I was recently talking to a friend, scientist and author, about our sense of smell. She is studying how city folk have lost their sense of smell, at least this is her hypothesis. It reminded me of a visit to China where the smells were so strong I would walk outside each morning and vomit in a gutter. It made me laugh so hard that the entire process didn’t work well, but I couldn’t seem to make it stop, not for the weeks that I was there. The smells were so intense, foreign, and unpleasant, my body convulsed upon contact.

The scents of US cities don’t have this effect on me. I am not sure I notice the scents of our cities, they are habitual and I block them out in the same way I do sirens or slow walking tourists. Apparently this is what happens in cities, people block out the scent as much as the sound, unless they want to access it. But it is not a layer of information or navigation, it is not a crucial source.

I use smell as one of the most important indicators of life, safety, and direction. I use it to navigate what I eat, where I go, how I feel, if I am healthy. It’s not just the basic ability to tell if food as gone off, or something is rancid, but in the woods, it provides safety and security. The scent of marsh or bear scat, the scent of the air and the impending weather. I need to know these things, in remote areas. Sight works well, sound less so, scent provides a deep level of knowledge.

On a individual level, it is a clear indicator of my health. After being treated for a major illness, the scent of my skin was entirely different. It took over a year for me to smell like me. I would find myself in yoga class, trying to surreptitiously smell my forearm in down dog, to see if I was still oozing the sticky sweet scent leftover from too many hospitals. It works for others too, that sweet smell that indicates blood sugar out of bounds which you probably have noticed but may not know what it indicates. So many others, but scent is hard to describe in words, far easier to experience. Is this why it has gone away as a key indicator? We have no teachers? If I lost these scents, I wouldn’t know that I should get more sleep, or am a few days away from pneumonia, or that I should be brewing up special teas to change the way my body works.

As a child I had the run of the woods and my mother would walk me out and around and name the plants and the animals. I learned which plants could be used for what medicinal application, which were poisonous, emetics, and other features. I no longer know their names, I generally know what they look like, I doubt I will ever forget their scents. I could still wander into the New England woods to find the fern I need to boil up a salve for poison ivy. Almost all of my knowledge of medicinal elements is encoded in scent. This isn’t a single instance. It goes for the trees and herbs as well.

My loss of these names, it is a loss of language, devastating to the world of linguists I often find myself in. With the loss of language we lose history and culture, we lose the local history of medicine. I have lost the words for these items, in the English I had as a child. If I lost these scents, I’d lose my medicine.

We rarely speak of language loss in English. But the loss of scent combined with the loss of language becomes a double loss. I have lost my ability to teach, but not my ability to know myself, and the woods in which I travel. Someone knows these languages I have lost, the words are likely written. If we lose the scents, the memory entailed in our experiences and the knowledge we have gained through generations, I do not know how we regain this. Scent is so hard to describe, yet stick so firmly into our minds. I should find these words, and share these scents.

Except, as Alix says, perhaps this is not knowledge that is important in a city. You won’t get poison ivy, and you are unlikely to walk into a bear due to not recognizing their scents, there is no bog to crash into, or quicksand. If you did not grow up using scent to navigate the world, perhaps it is no loss at all.