A Natural History of the Senses (5 page)

We each have our own aromatic memories. One of my most vivid involves an odor that was as much vapor as scent. One Christmas, I traveled along the coast of California with the Los Angeles Museum’s Monarch Project, locating and tagging great numbers of overwintering monarch butterflies. They prefer to winter in eucalyptus groves, which are deeply fragrant. The first time I stepped into one, and every time thereafter, they filled me with sudden tender memories of mentholated rub and childhood colds. First we reached high into the trees, where the butterflies hung in fluttering gold garlands, and caught a group of them with telescoping nets. Then we sat on the ground, which was densely covered with the South African ice plant, a type of succulent, and one of the very few plants that can tolerate the heavy oils that drop from the trees. The oils kept crawling insects away, too, and, except for the occasional Pacific tree frog croaking like someone working the tumblers of a safe, or a foolish blue jay trying to feed on the butterflies (whose wings contain a digitalis-like poison), the sunlit forests were serene, otherworldly, and immense with quiet. Because of the eucalyptus vapor, I not only smelled the scent, I felt it in my nose and throat. The loudest noise was the occasional sound of a door creaking open, the sound of eucalyptus bark peeling off the trees and falling to the ground, where it would soon roll up like papyrus. Everywhere I looked, there seemed to be proclamations left by some ancient
scribe. Yet, to my nose, it was Illinois in the 1950s. It was a school day; I was tucked in bed, safe and cosseted, feeling my mother massage my chest with Vicks VapoRub. That scent and memory brought an added serenity to the hours of sitting quietly in the forest and handling the exquisite butterflies, gentle creatures full of life and beauty who stalk nothing and live on nectar, like the gods of old. What made this recall doubly sweet was the way it became layered in my senses. Though at first tagging butterflies triggered memories of childhood, afterward the butterfly-tagging
itself
became a scent-triggerable memory, and, what’s more, it replaced the original one: In Manhattan one day, I stopped at a flower-seller’s on the street, as I always do when I travel, to choose a few flowers for the hotel room. Two tubs held branches of round, silver-dollar-shaped eucalyptus, the leaves of which were still fresh—bluish-green with a chalky surface; a few of them had broken, and released their thick, pungent vapor into the air. Despite the noise of Third Avenue traffic, the drilling of the City Works Department, the dust blowing up off the streets and the clotted gray of the sky, I was instantly transported to a particularly beautiful eucalyptus grove near Santa Barbara. A cloud of butterflies flew along a dried-up riverbed. I sat serenely on the ground, lifting yet another gold-and-black monarch butterfly from my net, carefully tagging it and tossing it back into the air, then watching for a moment to make sure it flew safely away with its new tag pasted like a tiny epaulet on one wing. The peace of that moment crested over me like a breaking wave and saturated my senses. A young Vietnamese man arranging his stock looked hard at me, and I realized that my eyes had suddenly teared. The whole episode could not have taken more than a few seconds, but the combined scent memories endowed eucalyptus with an almost savage power to move me. That afternoon, I went to one of my favorite shops, a boutique in the Village, where they will compound a bath oil for you, using a base of sweet almond oil, or make up shampoos or body lotions from other fragrant ingredients. Hanging from my bathtub’s shower attachment is a blue net bag of the sort Frenchwomen use when they do their daily grocery shopping; I keep in it
a wide variety of bath potions, and eucalyptus is one of the most calming. How is it possible that Dickens’s chance encounter with a few molecules of glue, or mine with eucalyptus, can transport us back to an otherwise inaccessible world?

Driving through farm country at summer sunset provides a cavalcade of smells: manure, cut grass, honeysuckle, spearmint, wheat chaff, scallions, chicory, tar from the macadam road. Stumbling on new smells is one of the delights of travel. Early in our evolution we didn’t travel for pleasure, only for food, and smell was essential. Many forms of sea life must sit and wait for food to brush up against them or stray within their tentacled grasp. But, guided by smell, we became nomads who could go out and search for food, hunt it, even choose what we had a hankering for. In our early, fishier version of humankind, we also used smell to find a mate or detect the arrival of a barracuda. And it was an invaluable tester, allowing us to prevent something poisonous from entering our mouths and the delicate, closed system of our bodies. Smell was the first of our senses, and it was so successful that in time the small lump of olfactory tissue atop the nerve cord grew into a brain. Our cerebral hemispheres were originally buds from the olfactory stalks. We
think
because we
smelled
.

