‘It’s like finding that blue, moldy thing at the back of the fridge. . . . It sure is pungent.’ : Ah, Autumn in L.A.: Time to Steer Clear of Those Smelly Lawns

As the evening air turns crisp, neighbors set pumpkins on doorsteps, and a pungent aroma wafts through the streets and across back yards.

It creeps into your home, despite the closed windows. It permeates your clothing. It clings to your hair. It means you walk cautiously into a room, particularly among strangers.

This is the legacy of a Southern California rite of fall: the odor of steer manure spread to speed the sprouting of reseeded lawns. In the spring, the honey-sweet scent of orange blossoms fills entire neighborhoods; in autumn, it’s as though a dairy barn moved in.

But inhale deeply, if you dare: Steer manure on lawns is about to go the way of rotary telephones. Soon this will be a smell of nostalgia as more and more yards grow year-round green grass, like the increasingly popular dwarf fescue, and as an increasing chorus of experts says steer manure, loaded with salt, offers little long-term benefit to soil. (Other non-smelly though more expensive alternatives are available.)

In a land where face lifts and tummy tucks reign, it’s no surprise that we want our Bermuda grass lawns--ordinarily brown and dormant at this time of the year--to defy nature and look like Bob Hope’s golf course.

And so for now, in yard after yard, like a contagious disease spreading on certain streets, lawns succumb to the telltale brown streaks and splotches emitting a stubborn odor that worsens after it’s dampened by sprinklers.

But as the stench subsides, brilliant green sprouts of rye grass emerge. Within three weeks, a new lawn is born, cold-weather grass that will flourish until temperatures soar, a tribute to fall in Southern California.

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When Charie Van Luvannee returned from work to her ground-floor Pasadena apartment last week, she was rather alarmed. My God, the sewage pipes burst, thought the Pennsylvania native.

But as she took her Doberman, Sturmy, out for his evening walk, Van Luvannee realized what the gardeners had done. She snapped shut every window in her two-bedroom apartment. She purchased four room deodorizers. She turned on the air conditioner, despite the chilly evening.

Even so, the stench of manure lingered.

“It’s just a shock when you are not expecting it,” said Van Luvannee, a psychotherapist. “It was gagging.” And it was irritating. Van Luvannee would never allow her dog to defecate in the yard of her Orange Grove Avenue apartment complex, a place so particular that officials restrict the colors of patio umbrellas. Yet here she was, gasping for fresh air and inhaling what smelled like a stockyard.

It was, she figured, another one of her Southern California experiences. Without a doubt, it paled beside her memory of the riots, fires, earthquake and the time she came across two gang members shot dead in a car in the supermarket parking lot. It was, however, another time for her to turn to Sturmy and say, “We’re not in Lancaster, Pa., anymore.”

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The smell, however, doesn’t bother everyone. It makes Beth Pickert think of her childhood and her parents’ house in Seal Beach.

For Pickert, a full-time mom to a lively 4-year-old and 20-month- old twins, having her Mar Vista lawn done is the kickoff for fall. It triggers an unrelenting schedule of birthdays, holidays and other rituals, such as cleaning out closets and hanging Halloween decorations.

When the lawn man, Brett Arellano, arrived at her house to spread steer manure, Pickert did what any reasonable Angeleno would do. She left.

At Green Scene Inc., the Sun Valley-based lawn maintenance company where Arellano works, employees draw straws to see who ends up with the manure jobs.

“The smell will stick,” explained Arellano. “It’s never a mystery as to who did the manure work.”

Arellano, his black hair combed smoothly into a ponytail, is good-natured about his task. “If anyone is going to handle bull----, it’ll be me,” he jokes as he pours a sack of manure into a hand-pushed roller.

He forgot to bring his rubber boots, which he usually wears for a job like this. But he remembered another set of clothes, which he planned to change into immediately after finishing Pickert’s yard. Because of the stench, Arellano won’t wash these work clothes at home, they go straight to the coin laundry.

Normally, Arellano, who moved here from Kansas in hopes of joining a rock band, wears shorts at work. (His legs, he says, “are the one thing I have left that still look good.”) But for an assignment like this, he dons black jeans, refusing to wear the company-issued pants because they “look geeky.”

“This is L.A.” said Arellano, 28, whose hero is Mick Jagger. “Vanity doesn’t escape the lawn care business, not in this town.”

The first time Arellano ever spread manure in a yard, he thought it was going to make him ill. “It’s like finding that blue, moldy thing at the back of the fridge; you’re not sure what it was or what it became, but it sure is pungent.”

But these days, he’s grown more accustomed to the odor. “I played football, so I can handle anything,” he said. “Besides, I like autumn.”