By The Campfire

August 15, 2008

In human liquidity, sweat belongs next to blood in the most often written-about fluid in Southern Literature. Lets ignore tears since they are just part of everyday life down here and hardly warrant mention because of their ubiquity. Tears are like rain and rivers, a daily event, spent and gone, and leaving nearly the same effect of washing. But when sweat and blood show up, you have a handful of tension to deal with and it’s better to write them gingerly unless you want to get too caught up in either one.

Sweat has many forms. Flat out, dripping-off-your-nose-sweat accompanies sports and outdoor work. That honest kind of sweat will turn your garments into salty, wring-able cloth, barely capable of containing the heaving human within. If you attempt to fend off this hard-working sweat with antiperspirants or deodorants, it’s like trying to bouffant a horsefly or powder a mule.

There is driving sweat, running sweat, shoveling sweat, cotton picking sweat, ditch digging sweat, hammering sweat and sawing sweat. Fishing sweat smells different than hunting sweat. House-painting sweat is a whole other type of sweat. Each action carries its own sweaticular genus. Often, normal humans don’t notice such particulars. If you go into a football locker room, it will smell pretty rank. Same with a hockey locker room. Rancid and putrid. Basketball and baseball succumb to totally different kinds of athletic stank. And if you think females are immune from this petri dish of bacterial funk, stroll by a female locker room and prepare to see where they’re storing the limberger.

The crème-de-la crème of smell is claimed by one sport alone: Wrestling. If hell has an outhouse, that’s where the Hades Wrestling Team practices.

Human sweat stays with us long after we have passed this earthly plane, turning into ghostly odor in the afterlife. If you've never seen a corpse sweat, be thankful you missed the days before proper embalming in the Deep South. I saw it once as a kids. Don't want to see it anymore. It was a hundred degrees, liquid humidity, a packed farmhouse off Highway 84 between Andalusia and Opp. A tractor accident tucked a dead man in a crude box, packed in ice. He was sweating like a formaldehyde frog in a biology lab.

We have a 1962 Ford Galaxie 500. Inside of it, I can smell the 1960's sweat of my grandfather on the seats. It is a totally unique aroma I associate only with him – a smell made up of five parts Prince Albert Roll-Your-Own tobacco, one part motor oil and axle grease, two parts South Alabama red clay, one part smoked pork and cathead biscuits, one part Old Spice After Shave. The last part has the tinge of faint pine sap and leather.

No matter how much we tried to clean that car, Grandpaw’s ‘roll-your-own, Prince Albert clings to the fabric, down in the springs and hinges and wiring, riding side-by-side with the red clay dust. When I smell it, I can hear his gravel voice and fearless chuckle in the breeze. We take his dearly departed smell for a ride now and then. I think he likes it.

Growing up in the South gives all Southerners a collected sweatography. It is just part of who we are. It is our DNA leaking out through the pours of our skin. It is what turns Northerners into Southerners. I know a Frenchman who came to Alabama for a summer and upon leaving and noticing the red, burned patch on his neck, pronounced himself, “A Redneck!”

I smiled. The irony is that we think we own the term. But we don’t. It’s the sweat equity that earned Philippe his redneck degree, not the current political associations with that term.

You can break a sweat in winter just like summer. But the Sweat of Summer is the true definition of the thing that makes us who we are down here.

Southern sweat will tell a story about your recent activities whether you open your mouth or not. Did you eat a bunch of garlic or onions last night? Your sweat will out you. Drink a bunch of bourbon or wine or beer? Get ready to fess up because your sweat will. Go on a bender and your next morning sweat will uncork those aromas all over again and spread your scent downwind like a little novel of your previous activities. If you smoke, it’s even worse. I once smelled like kudzu for a week because I had to clear out a pungent vine patch. Shovel manure and two weeks later, when you bust some perspiration, you will clear a room.

I have heard it told that experts can determine exactly what you were doing just from smelling your sweat. We tried in once in Florida.

“Lean over here against this wall, boy,” said an old man I worked with years ago at a junk yard near Defuniak Springs. The old man supposedly had the sweat mojo. Southerners do such things because in Southern Culture, it's important to have a talent in some specific area. It doesn't really matter what.

The old man looked deeply at the boy pressed against the concrete blocked building, sniffed a few whiffs and waved him off.

Sweat oozed from every pour and left a mark on the wall. The young man was sweating so profusely, his clothes looked like he’d showered in them. Finally, he wandered away and found some tended shrubbery, leaned into the bushes by a shade tree.

The old man examined the wall where the boy had stood. He sniffed the wood and told what the young fellow had done the night before.

“He smoked three packs of unfiltered,” said the old man. “Chesterfields, likely. Cheap bourbon too. He took a woman to a riverside restaurant/bar – maybe up on the Conecuh. She was wearing too much cheap perfume to cover her own drunkenness. He had raw oysters. She had catfish, fried. They were in his car for a while. His old Pontiac leaks oil and you can tell a car burning oil all the way to Mississippi. I won't go into more detail about their activities in the Pontiac.”

The old man turned and started up the road and pointed up toward the highway. “Later, he got into a little scuffle up yonder with some drunken frat boys from Troy or maybe Auburn. Didn’t fight though. He was too liquored-up. After midnight, they all made up and drank a lot of Jack, out on the pier there. The woman he was with drank vodka tonics. She’s sleeping them off right now in some cheap dive or in his car, not feeling too good at all.”

We asked the old man how he knew such specific details about a guy he’d never met.

"I was with him." he said. "I bar tend up there on the hill. I seen it all. Watched the whole damned thing."

He laughed like a breaking cough.

“But what about the sweat?” we asked him. "You just joking about being able to read sweat like tea leaves?"

He grinned a smile with a few missing teeth.

“If you want to smell somebody’s BO to tell what they been doing, go right on ahead. I’d rather pay good attention. Don’t stink so bad from a few feet away.”

He was still grinning and slapping his knee in a spastic rhythm as he walked into a small trailer shaded by a scrubby palm.

Across the Gulf in front of us, out past the breakers and rocks and fishing boats rocking, the boiling thunderheads rolled down out of the sky onto the aching, green water, like dirty marshmallows spilling. The waves frothed green and dull gray. Temps dropped 20 degrees, and soon the big, tearful drops were spanking the hot oyster shell and steam was rising with a salty smell, just like the smell of sweat from a drunk man who’d partied too hard last night and would do the same tonight in the heat lightning that turned Sunday into Monday and a whole new kind of sweat.

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