Our sense of smell, like so many of our other body functions, is a throwback to that time, early in evolution, when we thrived in the oceans. An odor must first dissolve into a watery solution our mucous membranes can absorb before we can smell it. Scuba-diving in the Bahamas some years ago, I became aware of two things for the first time: that we carry the ocean within us; that our veins mirror the tides. As a human woman, with ovaries where eggs lie like roe, entering the smooth, undulating womb of the ocean from which our ancestors evolved millennia ago, I was so moved my eyes teared underwater, and I mixed my saltiness with the ocean’s. Distracted by such thoughts, I looked around to find my position vis-a-vis the boat, and couldn’t. But it didn’t matter: Home was everywhere.

That moment of mysticism left my sinuses full, and made surfacing painful until I removed my mask, blew my nose in a strange two-stage snite, and settled down emotionally. But I’ve never forgotten that sense of belonging. Our blood is mainly salt water, we still require a saline solution (salt water) to wash our eyes or put in contact lenses, and through the ages women’s vaginas have been described as smelling “fishy.” In fact, Sandor Ferenczi, a disciple of Freud’s, went so far as to declare, in
Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality
, that men only make love to women because women’s wombs smell of herring brine, and men are trying to get back to the primordial ocean—surely one of the more remarkable theories on the subject. He didn’t offer an explanation for why women have intercourse with men. One researcher claims that this “fishiness” is due not to anything intrinsic to the vagina, but rather to poor hygiene after intercourse, or vaginitis, or stale sperm. “If you deposit semen in the vagina and leave it there, it comes out smelling fishy,” he argues. This has a certain etymological persuasiveness to it, if we remember that in many European languages the slang names for prostitutes are variations on the Indo-European root
pu
, to decay or rot. In French,
putain;
to the Irish,
old put;
in Italian
putta; puta
in both Spanish and Portuguese. Cognate words are putrid, pus, suppurate, and putorius (referring to the skunk family).
Skunk
derives from the Algonquin Indian word for polecat; and during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England polecat was a derogatory term for prostitute. Not only do we owe our sense of smell and taste to the ocean, but we smell and taste
of
the ocean.

In general, humans have a strong body odor, and anthropologist Dr. Louis S. B. Leakey thinks our ancestors may have had an even stronger odor, one that predatory animals found foul enough to avoid. Not long ago, I spent some time in Texas, studying bats. I placed a large Indonesian flying fox in my hair, to see if it would get entangled, as the old wives’ tales warned. Not only did it not tangle, it began to cough gently from the mingling smells of my soap,
cologne, saltiness, oils, and other human odors. When I put it back in its cage, it cleaned itself like a cat for many minutes, clearly feeling soiled by the human contact. Many plants—like rosemary or sage—have evolved pungent odors to repel predators; why not animals? Nature rarely wastes a winning strategy. Of course, some humans have much stronger odors than others. Folk wisdom says that brunettes “smell different” from redheads, who smell different from blondes. There’s been so much anecdotal evidence about different races having distinctive odors—because of diets, habits, hairiness or lack of it—that such claims are difficult to discount, even though the topic scares most scientists, who are understandably concerned about being called racist.
*
There hasn’t been a great deal of research into national and racial odors. In any case, one culture doesn’t “smell” better or worse than another, just different, but that may be why the word “stinking” so often appears as an adjective in streams of racial abuse. Asiatics don’t have as many apocrine glands at the base of hair follicles as occidentals do, and as a result they often find Europeans ripe-smelling. A strong body odor among Japanese men is so rare that at one time it could disqualify them from military service. This is also why there is so much scenting of the room and air in Asian life, and much less scenting of the body. Pungent odors are absorbed by fats: If you put an onion or cantaloupe in the refrigerator with an open tub of butter, the butter will absorb the odor. Hair also contains fat, which is why it leaves grease stains on pillows and antimacassars. It absorbs smells, too, like smoke or cologne. The hairiness of Caucasians and Blacks makes them very sweaty compared to Asians, but colognes simmer in their oil and warmth like votive candles.

