What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [98]
“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.” The opening line of John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel acknowledged the reek of the fish-processing plants on Cannery Row, but by the 1950s, overfishing had flattened the local sardine population and taken the factories down with it. When he returned to Monterey in 1960, Steinbeck climbed up Fremont Peak for a last panoramic look at the land of his youth. The canneries had disappeared and so had their “sickening stench” all that was left was the smell of wild oats on the dry brown hills. It brought to his mind Tom Wolfe’s phrase: you can’t go home again. Steinbeck had immortalized the smell of Cannery Row on the printed page, but he could no longer inhale the thing itself—and neither could his readers.
When an entire smellscape fades away, especially one familiar to many people, our culture suffers a loss. Take the case of the local tavern. The journalist and pundit H. L. Mencken grew up in Baltimore and accompanied his father—a cigar manufacturer—to the saloons where he sold his product: “In the days before Prohibition, which were also the days before air-cooling, I doted on the cool, refreshing scent of a good saloon on a hot Summer day, with its delicate overtones of mint, cloves, hops, Angostura bitters, horse-radish, Blutwurst and Kartoffelsalat. It was always somewhat dark therein, and there was an icy and comforting sweat upon the glasses.”
Mencken couldn’t relive his memories in today’s gleaming, artfully designed modern brew-pub, but he might feel at home in a place like McSorley’s Tavern on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which has been serving ale in an atmosphere little changed since it opened in 1854. Patrons find something soothing in its quiet, almost gloomy interior. As one regular described it, in 1943, “there is a thick, musty smell that acts as a balm to jerky nerves; it is really a rich compound of the smells of pine sawdust, tap drippings, pipe tobacco, coal smoke, and onions. A Bellevue intern once said that for many mental states the smell in McSorley’s would be a lot more beneficial than psychoanalysis or sedative pills or prayer.” Coal-burning furnaces disappeared decades ago, and in 2003 the city’s mayor banished the sweet, warm notes of tobacco, yet McSorley’s retains its distinctive aroma: a dark, hoppy yeastiness livened by the sawdust on the floor. TGI Friday’s it’s not. McSorley’s is the Kong Island of taverns, a place where prehistory lives on—for now.
High on the list of endangered smellscapes is the heartwarming aroma of Grandma’s kitchen. Fewer families eat dinner at home, and when they do, they don’t cook: they microwave frozen food, which doesn’t pack the same emotional punch. The aroma of a tomato sauce simmering all day? Fuhgetaboutit. Chicken roasting in the oven? No one has the time. Apple pie? Pick it up at the A&P. Coffee aroma? Kiss it good-bye: half of Americans in their thirties get their hot java at a store; the proportion is even higher for those under thirty. Home-brewed coffee will soon be a game for the elderly.
The extinction of familiar smells leaves the fabric of our culture looking rather moth-eaten. It even affects movie watching. Take the scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High where a classroom full of students plunge their faces into quiz papers fresh off the ditto machine. The visual joke is lost on anyone born after 1982. The Wite-Outsniffing school secretary in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off will be equally incomprehensible: Correction fluid died with the typewriter.
When most Americans lived on farms, cow manure smelled of income and family security. In rural areas today, newly arrived suburbanites feel differently; they consider dairy farms a public nuisance, and object to the spreading of manure on fields. To defend farming as a way of life, the Planning Commission in Ottawa County, Michigan, put a manure-scented scratch-and-sniff panel in an explanatory brochure for people moving into the area.