What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [106]
WE COULD FILL an almanac with the site-specific scents of America. Because I grew up there, my nasal circuits are hopelessly imprinted on California. It’s the source of dozens of characteristic smells—all true and equally essential—enough to fill a wing of the smell museum. The Golden State overwhelmed the intrepid Helen Keller: “I think I could write a book about the rich, warm, varied aromas of California; but I shall not start on that subject. It would take too long.”
I’ll give it a try. Start with the redwoods and the Sierra foothills full of kit-kit-dizze and coyote mint. Leave space for the La Brea Tar Pits and the pleasant, clean, tarry note that hovers over them. Include the stinkpots of Mount Lassen in the far north, and the sulfury hot springs of Esalen, down near Big Sur. The Pacific Coast has its own special collection: heaps of rotting kelp and the rich funk of tidal mud inside the Golden Gate. Depending on the wind direction, there’s the stink of guano off Seal Rocks or the stench of the elephant seals at Point Año Neuvo.
The journalist and social observer Heather MacDonald grew up in the tony Bel Air section of Los Angeles. Living in a dense urban metropolis, she delighted in the nearby outdoors—a typical California contrast. “I spent a lot of time in the Santa Monica Mountains. The smell of the dry chaparral in the summer time and the eucalyptus and the wild mustard plants and the light…. There are so many smells that I associate with the land around here.”
Eucalyptus, that Australian import, is everywhere in California. Another Australian, the Victorian box tree, has become part of the Southern California smellscape. Its nighttime perfume—an intoxicating blend of orange and honey—blankets Los Angeles every February. The local columnist Mary McNamara writes, “Seeping in through open windows, under doors, the scent saturates the air, the bedclothes, so dense you can taste it. Ambrosia rising, within and without.”
The best way to sample California smells is by car. Drive down I-80 with the windows open as you pass the oil refineries in Pinole. Cruise past the Harris Ranch and the stockyards off I-5 in Coalinga and get the full blast of the cattle. Take US 101 through Gilroy and inhale the garlic. (And don’t forget that the famous Lockheed “Skunk Works” in Los Angeles was named for the obnoxious smell of a nearby plastics factory.)
Maybe Helen Keller was right—California demands a lot of the cataloger, and these are just the bigger features of the smellscape. Zoom in to the level of neighborhoods and the picture gets more detailed, and even more evocative. Odor mapping is an exhausting effort. Is it really necessary to capture and preserve all this stuff that’s just out there, floating around? Of course it is. The Hunt’s tomato cannery in Davis is shuttered; the garlic depot in Vacaville is gone; Cannery Row smells only on paper; and it’s a rare day when Fisherman’s Wharf smells of a fresh catch. The recent past—our very lifetimes—is evaporating day by day.
CHAPTER 12
Our Olfactory Destiny
They were, I now saw, the most unearthly creatures it is possible to conceive. They were huge round bodies—or, rather, heads—about four feet in diameter, each body having in front of it a face. This face had no nostrils—indeed, the Martians do not seem to have had any sense of smell.
—H. G. WELLS, The War of the Worlds
IN THE IMAGINATION OF H. G. WELLS, MARTIANS WERE more advanced than humans: they didn’t need a primitive sensory system with nostril holes and wet mucous membranes. Martians were big-eyed, big-brained, and gutless, with squidlike tentacles instead of arms and legs. What these creatures lacked in biology they made up for with technology: they roamed the Earth in mechanical exoskeletons. Since The War of the Worlds appeared in 1898, science-fiction writers and alien abductees have