Most dogs are not employed to find bedbugs or spot cancers. Most live in owner-controlled smell environments, asked to do little smelling beyond locating and cleaning up any food the resident child has dropped from his high chair. Moreover, in dogs’ peculiar indoor world, the smells of the day that accumulate on hardwood and carpet are periodically vacuumed up (which period depends on the dirt tolerance of the co-inhabitants) and scoured with substances rude to the nose. In this world, crotch-sniffing is frowned upon, and even a surreptitious lick of an arm or mouth is only sometimes tolerated. The evocative and emphatic smells that people saturate their clothes with during the day—piles of smelly reminders of their presence—are mysteriously spun and heated away in large, noise-making machines, emerging as replacement “fresh” odors that call to mind nothing at all. And on very, very bad days the dogs are led to the fecal-urinous room, piled into a slippery-bottomed vat, wetted, and made to smell like taxi air freshener.
But oh! when it’s time for The Walk: the olfactory scene changes. The great outdoors provides stimulation on the ground and on the breeze, on objects passed and passing objects. Each time the front door opens a new scene arrives, a scene of what has recently happened, what is now happening, and even a bit of what might be happening down the street. Not for lack of seeing, but clearly my dogs’ journeys down the block are not made of visual landmarks. We launch outside a few steps above the sidewalk, and before we turn onto it the dogs’ noses are in the slipstream of sidewalk currents, three feet above the ground, occasionally raised up high for a tall sniff. As we proceed, we pass a loamy tree pit, whose iron rail is messy with the passing dogs of the day; the sulphurous emissions from a work crew on the street, wafting from between parked cars; a frightening garage door that sometimes belches open with activity and rushes of air; the busy passage of a community of birds from apartment house to low tree branches, the berries dropped by the birds on the pavement, from mouth or ass; the edge of the corner building, where winds race uphill from points south; the slick-slippery feel of the marble stairs down, requiring more deliberate steps; the bench where a man sleeps at night, littered with his leavings and the stale, fetid odor of his clothes.
When I came to realize how central smelling can be to the dog, I began doing concerted “smell walks” with both of my dogs. On these walks we are not trying to make good time. Never do I pull them away from that spot they’ve been at for impossibly long; I celebrate rather than worry over their abiding interest in other dogs’ rumps. We do not hurry to get around the block, to get home, to get anywhere but wherever their noses lead us. There is no place we need to get to, or time by which we need to get back, to satisfy smell-walkness. Instead, the walk is defined precisely by how long and how much my dogs can sniff in. Sometimes the walk involves a lot of not-walking: standing, nose buried into the earth; nostrils pivoting their heads around to find the dog who left that message; even lying down with nose high in the air.
Our dogs’ smell-walk routes are almost never the routes—or the paces—of the walks that we humans concoct for them. As with many owners, when I head out on a walk, there is often a rectangularity to the episode: down, over, up, back. A walk in the human book has a time limit: “until I need to leave for work,” “until he does his business,” “until one of us is tired out.” A walk in the dog’s book is much more determined by circumstance: the course is irregular, doubling back and turning suddenly. On many days, there is no end in sight—until one suddenly arrives at it.
It occurred to me that, should I truly want to grasp the dog’s sensory experience, it might make sense to begin with the dog’s walk. I’m already along for the ride. As dog owners, we are implicit—if rather uninformed—accomplices as our dogs sniff their way down sidewalks, along road edges or park paths. How much more might it take to convincingly experience what they smell? After all, everyone who walks a dog surely sees, after a few goes around the block, the dog’s heightened interest in fireplugs, a tree branch fallen overnight, or a building scaffold newly erected. Over many, many walks I began to get better at predicting what would be of interest to my various dogs, following their noses. That fencepost looks recently moistened, I found myself thinking. Or, Oh, that leaf pile looks pretty appealing. This is, of course, but a tiny minority of the dogs’ smelling experience. Everything they (seem to) put their eyes to, they are nosing: the passersby, the wash of air from a car door opening, the ground around the park bench, the plastic bag being swelled up by a breeze, or the helicoptering maple seed being sent down by the trees. I see it. But do I dare to smell it?
