Baffling odor has us all crying foul

Not to pry, but – has a small, furry creature ever died in your refrigerator?

The reason I ask is because I was convinced that this happened in our refrigerator this week. My evidence being: Whenever anyone opened our fridge door, they said, “Aww, man. Something died in here.”

Yet I have spent days searching through the vegetable crisper, the meat bin and the freezer compartment. I have yet to find any expired rodents, weasels, squirrels, house pets or farm animals. Well, yeah, there were some expired farm animals. What do you think a pound of ground beef is? But I found nothing rotting long past its expiration date.

This is not the first time this has happened to us. About a year ago, my wife, Carol, and I suddenly noticed that our refrigerator wasn’t smelling as sweet as it should. We noticed this because whenever we opened the door we would pass out. When we awoke, we would be enveloped in a noxious plume of pure odiferous evil. I would describe it as the smell you would get if you took one skunk and one pound of lutefisk, put them both in a blender and hit “puree.” Except it was more rank than that.

Well, we knew exactly what had happened. Obviously, a small, furry creature had died in there. So we wrestled the refrigerator out onto the kitchen floor so that I could get in behind it and remove whatever marmot had crawled in.

I found nothing. So I got out my ratchet set and started removing various covers and panels. The critter must have crawled up into the insulation and died. Still, I found nothing.

Finally, I noticed that the bad smell seemed to be worse in the freezer where the cold air blows in. So I checked the air intake. Nothing.

Completely baffled, and a bit lightheaded from the waves of rotten air still streaming from the fridge, I stared long and hard at that refrigerator. Then I noticed an interesting detail. An air passage runs between the freezer and the meat keeper to keep the bin colder than the rest of the fridge.

“Hey, look,” I said. “Maybe the smell is coming from the meat bin. Except there’s really nothing in there except some cheese.”

It was good Tillamook cheddar and it looked fine. But then Carol reached toward the back of the bin and found something that, for one horrifying moment, we thought might actually be a small, expired rodent. After all, it was covered in fur. No, it too was cheese. I think it was Gouda, but it was no longer, as they say in Europe, good-a.

That solved that particular fridge funk. So now, when a pungency arises, we go by this wise motto for life: Always Check Your Cheese. Next we check for any bad scallops that might have escaped our notice, since hard experience has taught us that nothing, not even fur-bearing Gouda, can clear a room faster than fermenting scallop juice.

Which leads us back to our present dilemma. We have checked the cheese and searched for scallops. Nothing.

We have scrubbed every surface and tossed out anything remotely elderly. We have sacrificed a bottle of Thai fish sauce, on the grounds that, even though tightly capped, it might be stinking through osmosis. We even tossed our packet of baking soda, which is supposed to keep the air fresh, but had itself taken on the same evil stench.

We’re at a standoff. We’re getting so desperate that we can think of only one solution: Get a new refrigerator.

I know that’s extreme, but maybe after 15 years, a fridge absorbs so many foul odors that it simply permeates the very glass in the shelves and plastic in the moldings. So we may just do this, if we can talk the EPA into declaring the old fridge a SuperFund site.

Meanwhile, I still wonder if there isn’t a dead critter around somewhere. If it ventures anywhere near that fridge, it’ll go claws-up.