The summer I turned 17, I worked with a bizarre crowd of kids at the phone bank of a political research firm whose office abutted a Wonder Bread factory. Since it doesn’t matter what your employees look like when your clients only hear their voice, the phone bank employed an array of squeaky clean Mormon kids in polo shirts and khakis alongside be-dreaded potheads, tattooed rockers--a whole slew of run-of-the-mill dirty pretty things. It was my first brush with the rising generation of Salt Lake City hipsters, and I found myself edging across the aisle to get a closer look. I wasn’t sure about Pabst or Parliaments, but driving fast, motel skinny dipping, and listening to Bob Dylan stretched out on a trampoline into the early hours of the morning spoke to a part of me I was just discovering.
Each night as we were leaving—off to one another’s backyards or bedrooms, to the all-night coffee joint or the salt flats—we would walk out into the wondrously sweet and gluey miasma of the aroma of baking Wonder Bread. That smell defined that moment in my life. The first hints of yeast drifted into the office around 8:30, an azan of sorts, calling us out into the night. Even now, when I drive down 7th East late at night, just a whiff of baking bread from that factory conjures up a visceral reaction—not just the memory of that time, but the twinge of other senses and every particle of experience connected therewith. To me, young danger smells like baking Wonder Bread.Â
Scent moves us, it drives us, it defines our individual experiences in ways we do not realize; it is the id of our sensory systems, lying quietly in wait under the bright analytical buzz of sight and sound, moulding our memories in its own way without our willing it to do so, and without regard for our consent.Â
No one knows how smell works. Especially not Chandler Burr, the former scents critic for The New York Times, who introduced me to this bizarre gap in scientific knowledge one terrifically rainy night in an auditorium filled with humanities majors at NYU’s Kunst Kamera lecture series.Â
You see, there are two types of systems in your body: instant and universal. The digestive system is an instant one: we’ve developed a library of enzymes that instantly—though limitedly—work when outside molecules are introduced into it the system. Hence, when you eat an Oreo, the enzymes in your saliva and stomach begin to break down all those fructose and glucose molecules and within a short period of time, your body is using that sugar; equally true, despite the valiant attempts by 4-year-olds everywhere, you cannot actually digest a penny, since we don’t possess mass alloy-digesting enzymes in our bodies—yet. The immune system, on the other hand, has to be able to deal with whatever is introduced into it, whether it already possesses the antibodies for that particular foreign body or not. To recognize and eradicate a universal range of potential molecular interlopers takes time, which is why colds last several days or weeks instead of a few short hours.Â
The olfactory system, however, is both an instant and universal system. You can smell anything, not just things you’ve developed a sense for, and you can do so instantly. In fact, you smell on an atomic level: the rotten egg smell of sulfur, the sanguine tinge of iron, and the subtle bitter almond aroma given off by arsenic. How it is we can catalogue so many shades of smell is still a mystery, and, despite an array of possible theories, at the end of the day no one really knows how it is we register brewing coffee, dirty socks, or CK One.Â
That night, after fumbling through several obtuse explanations for how we smell, and failing to answer questions from American Studies majors like, “But how do you give fruit flies electric shocks? They’re too small!” (the single research scientist in the crowd emits an audible groan), Burr finally gave up and did what he does best for the remaining 20 minutes: tell gay men’s jokes and describe how certain molecules smell.Â
He told captivating tales of smelling Mysore sandalwood, of real musk and its horrifying origins, of an original bottle of Chanel No. 5 that had been properly preserved. Once he hit his stride he rushed to tell us about the wildest thing he’s ever smelled: there is a bush in the south of France—a totally, completely, natural plant—whose essence smells like a plugged-in photocopier on fire. “It is like the smell of burning plastic and electricity and toner and is absolutely, incredibly alarming.”
The day I arrived on Jean-Louis and Caro’s isolated herb farm tucked high in the mountains west of Montpellier, the mercury in their outdoor thermometer burst its glass casing. That morning I had awoken in Tromsø, a good five hundred miles north of the arctic circle, and by that afternoon felt the rubber of my boots melting to the asphalt as I tried to thumb a ride in the scorching riviera sun to the closest town to the farm. The heat could curl your eyelashes; Jean-Louis’ two young daughters were skinny-dipping in a kiddy pool outside the kitchen, the golden retriever was lying motionless in a ditch along the side of the house, and as soon as I set my bag down, Caro said, “Great, let’s go pick some oregano before it gets burned.”Â
Thus commenced the fortnight that made me want to find every migrant field worker who had ever laid a finger on a vegetable I’d eaten, and give each a hug and a huge, cold, bottle of water.Â
After I had sweat myself dry in the oregano fields the first day on their farm, Caro took me to the sechoire—a longhouse with wide-planked wood floors and hundreds of racks stacked along its length, used to dry the medicinal herbs they produced. The moment we stepped inside, my nose was flooded with the scent of sage, and my memory with the high mountain meadows just below the peak of South Thunder in Bell’s canyon on the clear October day when Felipe and I missed the summit by an hour; combined with another memory of staring out the moldy kitchen window of my apartment on Prospekt Mira in Moscow with the sense of hoping to feel like home on a bleak Thanksgiving Day.Â
This pattern would continue the entire time I stayed in the mountains with Caro and Jean-Louis—engulfed by smells and the gut memories they conjured, almost to the point of distraction. Threshing the lavender and seeing Sarahlina push her purple-rimmed glasses back on her nose with the loveliest gesture while we sat in the Beehive Tea Room eating ice cream that tasted of soap; spending 12 hours collecting wild raspberry leaves in even higher altitudes while stirring up the colossus tree just across the fairway from my grandparent’s own raspberry thicket; cooking chestnut paste in an outdoor kitchen, but tasting the leftover stuffing Melissa Bradford fed me in her kitchen one November night in Paris while reading the last four verses of Luke 10 to me.Â
I spent hours stripping verbena leaves from their stems, trimming oregano blooms, or harvesting fitzer flowers, all the while trapped in my own revery, standing paralyzed, sickle in hand, as I was pulled through time and space by just a scent on the breeze. It was not a flaming photocopier, but it was often absolutely, incredibly alarming. Â
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