What I remember most is the smell. It wasn’t the smell of pig dung. I’m used to that. I was in the back seat of a pickup, driving down a gravel road just south of the Iowa-Missouri border. Back in Iowa, my home state, pigs outnumber humans eight to one. Most of them live in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where thousands of pigs per unit spend all but the very beginning and very end of their lives under the same roof, on a cement floor, crowded above a tank filled with their own manure. When the massive fans on the far end of any facility go out, the entire herd can die from asphyxiation within minutes. The wind carries the smell of these facilities for miles across the Midwest countryside. It’s a smell that sticks to our clothes, our hair, and to the lettuce that grows in our vegetable gardens.

This wasn’t that smell. This was a bitter, dark smell.