“Do you ever smell what the dog is smelling?” Avery Gilbert first says when I ask him for a suggestion of how to become better at using my nose. “You want to get as close to the ground as you can get to smell things,” Stuart Firestein tells me, “because that’s where the molecules are.” While I know this logically, I had not followed it through, to, as Gilbert tells me, “get down there and sniff at it.”
Indeed, we don’t generally sniff it, whatever it is. And so I determined to sniff at it. To smell my neighborhood as my dogs did.
I found myself surprisingly unworried about the obvious: that the reason we don’t sniff what dogs are sniffing is, essentially, simple self-preservation and survival. There are funky, foul, downright fetid smells on the sidewalk. Our species may be the robust, successful species it is because we do not ingest the noningestibles down there. Instead, I considered the logistics: how could I get at the smells? To start, I figured, I must be willing to lose some of my restricting bipedal configuration. If indeed being upright, nose too far from the ground, is what keeps us from smelling, why, I’d go on all fours. When my dog lingers with nose planted at the base of a tree, so shall I plant my nose. If he gets intimate with a patch of invisible interest in the grass, so shall I pursue that interest. If he makes inquiries about the pant cuff of a passerby, so shall I. Passerby willing.
I began strongly. On a cool summer morning Finnegan, Upton, and I launched out off the stairs in front of our apartment building. Right away Finn angled for a tree guard: the impotent short iron fences that ring street trees in New York City. He examined the edge, which looked recently moistened, with the precision of a watchmaker diagnosing the innards of an ill watch. When he came up for air, I took over. I had to kneel awkwardly, one hand ringed with leashes and the other on the rail. I bent very, very close—too close. Emboldened by Finn’s thorough vetting of the spot, I sniffed with abandon. A strong, bright smell hit me. I sniffed again. It was not urine, I thought with appreciation. It was, simply, the cool astringency of paint on metal. As I pulled back my head, my dogs stood to the side, watching me. A couple walking up the hill took a wide berth. I got up, suddenly self-conscious, brushed off my knees, and let Finn pull me away and down the sidewalk.
“No one questions a dog when they smell the environment,” says Kate McLean, a self-described “multisensory” artist from the UK who has herself been pursuing urban odors. It was only too apparent to me and everyone else that I did not have the canine bona fides to get away with sniffing tree guards. After that brief foray into sidewalk sniffing, I lost my courage. To build some smelling bravado, I followed the brave—in this case, McLean, who bravely smells her way through cities with an interest in depicting the particular smell clouds to be found in each.
McLean was visiting New York and invited me along on a “smell-mapping project” in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I found her, a bit flushed and with a black stingy-brim fedora atop her head, waiting on the sidewalk on a warm September evening. She is lean and fine-featured, with an easy smile. Her shoes were well worn, presumably having walked her nose along many miles. Umbrella in hand, a cheeky nod to the UK style of “tour leader,” she addressed a cluster of two dozen smell-interested folk gathered around her. They included artists who worked in multimedia, photography, and with olfaction; memoirists and science writers; a couple of interested hangers-on; and two professional children. We were, McLean instructed, to take a tour of six or eight blocks and simply smell, recording what we noticed.
Well, it was not so simple.
“Be aware that there are many different kinds of smells,” she cautioned. “There are episodic smells, which drift past in a moment—a person, a draft from smoking, a truck—brought on the breeze. Especially at street corners. So at corners, stand and turn around.”
Apart from the wafting smells, there are also static smells that have been absorbed into materials. “So sniff walls, touch plants, go into stores,” she instructed, watching smiles creep onto every face. A few people exchanged raised-eyebrow glances.
