to the end of the boardwalk at the Nisqually Refuge on a day when the tide is low. Their fears will be greatly eased.

This story was originally published June 8, 2017 at 6:32 PM with the headline "Mudflats smell like nature."