I Smell a Memory Reprinted from September, 1998
~by Henry Swain (1918-2014)
S
ome scientists claim we lose our sense of smell when we sleep. This may be true in the deeper stages of sleep but I doubt it in the lighter stages. On a recent vacation, the motel in which we stayed offered a continental breakfast. I was awakened, not by noise, but by the smell of brewing coffee. I suspect the ventilating system spread the odor throughout all three floors of the motel. It provided an olfactory wake-up call. Some say our sense of smell will recall events more quickly than any of our five senses, especially those odors associated with nostalgia. When I smell apple blossoms, I remember riding my motorcycle through the orchards north of Bloomington in springtime during my college years. Motorcyclists find odors in the passing air that motorists miss. I recall fighting forest fires in my youth in the high Nevada rangeland. After a week on the fire line the only thing I could smell was smoke. It took about three days before I could again smell anything but smoke. We were blessed with a summer shower and the smell of wet sagebrush restored my sense of smell.
At boy scout camp one summer I won a flashlight. One night one of our campers spied a skunk. Someone said that a skunk could not spray its odor if its hind legs were off the ground. Of course we had to find out if this were true. One scout blinded the skunk with his light while two of us approached the skunk from the rear. I held my light while my companion reached to grab the tail to lift it off the ground. Our efforts were not properly synchronized and my new flashlight got a dousing. That flashlight never did lose the odor and I finally had to throw it away. If anyone has ever successfully performed this experiment I would like to know if it is truth or legend. Raised in the country, I have fond memories of the smell of new straw. As a boy my chore would be to drive the spring wagon to take jugs of cold water to the farmers in the field loading wagons with bundles of wheat. My neighbor, as a kind of pay for my chore, would let me sleep on top the haystack I would invite a couple of friends and we would spread our blankets on top the stack and watch shooting stars till we drifted into sleep. When I drive by a field of newly combined wheat today I find the smell carries
me immediately to those nights of haystack slumber. If you have ever cleaned accumulated cow manure from a barn you know that your olfactory memory chip has been permanently etched and that any attempts to delete are destined to fail. Any subsequent encounter with the smell of cow manure will return you to your first barn cleaning quicker than Jeff Gordon. Did you ever notice that the smell of flowers in a funeral parlor setting is quite different from the natural fragrance of garden flowers. Some smells we are familiar with did not exist many years ago and may be unique to the twentieth century—the first few drops of rain on hot concrete pavement, diesel fumes from an eighteen-wheeler, jet plane fumes at an airport, newly laid carpet, asphalt in road construction, urban smog, chlorine water in swimming pools, the interior of a new car, WD-40. What are your most and least favorite odors? How far back and how quickly do they take you? Our sense of smell is like the antennae of a grasshopper. It informs us of that which is familiar and that which is new. As we encounter each new smell we identify it, catalogue it for future reference and there it stays, subject to instant recall. I smell it is time to stop. ď Ž