At some time or another, if you live in North America and drive, you will come upon some fresh asphalt.

The smell, that asphalt smell you get from the laying of fresh hotpatch, is the byproduct of one or more chemicals known as Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. These are present in the form of napthalene, anthracene, and benzoapyrene, among others.

When you make coke out of coal (no, not that kind, of coke. And not that kind of coke, either) you heat the coal in thin vertical ovens until it drives off everything but the pure carbon (more or less). The process has a LOT of by products. Sodum nitrate by the ton. Napthalene. Coal tar. The whole plant smells like fresh asphalt is being laid all the time.

When I began my apprenticeship in 1980, at Inland Steel, I walked down Coke Plant Road for the first time, drinking that hydrocarbon smell into me, absorbing all the new sensations and sights- flames in columns hundreds of feet high, ovens burning over 2200 degrees, doors open on their hellish yellow hearts of airless flame. Clouds of steam the size of neighborhoods, machines the size of stately homes that move under their own power.

I walked through the gate of the maintenance area and saw that someone had used a china marker to write, in a small and careful hand, the following inscription:

“Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create
se non etterne, e io etterno duro.
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate”

I supposed at that time I was the second person in the plant who had read the divine comedy, and the first to have gotten this message, and I was not far wrong.

Fact is, I had a learning experience ahead of me. In the four years i worked there, I became a man. I learned to be a machinist. I learned to be a good mechanic. I learned to be a decent electrician. I saw people die, more than once close enough to blow their heated, sanguine last breaths on my face. I married and became estranged from my first wife. Four, five years of intenseness, every moment a harsh reminder of the frailty of life, as you constantly thought about the misstep you could make which would cause your instantaneous death. I finished my apprenticeship, got the education they provided, and moved on.

Still, when I smell an asphalt truck, or witness fresh hotpatch being laid, the smell hearkens me back to those days, I think of the friends I buried, and the way they died, and I am sometimes a tiny bit ashamed to have lived, more by dumb luck than by skill. Overall, though, the memories it dredges up are good ones, even if bittersweet.