Thursday, April 21, 2005

snifftastic: part II

smells that touch my memory: part I was yesterday.  part III is tomorrow.  then I get a short hiatus.  oh yes I can.  don’t take that tone of voice with me.  do you want me to turn this blog around and go back home right now?

Electric motor: there’s a peculiar tang in the air that I associate with a certain class of household-grade electric motors.  It’s almost sour, almost sweet – an intensely artificial smell, but somehow comforting to me.  Perhaps it’s the smell of a household robot.  In my home growing up, it was the smell of mom’s Sunbeam electric hand mixer, a smell that meant she was doing something good: cookies, probably, or maybe a cake.  This meant I would most likely soon enjoy not only a tasty dessert, but also a more immediate harvest of rich mixing bowl gleanings.  I’d stand by the kitchen counter, sunlight streaming into the room, the ingredients gleaming as one by one they were incorporated into some bliss-inducing synthesis, and beneath and around it all, that curious electrical scent.  When I encountered similar kinds of motors emitting similar odors in non-kitchen environments, such as power drills or some plug-in children’s toys, my mouth has literally watered when that smell of warm insulation and whirring dynamos reached my nostrils.  It seems technology has left me behind on this one, though; newer motors don’t seem to make the same yummy smell.  Sometimes, though, I still run into an old vacuum or sander that smells like the promise of cookie dough when I turn it on.  In such cases, the turn-on is mutual. 

Creosote: it’s that bitter-smelling black stuff on phone poles and pier pilings, a hydrochemical smell, distilled from tar and impervious to the elements.  Yet when it gets in the air around me, I’m sent back to a time when, though some things were not as I’d have wanted them, I was too naive to think ill of my circumstances.  I was six, in England, effectively friendless and culturally adrift.  Yet sometimes the kids in my block of flats (as the brits so charmingly called it) got together to cavort and carouse as best we could in that quiet time with the limited means at our disposal.  We ran around and kicked stuff in the street, threw horse chestnuts at each other, antagonized insects and generally experienced a bit of life free from adult supervision.  These breaks in the generally overcast tedium of my life were precious and I knew it.  And as a general rule, they tended to be accompanied by the smell of creosote, which seemed to be in liberal use everywhere all over the city – in streets and on roofs and on anything made of wood and by the barrelful in the brownfields… wherever I seemed to go, the odor of wood mummified in this stygian goop had preceded me there and overtaken the environment.  I always arrived to the scent of creosote; it seemed to signal my right to let my guard down and enjoy myself.  To me this was never the smell of poison and preservatives.  It was the smell of freedom.  And sometimes if the whiff hits me right, it still is. 

Sycamore and sage: growing up, I spent several of my early summers at a camp up in the Malibu hills.  A private road ran inland from the sea up a narrow canyon where they’d built cabins along a few miles of creekbed; my dad had a regular chaplaincy gig there, so I got to know the place pretty well at an early age.  The camp was rustic, minimally transforming the wild land on which it stood.  A canopy of sycamores shaded much of the area.  These are large trees that have bark that peels off in flat chunks, big leaves covered with stiff fuzz, and spherical seedpods that fall apart into hundreds of little pollen darts.  The groundcover was mainly poison oak and wild sage, both of which I learned quickly to recognize for opposite reasons – one, because it was beautiful and dangerous; the other, because it was plain but fragrant.  The sage and the sycamore together wove a dusty perfume that filled the canyon – and my mind.  I sense Malibu mountains in the summer heat whenever this particular combination of sage and sycamore reaches my nostrils – which is reasonably frequently, what with my coastside lifestyle and all.  The evocation is much more than mere place and time – it’s an evocation of a state of mind, a time when summer lasted half my life and I never had to worry about money or food.  It’s the smell of unlimited potential and a sheltered place from which to grow.  I cherish it.