Smell

In the summer of my junior year of college, I lived next to a methadone center in not yet hip Brooklyn, in a building in the process of being gentrified. I foraged the stores of my neighborhood. On Atlantic Avenue I walked into an Arab store, sacks full of beans and spices, barrels of olives and breathed deeply. I was home. All summer I returned as often as I could just to stand and smell. I don’t think it was any single fragrant thing, but the mix of it all that made me giddy and happy. I bought packets of this and that and added them to other things, or ate them by themselves. No one thing had that smell.

Today, I have that same jump in my heart when I walk down a path covered with fallen leaves, poke my stick into the dark molder of forest floor to get a better look at an emerging mushroom. The robin in my back yard or the wood thrush deep in the woods announces me like the bell on the door of the shop. I pick a little of this and that and bring them home, have them by themselves or added to other things. No one thing has that smell because it is the smell of all the pieces together.

Smell is our most primal sense, the most intimate. We literally incorporate a tiny particle of whatever we are smelling. Smells can stir memories from before we had words. Yet our vocabulary of smells is stunted. The smell of the woods is one of the ten elemental smells, but most of the others also mix in what I smell as I walk down a favorite path: sweet and fruity smells from something blooming, brush against sweet fern, pass by chanterelles; minty and citrus smells as I tread on dropped pine needles, ants, a twig of black walnut, black birch with its wintergreen smell; something dead, an animal or mushroom; the intense musk that tells me a fox lives nearby…yes I see the hole; ferns toast in the sun, with subtle under tones from the sedges and then the deep chime from the stump moldering in the middle. One late fall walk Eileen and I spent half an hour trying to locate the source of a tantalizing rich smell, like vanilla and sandalwood. We thought it might be coming from the lichens that had fallen out of the oaks overhead during a recent storm since oakmoss is a famous perfume source. Then we looked for something in late flower. The smell was familiar but we couldn’t name it. I think it was a coral fungus that gets an ashy grey dusting and can have a sweet smell. The smell was intensely local but in the end we couldn’t locate it.

We aren’t very good at smell. Dogs and pigs can be trained to point out the truffles we are too dim to recognize. Our eyes are brilliantly positioned for location, turning our heads we can find the source of a sound, but the directional information from our squishy noses is only approximate. Just as some people are gifted with perfect pitch, some have exquisitely sensitive noses. And, as with music, for the most of us who lie in a great  middle ground between having the nose of a perfumer or sommelier and being anosmic, we can learn. Training for something involves building shortcuts between stimulus and response, or finding your way to the existing shortcuts. As animals in the world we have wiring to tell us what is good and bad to eat, what is poison, although that may be most applicable to the plains of Africa where the wiring was installed. The smells of childhood, like that store on Atlantic Avenue, may be burned in literally from our mothers’ milk. If you have been away from things growing together, it may take time to learn to trust your own sense of smell, to understand where smells are coming from and how far away they are. To find a vocabulary to describe what you smell; having words for things helps us sharpen our understanding of them, just as practice helps us understand how far a scent has carried depending on how the air feels.

I belong to lots of on-line plant ID, gardening, mushroom and foraging pages. I have a wonderful library of books by gifted experts in these areas. Pictures only take you so far. For many things a final ID requires touch, taste or smell (one reason it is so important to learn from a teacher.) Understanding how a specific thing smells depends on having that thing in our hand and knowing it is that and not its look-alike.

My sons-in-law are both hunters. Part of their woods lore involves deodorizing their clothes and themselves, burying their gear in something that neutralizes the smells of machine and human, smoking them or replacing them with wild smells of musky animals. When you forage, nothing is going to run away from your smell but you might be nose-blinded by yourself. Necessary insecticides can reek, but nothing else that smells is necessary, and if you refrain from that scented soap you might find that curious insects don’t bother you as much.

Close your eyes as you enter the woods or field, whatever place you go, stop and listen and smell. What is new, what has opened, what is overripe? Can you smell moisture, a swampy growing reek,  or are the woods parched, smelling like baking? Are the berries ripe yet? (If so, you may hear the bees before you smell them.)  Moisture and warmth both bring out the scents of things.  On a sunny day after rain my cats go to the door with ears and tails erect, quivering, swinging back and forth, whiskers twitch, intensely alive. I like to enter my woods the same way. Stop, smell, feel all the tiny different threads that rise and fall as I swivel my head. Among buildings I keep my smelling low. Now, as I enter the dapple of my foraging trail, I turn on that sense.

Head lowered I scan the ground, sniff. So many threads, so much happening. There are mushrooms I track mostly by scent. Sometimes I stop and search before I realize what made me think, this would be a good spot. I look at the way the light through the trees has divided itself on the way down to the moss and leaf mold, recognize a likely slope. But why did I stop just now to look? And as they come into focus I realize they had called me by smell, and I responded automatically from below the place where I think about them. Gratitude.

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