And furthermore, “smell voids” are just as important, she said. Given that we get acclimated to smells, we should be alert to when we are not smelling anything. McLean recommended using one’s own smell as the natural resuscitator of one’s sense of smell: by burrowing your nose in your own skin, the receptor cells have a moment’s pause to recharge and resume their attention to the environmental odors.
McLean handed out handmade accordion-folded maps of our route, with “nose points” along the way to remind us to pause; to smell high, low, close, and deeply; to breathe in passing smells and constant smells. At each stop we were to record five scents. Five! I inhaled through my nose as we listened to her. I smelled nothing, but by the walk’s end my handwritten notes would be overflowing the page, turning around corners and ducking under other notes much like the routes of the smells we were chasing.
McLean has traveled the globe smell-mapping, from Amsterdam to Pamplona; Glasgow to Newport, Rhode Island; Milan to Edinburgh; and Paris to Singapore. After each walk, she has translated the walkers’ records into beautiful maps with a colored, topographic styling marking the sources and spread of odors. Washes of colored dots mark migrating smells. Each city, she suggests, has a background smell that specifies the place. In Amsterdam in the spring, it is the “sugary, powdery sweetness of waffles” and the water of the canals. And each city has distinguishing particulars: Edinburgh’s map, for instance, includes fish and chips, malt spewing from breweries, and the scent of “boys’ toilets in primary schools.” Heaven knows how she knew that one.
On an earlier visit to New York, McLean mapped what she described as the city’s “smelliest [square] blocks”—on the Lower East Side between Allen and Eldridge, south of Delancey. While this part of the city has a varied history—partly manufacturing, partly sordid—its recent sprouting of multimillion-dollar condominiums challenges her claim. Still, the final smell map included landmarks of sawdust, trash, car oil, and cabbage, as well as long swaths of dried fish and cheap perfume.
Geographer J. Douglas Porteous called olfactory landscapes like those McLean maps “smellscapes.” Cities, it has been claimed, are identifiable by their scent. As a freshly baked baguette invokes contemporary Paris, the characteristic odor experience of a city may come from food or spices sold on the street, the marine air that fills the city’s avenues, or the detritus of the teeming populace. Certainly there have been smellscapes, celebrated or not, for thousands of years: in ancient times, temple builders mixed milk and saffron into the plaster; mosques were built with musk and rose water worked into their mortar. On being rained on or warmed by the sun, the buildings effused fragrance. For many years there were regular weekly smells: the warm wet smells of washing, the hot iron on linen; the scent of “baking day.”
The idea of smellscapes has caught on in the field of urban design, whose proponents have an eye to celebrating and improving the sensory experience of city residents. Some of the programs cities have enacted are pleasingly quirky. In the Netherlands, pedestrian plazas have been designed to include plants that may have relaxing, therapeutic effects. Since 2001, the Japanese Ministry of the Environment has supported the maintenance of “One Hundred Sites of Good Fragrance” countrywide: national landmarks as significant to the history and culture and life in the country as visual landmarks. They include “the smell of deer seen at Jinhua mountain”; a house smelling of the animal glue used to paint papier-mâché dolls; “one hundred thousand peach blossoms at a glance”; and, in the biggest city in Japan, “Kanda’s streets of used bookstores.”I
This turn into designing and celebrating smells follows a long history of complaining and worrying about smells in cities. And most of this cogitation was because cities smelled utterly, horrifyingly disgusting.
The streets of Manhattan were designed as a grid not only for ease of way-finding but also for ease of smell-letting. What this implies is that smells needed to be let out. Indeed, the curvy, narrow streets of old European cities—Paris and London, for instance—were widely seen as attracting and providing breeding ground for stinks. “Paris may be smelt five miles before you arrive,” it was claimed; the atmosphere around the cities of Italy was saturated with garlic. The smells of nineteenth-century Paris were described as “intolerable”; the “monstrous” city of London was “strewn with excrement, mud, decomposing animals, meat, vegetables, and blood”; odiferous industries like tanneries and breweries were cheek by jowl with residential sections. Both London and Paris had episodes known as the Great Stink—both caused by a failure of the prevailing sewage treatment approach.II
The idea with the Manhattan grid, reaching from river to river, was that smells would swirl down the streets and out to sea. The New York commissioners reported that this would “promote the health of the city” and used words like free and circulation to vaunt their approach.
