A Big Sniff in the Face of Coronavirus

I go outside every morning and sniff the air. The combination of newly opened flowers, wet grass and lush growth topples me backwards to long ago summers, when my sister and I had to get up every morning to pick cherries.

My grandfather was of the opinion that it was best to pick before the sun came up, while it was cool and before the summer heat had softened the fruit. He was probably right. By mid-afternoon, when you bit into a cherry, the juice, as warm and thick as blood, ran down your chin and stained your teeth crimson.

The smell of summer mornings takes me right back to that time and place — KC Radio alternating between sad Glen Campbell and Freddy Fender hits, and my grandfather yelling at us to climb higher and get the cherries at the very tops of the trees.

The information that one of the symptoms of COVID-19 is the loss of the sense of smell has brought on a non-stop obsession with sniffing things. I’ve always had the habit, but it’s increased 10-fold in the last number of weeks.

It’s not only the morning air that I snort, but all kinds of things — the fatty cloud outside Church’s Chicken, cut grass, wet dog, sweat, Elmer’s glue, Sharpie pens (maybe don’t sniff too much of those last two). A particular favourite is Skin Food moisturizer, with its peculiar medical/herbal blast that clears the sinuses like a firehose.

I’m not alone. Some medical professionals are using the smell test to gauge whether they may have been infected with the virus.

Someone may be an asymptomatic carrier if they experience the symptom of smell loss. Peanut butter, coffee and vinegar are all useful indicators to assess the state of the most fundamental of senses. But it’s an ongoing practice, one that must be dutifully attended to on a daily basis.

As a National Post article explains: “A person’s sense of smell can slip away quietly, over a period of time, without the person noticing it is going, going, going, until it is effectively gone.... In this way, an asymptomatic carrier who feels like a million bucks, but notes a diminishing sense of smell one day to the next, could consider quarantining, ASAP, instead of carrying on until their olfactory sense disappears altogether.”

I’ve been keeping track of my nose powers lately, which has had the interesting side effect of upping appreciation for the world and all its odours.

It’s a bit odd that in the midst of so much fear and uncertainty, spring is erupting in all its luscious green glory. The rosebuds are getting ready to unfurl and release their fragrance. The sticky sappy aroma of cottonwood trees coats the air along the railway tracks in East Vancouver. Lots of people are sneezing their heads off, but the bees are quite happy.

This prolonged period of lockdown is offering more time to notice and appreciate nature, whether it’s the birds, plants or skunks trundling about. I’ve had more time to notice the many different smells of the world, to collect and assemble them, using them to mark the passage of one season into another.

The smell of early spring — an inky electric promise of night sky and bright stars — fades into the fragrance of late summer — blackberries and warm dust, lake water and sand, apricots, peaches, raspberries. Tomato vines. Even the musky reek of garter snakes. As a child, I was always on the lookout for snakes. When I caught one and held onto it for too long, the smell would sink into my palms and stay for days.

There is perhaps no better summer smell than the spiced cathedral glory of warm pine needles in the forest. Even the words used to describe these natural phenomena are sometimes as remarkably beautiful. Petrichor for the smell of rain on a hot day. Nidor for the smell of burning fat. Geosmin for the earthy funk that gives beets their distinctive taste.

There’s an entire literature devoted to the smell of trees. In addition to the fragrance of firs, traditionally associated with Christmas, there is a world of aromas in other types of trees including white fir, pinon pines, coastal redwood and western red cedar.

Author Ray Collett, writing in Pacific Horticulture, reveals that the most fragrant tree is the jeffrey pine: “The reddish bark, especially when heated by the sun, pours out an aroma belonging to sweet puddings and pastries, flavoured with vanilla and added bits, perhaps, of pineapple or banana.”

But the smell of the trees isn’t purely for the olfactory pleasure of humans. As Collett explains, it often serves a specific function:

“The delicious odour pervading Douglas-fir forests does not arise solely from the trees. Truffles and other mushrooms abound in the soils and the duff of these primeval forests. When they have turned into special morsels buried beneath the soil, these ancient companions of Douglas-fir call out to mammals for help. They need flying squirrels, chipmunks and deer to dig them out, eat them, and spread their spores throughout the forest. Many creatures, including some humans, are unable to resist their beckoning call, though humans likely need the aid of creatures like dogs and pigs (with more powerful noses) to locate the buried treasure.”

Even though the human nose pales in comparison to the nasal power of dogs and sharks, we can still detect more than a trillion different smells.

Of these trillion or so scents, most folk have a strange fetish, something that sets off a chain reaction of memory, emotions and images, like a series of tiny explosions inside one’s head.

I love the smell of garages, of churches. The melancholy aroma of woodsmoke. The rich funk of browned butter, the sweetness of wet cedar. Diesel fuel, creosote, the crackling ozone atmosphere of a storm brewing. Good or bad. It doesn’t really matter.

Sometimes even the stuff that is slightly gross has a strange appeal. Think of the SNL character Mary Katherine Gallagher sticking her hands underneath her armpits, then whipping them out to smell the tips of her fingers. (Don’t turn up your nose, we’ve probably all done it at some point.) If you love someone, they smell good. If you don’t, it’s because they don’t smell right.

The fragrance of cherries still spins me round. During summer picking season it was non-stop cherries from morning till night. All the cherries we couldn’t eat or sell, my grandmother would juice. A giant gallon jar of the stuff, the deepest darkest crimson you can imagine, almost overwhelming in its sheer cherry-ness, was always on the kitchen table.

The world is a poem of smells.

The sense of smell is one of the first to evolve in humans, and as such keeps us grounded in the world. The loss of it seems a precursor to other more profound losses. If smell is life, its opposite is, well, you know.... The fact that the coronavirus strips away this sense seems especially cruel, but then viruses aren’t known for their compassionate natures.

Sometimes you have to fight back and take a deep whiff of existence.

The only thing I’ve ordered in the previous seven weeks (has it been that long?) was a selection of perfume samples and a small slim bottle of a scent called Dulcis In Fundo. The name means “sweetness in the bottom,” which has a sexual connotation in Italian, but the scent itself is a sunny composition of vanilla and orange, like a sexy creamsicle, which also has sexual connotations... perhaps I’ve been in lockdown too long.

As a number of folks have noted, one of the most curious things about this period of time has been the vividness of memories, dreams and other mental states. Happiness, potent and airy, pops up out of nowhere occasionally, dragging with it wafts of days gone by. Sometimes I think about the smells that exist only in my head, because the people or places that once created and hosted them are gone. Houses torn down. People passed on.

If you hold very still and conjure their scent, they can sometimes return. Not unlike how a song that you haven’t heard in a long time can unlock a pocket of atmosphere inside your head. Out spills the feeling of what used to be. Inside of these moments, you can linger for a while, breathing in their perfume.