Have you ever experienced that awkward moment when you're in the car with someone from out of town and you drive through American Fork on I-15? Suddenly your car smells like someone had way too much mexican food and no qualms about letting loose in such a small and enclosed space.

Your passenger of course assumes you let loose and you realize that even if you explain that American Fork is apparently on the other end of every flushed toilet in America, they're not going to buy it. It's like going into a restroom that stinks to high heaven before you got there, and then finding some cute girl standing outside the door when you leave. It's not as if you can stand there and explain that you didn't cause the stench.

Okay, seriously - the stench is foul. I was going to come up with some snarky way of describing what must go on there like "it's as if they pile up the waste of every individual in Utah, line the highways with it, and use fans to blow it at the cars," but the reality is just as bad as anything I could think of.

That's right, the solid waste from 190,000 residents from American Fork and surrounding cities is laid out flat in the fields along I-15 so that it can age and dry.

Really? That's the best we can do? We collect excrement from a couple hundred thousand people and plop it down right at the entrance to our city?

Welcome to American Fork! Come live with us in a city literally built in vast rolling hills of feces!

The interesting thing is that if you're out walking your dog, the law requires you to pick up the doggy-doo and throw it away. Yet right down the street we have fields of human variety plop laid out nice and neat like some kind of sick scat fetish wonderland.

American Fork's Field of Feces is a popular spot for high school pickup games.

The problem is actually bad enough that companies have to send people home early when the smell gets bad enough and some companies avoid bringing out-of-town guests to their offices for fear of giving the impression that Americans for some reason love to wallow in their own putrescence.

Here's a handy tip: Start recirculating the air in your car when you hit Orem and don't stop until you get to Thanksgiving Point. I've mused about creating some kind of GPS-enabled switch for Utah drivers that would perform the task automagically. I think there is definitely a market for it.

This week brings good news for those of us who don't like smelling our foul bodily waste every time we go outside; the Lakeside treatment facility is going to upgrade their facility with some machines that will keep them from having to spread everyone's filth out on the front lawn of Utah valley. That's right, they'll no longer be using waste management techniques invented in the neolithic era! The rest of America welcomes you to 100 years ago!

So beginning next week they're going to start using this new machine. Then all we have to do is wait for the current crop of human meadow muffins to bake and dry out and we should be home free (good news for my friends at Sewell Direct). They say that will take until the end of summer this year.

Then we'll just have to worry about the stench from Utah lake, where everyone else dumps their raw sewage.

(As a side note, I actually found this definition for "poop" on dictionary.com quite entertaining and I don't know why. Poop -noun: relevant information, esp. a candid or pertinent factual report; low-down: Send a reporter to get the real poop on that accident [unless that accident happened in American Fork in which case the poop is already all over the accident].)