The grid did not save the city from its smells. And “smells” in this context were mostly “noxious, horrible smells.” Consider the state of New York City in the mid-nineteenth century, when horses—then the city’s main transport devices—shat freely and plentifully in the street and were often left where they fell and died; the contents of chamber pots were summarily dumped out of windows; and fear ran rampant that miasmas (foul gases emerging from the ground) were leading to a cholera epidemic. Conditions were sufficiently bad that a governmental “smelling committee” was officially called together, tasked with seeking out sources of ill smells by nose(s).
The notion of contamination by smell continues today, in small doses, with fear and retreat from people who smell bad, as though disease were conveyed by odor. Though long discredited, this anxiety had its root hundreds of years ago, when “deodorization” projects began. In particular, streets and sidewalks were paved to tamp down the miasmic emanations; plaster covered walls that might seep with foul-smelling vapors; industries, reeking of paint solvent (vaguely banana) or cleanser (soapy), were moved away from residential areas.
Today’s city has done away with the horse and chamber-pot leavings, but it still smells of the city’s occupants and wares. Concentrate as you walk down the street and you’ll notice the wash of odors out of open store doors, warmed inside and released in bursts by customers’ entrances and exits. People are perfumed with bottled fragrances—or the bodily odors that bespeak a lack of fragrances. But one can walk many miles in an American city without being hit by any specific smells. One of the responses to the overwhelming array of noxious odors in cities has been to try to do away with odors altogether (as “deodorization” implies) or to cover them. Ubiquitous chain stores homogenize cities, and there is a booming business of branded scented environments, in which retailers diffuse a fragrance intended to invoke “car showroom” or “fancy hotel.” The result may be the waning of the characteristic odor of a city. Should Paris stop smelling like bakeries and Gauloises, Vancouver like the spray of sea salt, or midtown New York of hot garbage and food carts’ emissions, some part of the place will disappear.
The British urban planner and designer Victoria Henshaw started thinking about characterizing—and perhaps commemorating—the remaining smellscapes. Building off the idea of city “soundwalks,” in which urban explorers actively listen instead of just listening in the background, Henshaw thought to bring the notion to collecting smells, too: smelling actively, searchingly, and intentionally—instead of passively and accidentally. McLean has used the noses of others, in addition to her own, to take off from Henshaw’s early, labor-intensive work.
On the street in Williamsburg, our group was slow to begin smelling. To rally us, McLean brought our attention to a handout she had prepared. Stay hydrated, it instructed. Find hidden corners. Be not embarrassed. Finally, “Sniffing in public is completely legal,” she thought to add.
Apparently, the activity is sufficiently nonstandard that she has had to consider this.
We set out at a meandering pace. On the sidewalk, among the generally steadfast and quick-footed New York City pedestrians, our group had a vaguely disoriented look. I came to learn that this is characteristic of those who are sniffing the air: a faraway, unfocused look to the eyes, head cocked or raised, expression somewhere between “Did I leave the oven on?” and “I just remembered a dream I had last night. I was in a car, with no pants . . .” Passersby step around you.
At our first “nose point” we formed a scrum of confused loiterers, nosing around for something to zoom in on. Stepping to the curb I got my first waft: a nose-pinching, clean-but-not-clean smell. A warm, scrubbed sidewalk: chlorine at battle with filth. Across the street, a food truck gave off an unmistakable taco-shell/chips smell: fried corn and used oil. The evening was sufficiently warm, we realized, to be full of smells: just as hot foods have more odor than cold, summer days have more odor than winter ones. Warmth makes many substances airborne, volatile, wafting up to meet any sniffing noses.
Our group began to self-organize, alternating poses by curb and by building, sniffing, then scribbling down a report. By the next street we were all but choreographed in our movements, flocking in pairs to local landmarks—a tree, an outdoor bench, an exhaust fan—and pointing our noses in unison into the air. People themselves become clues as to where to sniff. A photographer who had traveled with McLean from the UK, Sam Vale, bent under a bench backed against a food shop. I followed his nose. Wheatgrass (source: juice shop) prevailed on the sidewalk. But at the altitude of the bench, the pith of a leaf mixed with a definite spring-onion smell coming out of the exhaust fan. “This smells amazing!” he said and smiled.
We were into it. I sniffed the base of a tree: urinous. People walking by brought a chaos of fragrant odors: hair products, lotions, perfumes. Fried food followed a person with a takeout bag. “Use your other senses to guide you,” McLean reminded us. I touched and crushed a leaf (pleasingly fresh). I followed my ears to a dripping air-conditioning unit (dank basement) and to a clean towel spanking the air as it was shaken out (dryer sheets). Each new or different feature spotted on the sidewalk aroused interest. A construction site’s temporary fencing yielded a peephole into the site (dust, caulk, and warm brick) and, on its surface, a place for posters (fresh paper, paste). Even sights I would ordinarily veer around I began veering toward. With but a moment’s hesitation I dipped my head into the olfactory space above an open trash can. It smelled sweet, almost tangibly so. The remains of recently chewed mint gum cast upward to my nose. What was usually stomach-turning had turned into simply news of the street.
Virginia Woolf once tried her hand at smell-walking, in a manner of speaking, through her biography of Flush, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. He wanders off into Florence “to enjoy the rapture of smell” on the streets—“the rough, the smooth, the dark, the golden”—smelling brass being battered, bread being baked, hair combed, cloth beaten, and men spitting.
I thought of Flush locating the “swooning smells” of the gutter as we hovered around a sewer drain and tried to catch a spiral of air. Far from swooning, it walloped me. Was it salsa? It bit us with its sharpness. “Chinese food” was offered. The photographer, Vale, poised over the drain. His head cast around, neck extended, the very image of a newborn animal lurching for its mother. After a moment, he said, simply, “Garlic.” Our group erupted in murmurs of appreciation. The question of whether or not we wanted to be smelling garlic from the drain was trumped by the great satisfaction of identifying it.
Night began to fall. We had been walking for hours. We were shooed away from a restaurant where, even at a distance, our interest in the outdoor diners’ food was a little too conspicuous. At the walk’s final odor-promising corner, I faced a plain bricked building, the spent neon sign in a high window signifying a particular kind of dark, stale-beer-smelling bar within it. Instead of stale beer, I caught a very pleasant savory smell. It was suspended in just one small invisible cloud of air, and I had to stand on tiptoes, head raised and nose up, in order to catch it. When I stepped off the curb, it was replaced by a cloud of something darker, gray and waxy. I took a quick look around for likely sources—perhaps someone was walking by with a plate of food—and found none. Come over here; there are smells here waiting to be caught I indicated to one of the very good smell-catchers. He beelined over, stood facing me on the curb’s edge, and we sniffed. Gas? Tar? Not quite. Then he stepped off the curb in front of a vehicle parked on the street and inclined his head toward the grille—just about where you’d put your head if you wanted to be squarely concussed by a car. I went in for a sniff. Warm air greeted my face: the car, an SUV, had been recently parked. A smoky, waxy note curled out from the engine. It smelled delicious.
How did it come to smell delicious? When one begins actively searching for smells, one finds . . . not a lot. Just opening your mind (and nose) to the possibility of smells isn’t enough to actually smell anything. And actively sniffing is an oddly tiring exercise. Try sniffing now, and keep it up for just thirty seconds. Done? Chances are, you quit about halfway there (or wanted to). And furthermore, you probably noticed not a single smell.
So catching a whiff at all can be exhilarating. But here our undercooked relationship with odors kicks in. In English, most words for smells are words for their sources. While the sommeliers and perfumers among us may have a vocabulary to describe that whiff, most of us need something more. To name it—to know it—we want to know where the smell comes from. If the name and the source are not the same, our work is to resolve them satisfyingly. McLean remembers someone worrying to her that Paris seemed to have a background note of honey. Why should the city, not a center of beekeeping, smell of it? She tracked it to its source: not to a hive nor a covetous Pooh Bear, but to the wax polish popular in the city rife with parquet floors.
If a smell wanders off before being pinned, a beetle to an entomologist’s board, the frustration is stark. If the smell is traced to its source and its name, it feels truly caught, captured, collected. The car grille smelled delicious because it was, very clearly, hot oil on hot metal. I recognized the smell, but my certainty was buttressed by my recognition that I was, after all, sniffing into a recently used engine.
Buoyed, I stepped into the street, momentarily free of traffic, in search of the savory smell still at large. Catercorner to the bar across the broad intersection was a shop radiating light into the dusk. Its glass doors, trimmed in red and thrown open, faced the intersection. Aha! This was the source: a bakery. A terrifically obvious smell, now that I saw its source. The bakery was outputting a caramely, buttery smell, some of which was surviving being tossed this way and that by passing cars and weaving its way across the street to my nose as I stood on tiptoes. “I think I need to go there,” said one of the other walkers, catching the drift and darting toward the light. I did not. I had my source, and the moment was complete.
At the walk’s end, McLean changed senses on us. Pulling out a flip book of paint colors, she asked for the color we would use to describe one of our smells. I chose Pantone 1245C, an unlovely yellow-brown with a hint of green, for the first smell I pinned, the chlorine of the washed sidewalk. “Everyone always picks a yellow-green,” she said. But another walker found the caramel smell to be maroon, and our shared wheatgrass was remembered in a light mint. Garlic and the tarmac were an ashen purple. Gilbert and others have found correspondences between color names and odors, even with smells that don’t have clearly colored odor sources like lime or banana do. In one study, odor of civet—an artificial version of the odor from the anal sacs of civets, used in perfumery—was roundly considered “brown,” and another perfume favorite, bergamot oil, was most often seen as “yellow.”
I headed down into the nearby Bedford Avenue subway station to catch a train home. To my great surprise, even as I approached the entrance, I could smell it. Now, I’m sure that the subway always smelled—but never before had the smell reached out and poked my consciousness. I slowed on my descent down the stairs to the station. The smell of youth (wet, shampooed hair mixed with teenage body odors) and of decay (the moldering of the walls under accumulated dirt and water). I smiled.
When you notice the smell of decay and smile, either something is very wrong with you, or your relationship with smell has changed. The smell walk had begun to change us. Smells were to be noticed, collected, considered, not just avoided or spurned. The deep funk of the subway in the summer is plainly awful. But sometimes, awful smells are awful because of their incongruity: a classroom with an eggy smell, a restaurant with the smell of air freshener. Like the garlic and car grille, the stink of the subway suddenly felt honest: it was what one would expect the subway to smell like. What is truly off-putting are disingenuous smells: ones inconsistent with how a place ought to be. We have a sense of familiarity born of experience more than consciousness. We know the sounds of our home—and hence might notice if it is “too quiet”—and we know what a baseball game sounds like—and would be disturbed if it sounded like golf. We expect vision and taste to align, so we want our orange juice to be orange, not purple, and any food that is flavored deceptively (bubble gum chocolate) is foul.
So, too, with smell. In 2005, all of New York City was up in arms because of a sudden odor of maple syrup oozing over the city. While maple syrup might rank among the most preferred smells of many residents, the overarching response was terror—as the smell made no sense in our urban jungle. Later, once the weather pattern (a cool night in winter and a “lid” of warm air trapping odors caught on the wind near the ground) and source (probably a flavor manufacturer across the river in New Jersey) were identified, the smell could be enjoyed for itself.