Body odor comes from the apocrine glands, which are small when we’re born and develop substantially during puberty; there are many
of them scattered around our armpits, face, chest, genitals, and anus. Some researchers conclude that a large part of our joy in kissing is really a joy in smelling and caressing each other’s face, where one’s personal scent glows. Among far-flung tribes in a number of countries—Borneo, on the Gambia River in West Africa, in Burma, in Siberia, in India—the word for “kiss” means “smell”; a kiss is really a prolonged smelling of one’s beloved, relative, or friend. Members of a tribe in New Guinea say good-bye by putting a hand in each other’s armpit, withdrawing it and stroking it over themselves, thus becoming coated with the friend’s scent; other cultures sniff each other or rub noses in greeting.

Meat eaters smell different from vegetarians, children smell different from adults, smokers smell different from nonsmokers; other individuals smell different because of hereditary factors, health, occupation, diet, medication, emotional state, even mood. As Roy Bedichek observes in
The Sense of Smell:
“The body odor of his prey excites the predator so that his mouth waters and every fiber of his being becomes taut and every sense alerted. At the same time in the nostrils of the prey, fear and hate become associated with the body odor of the predator.
*
Thus on low levels of animal life, a specific odor evolves along with and becomes identified with a specific mood.” Each person has an odor as individual as a fingerprint. A dog can identify it easily and recognize its owner even if he or she is one of a pair of identical twins. Helen Keller swore that by simply smelling people she could decipher “the work they are engaged in. The odors of the wood, iron, paint, and drugs cling to the garments of those who work in them.… When a person passes quickly from one place to another, I get a scent impression of where he has been—the kitchen, the garden, or the sickroom.”

For those of exquisite sensuality, there is nothing headier than the musky smell of a loved one moist with sweat. But natural body odors don’t strike most of us as particularly enticing. In the Elizabethan Age, lovers exchanged “love apples”—a woman would keep a peeled apple in her armpit until it was saturated with her sweat, and then give it to her sweetheart to inhale. Now we have whole industries devoted to removing our natural odors and replacing them with artificial ones. Why do we prefer our breath to smell of peppermint instead of rotting bacteria, our “natural” smell? True, a foul smell might signal disease: We might not be attracted to someone giving off an unhealthy odor, and an excess of rotting bacteria could persuade us we are chatting with, say, a cholera victim, someone who could infect us. But mainly we value one scent over another thanks to Madison Avenue’s brashness and our gullibility. Aromatic paranoia pays well. In creative greed, they’ve frightened us into thinking that we’re “offensive” and require lotions and potions to mask our natural odors.

Just what do we mean by a bad smell? And what is the worst smell in the world? The answers depend on culture, age, and personal taste. Westerners find fecal smells repulsive, but the Masai like to dress their hair with cow dung, which gives it an orangey-brown glow and a powerful odor. Children like most smells until they’re old enough to be taught differently. When naturalist and zookeeper Gerald Durrell wanted to catch some fruit bats for his zoo on the Isle of Jersey, he went to the island of Rodriguez, east of Madagascar, and baited his net with what he called “jackfruit,” a big, brown durianlike hedgehog of a fruit, whose white pulp reeked “like a cross between an open grave and a sewer,” a regular “charnel house.” That sounds pretty bad to me, and so, just to see if he’s right, I’ve put “Rodriguez in jackfruit season” on the long list of sensory destinations I’d like to get to one day.

Though ancient and uncontrollably natural, a fart is generally considered to be repellant, discourteous, and even the smell of the devil.
The Merck Manual
, in an uncharacteristically entertaining chapter on “Functional Bowel Disease,” subheading “Gas,” describes
the possible origins, treatments of, and miscellaneous symptoms and signs of gas, along with this observation: