What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [100]
Having perfected their technique, the team was ready to analyze the turd of historical interest. They placed the ancient sample in the GC and waited for it to yield its secrets. One can imagine the tension in the lab as the instrument warmed up and the researchers hovered over the exhaust vent in anticipation. Would they get something, or was all their preparation in vain?
Within minutes secrets of the ancient bowel movement began to spill from the GC. The researchers got a noseful of the expected fecal notes, but along with them came an assortment of food aromas: green leaves, grass, and (weirdly) licorice. Next, they injected a sample from a more recent specimen, one found in Glen Canyon and dating from AD 1100 to 1300. From this one they smelled burned corn, meat, and, once again, licorice. The licorice smell was not an aberration; two plants native to the region smell of it, American licorice and sweet cicely, and both were eaten by Native Americans. Science has succeeded in turning the GC into a time portal. There are probably a lot of fossilized smells lying on museum shelves; which one will be reanimated next?
If You Build It…
With entire smellscapes going extinct, there is an urgent need for preservation. Can a scaled-up version of Warhol’s personal smell museum solve our crisis of collective memory?
In Salinas, California, the National Steinbeck Center is attempting to preserve Steinbeck’s marvelous fictional smellscapes. His inventory in Cannery Row of Doc’s workroom in the Western Biological Laboratory, for example, is a sustained tracking shot for the reader’s nose:
Behind the office is a room where in aquaria are many living animals; there also are the microscopes and the slides and the drug cabinets, the cases of laboratory glass, the work benches and little motors, the chemicals. From this room come smells—formaline, and dry starfish, and sea water and menthol, carbolic acid and acetic acid, smell of brown wrapping paper and straw and rope, smell of chloroform and ether, smell of ozone from the motors, smell of fine steel and thin lubricant from the microscopes, smell of banana oil and rubber tubing, smell of drying wool socks and boots, sharp pungent smell of rattlesnakes, and musty frightening smell of rats. And through the back door comes the smell of kelp and barnacles when the tide is in.
On display at the Steinbeck Center are permanent interactive exhibits in which smells are matched to the books where they appear: horse stable for The Red Pony, mangrove flower for The Log from the Sea of Cortez, and so on. (The smells are released periodically from hidden aerosol cans operated by a timer.) Olfactory realism occasionally takes a back seat to ticket sales: the Cannery Row sardine smell proved too unpleasant for visitors, who complained that something in the museum was rotting. The smell of old dog that accompanies Of Mice and Men is also not popular, but the curators left it in.
Scented museum exhibits are not new; the Smithsonian snuck lavender into a display of gowns in the Hall of American Costume in 1967. Today the Tenement Museum on Manhattan’s Lower East Side allegedly uses a scent generator to simulate the smell of a coal-burning stove in its restored 1878 tenement house. The idea is good—an overcrowded, unventilated apartment of that era would also have reeked of cooking food, BO, and chamber pots—but the execution is too faint to bring much life to the setting.
English museums are especially keen on smells; if you find yourself at a loss for entertainment in the coastal town of Grimsby, go to the National Fishing Heritage Centre and get a noseful of maritime history: seaweed, sea breeze, and dried codfish are among the offerings. Or head to York, where the Jorvik Centre uses smells