Led Back By The Nose To North America

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30041, 28 January 1963, Page 2

Led Back By The Nose To North America

IBv T.S.T.J

The parting advice of a college dean in Washington State, as I set off on a seven months’ tour of Canada and the United States, was this: “As you travel around, get out of the car now and then, take a picture in your mind of what you see, breathe in the air and smell the place. Then you will always remember, he said.

The emphasis was on the verb smell. Now, more than three years later, my nose still leads me back to North America. It happened again last week.

Sitting on the roadside near Motueka, I kept thinking of a picnic in 1959 on the boundary of a farm high above the St. Lawrence river, about half-way between Quebec City and Tadoussac—Canada's oldest settlement Quebec and Nelson provinces are a hemisphere apart, the company was different; so were the landscape and the food. The connecting link was the heady aroma of newmown hay. <

Humphreys drive at low Ude wafts me back to Windsor Mills. Quebec, faster than any picture of the place. In time, anyone can get used to the decaying stench around paper mills in Canada. But it was new to us on the hot summer evening we visited Christchurch friends at the Windsor Mills vicarage. As we drove along the highway the smell was near suffocating. We dosed the car win-

dows and bottled it in. We opened them all and that was worse.

It was everywhere, cloying the air of the old vicarage parlour, resistant even to smoke inhaled from 20 or so cigarettes. With the wailing curfew siren at 9 p.m., warning the young in the strict little Catholic community to get off the streets rnd go h me, the smell seemed to gather strength. For months after I returned home my nostrils would twitch involuntarily at the sound of factory whistles.

Let Down ’Soon after Windsor Mills, the high pollen count in the atmosphere, high humidity and low cloud ceilings brought me a dose of sinusitis and my nose let me down. I had to rely on ears and eyes alone. So Montreal comes back with the sweet sound of violins playing “Le Vie en Rose,” as they did one night in “Le Papillon” room at the Hotel de la Salle when we danced between courses at dinner.

Hilarious laughter, shared with an old friend, is now the background music of stiflinghot Toronto, with its massive maple trees and their cooling shade on the sidewalks. One day 1 buried my face in the low-growing leaves of a magnificent maple to try to capture their faint green scent Instead I sneezed violently. Musty With Age

By Williamsburg in Virginia my nose was doing its share in registering memories. The musty smell of age in the original magazine and guardhouse of 1715 and Bruton Parish Church (finished the same year) implant the restored • pital of American Colonial days far more strongly in my mind than mental pictures of the faithfully reconstructed Capitol building or the Governor’s palace. New York city comes to me first by way of the acrid smell of its grimy sub-ways. With it creeps in a twinge of annoyance that I should not think firs' of the sight of the Statue of Liberty, emerging through a sleepy, early morning mist, or the magnificent view of Manhattan Island from the top of Empire State building as the sun set over the water, ‘wiligbt c?me and tlen, below, a million twinkli .g light*. Pine Smoke in Santa Fe

At 7000 ft in Santa Fe (New Mexico) aromas retain their identity in the crisp, clean air. It is always easy to guess what is cooking for supper. But it is the tangy fragrance of pine smoke from a cottage fire that is, to me. as much part of the old. Spanish-settled town as the pink adobe houses and the chapel of San Miguel, built about 1610.

The strong scents of San

Francisco—boiling lobsters at Fishermen’s Wharf, salty sea breezes at the top of every street on a windy day, the conglomerate perfume of the little shops in Chinatown—return nostalgically whenever I share a love of the place with others who have been there. Plum Puddings

Once, in Dallas, a sweet smell of childhood days caught me unaware. From a run-down wooden house in a back street came the unmistakeable odour of spices, calico and steam. It seemed incredible that someone, in 1959, should be boiling plum puddings in an old-fashioned copper in Texas. I wish now that I’d had the nerve to go into the house and see as well But at the time my nose assured me 1 could not be wrong, as 1 stood there remembering my grandmother staggering back from a surge of steam as she lifted from the copper a row of Christmas puddings tied to a heavy stick. The rich, fruity whiff, with its anticipation of Christmas, had left an indelible mark and now brought in its wake a fleeting wave of loneliness. It was then I knew the dean had made his point; but he had forgotten to remind me that "smell-memories” have a two-way pull