After a little time walking and thinking, Dominic decided to smell out Grandville, his usual practice in towns he was visiting for the first time. He raced up and down avenues and alleys, rubbed himself against various poles, lampposts, cornerstones, and trees, inquired about the population and the town’s history—how many members of each species it contained, the birth rate, when the town was founded and by whom, and why—looked up the oldest landmarks, smelled them carefully, asked about the climate at different times of the year, learned what the salary of schoolteachers was, and the price of tangerines . . .
—William Steig, Dominic
On the five-minute walk between the subway stop and where I rest my head, I caught curls of air from basement dryers, grilled-meat trucks, circular-sawed wood; urinous wafts of mysterious source; a single smoker exhaling as he passed; curry from an open window; and menthol from a jogger’s sweaty legs. This, I realized, is more or less the smell of my own block. One psychological study that asked undergrads to find their way, blindfolded, in a room divided into grids of different scents, found that they could navigate using smell alone. Could I find my way home by smell?
My longtime and well-loved dog Pumpernickel once strayed from our home in a coastal town in California. I returned home late at night to find the front door wide open, light streaming out, and a house that was definitely too quiet. Pump had, apparently, opened the door (these were days before dead bolts were de rigueur) and walked out. I raced up and down the street calling for her. Stoppering my growing panic, I began to devise a plan of action, retracing all of our walks together. I phoned some friends who ran a dog-food shop in town to ask them to come by and stay at the house while I searched by car. Imagining where she would go, if entirely left to her own devices, was trying: I was bereft.
When my friends pulled up to the house twenty minutes later, Pump jumped out from the back of their pickup. Between jumpings of joy, I asked how they found her. They had driven by their store on the way over, they told me. Pump was sitting out front, awaiting opening hour.
Now, we had many times gone to the dog-food store on our walks. It was less than a mile away. But we had approached it from so many different angles: how, I wondered, had Pump gotten there? Had she turned right at the eucalyptus, headed seaward, then taken a left at the bagel shop? Did she follow the crow-flies path, cutting across backyards and going through back alleys? Did she smell her way?
Walking through my own block’s smells, I considered her olfactory navigation. Though the smells appear vague to us most of the time, they are very particular—enough to be landmarks. Sailors use smell in navigation: “(A)n old salt is said to be able to smell fog, rain, wind and snow. In calm, fluky weather, especially near shore, the knowledgeable shellback can often sniff out a breeze to keep his vessel going. He does this in large measure by sorting out what he smells—dampness from off the sea tells of a sea breeze or a fog while the aroma of new-mown hay, clam flats, or a pigsty warns him before the first ripple is seen that the breeze will be off the land.” The homing pigeon’s gift to return home, over hundreds of miles, appears to be a result of overlapping sensory awareness—including (but not limited to) smell. So, too, for dogs. In the First World War dogs were used by Britain as messengers or liaisons between the front trenches and the home camp, finding their way through some combination of navigational techniques including, presumably, the general smell of the area and the smell of (what was standing in as) home.
I turn left at the smell of curry, hop up the stairs, and am home. It’s only my first trip to the trenches and back.
I. A recent topic of research for scientists who publish in the Journal of Pulp and Paper Science or who study “material degradomics,” the “smell of old books” has been deconstructed and seen to overlap with vanilla, mushroom, nylon, and “grassy notes with a tang of acids.” Since the smell is literally the degradation of paper, ink, binding, and glues, it is not obvious that Tokyo’s bookstore blocks will smell the same in another century.
II. At the time (1850s) in London, cesspits under residential buildings filled with the wastewater and excreta of their inhabitants were transferred to the Thames and summarily dumped in it. Apparently this worked well enough, with the exception of a particularly dry June, when the river ran low and the wastewater ran high. The river “ripened” to “a peak of pungency” and lasted for two weeks, until the heat abated.