Field Blog Journal 6: Smell

Jonathan Levinsohn

It was October 31^st, 2009 around 10:00 am. It was an uncharacteristically warm day, almost 20^O C, which is well above the average temperature according to the almanac (courtesy of “the weather underground:” wunderground.com) of 12^O C. The sky was overcast, though the radar did not show any cloud cover above us. Perhaps the clouds were too low to be picked up. The wind gusted frequently and there is a wind advisory warning in effect for the area as gusts were reported to have reached 37 kph in North Adams.

Braving the wind, I made my way down to the cemetery for the fifth time in a week to examine the different smells of the area. The mowed and raked grass bordering the woods had, unsurprisingly, the mild odor of freshly cut grass. I looked up towards the trees, and saw few leaves. Only the now yellow Norway Maple leaves still clung to branches. I grabbed a low hanging leaf and ground it up in my hands and took a deep breath. The leaf had little smell, but resembled the smell of the cut grass. Perhaps this is due to common chemicals in plant vasculature. I grabbed some of the sumac fruit and tried to grind it up using my hands. Though my fingers stained red, I was unable to break the hard casing of the fruit. I smelled the pseudo-smashed berries, and detected nothing.

I turned my attention to the ground, which was now covered by more than an inch of yellow, red and brown leaves (mostly maple). There was an exceptionally large pile of leaves in a ditch, which was likely the destination of any leaves that fell on the grass. These crinkly leaves had no apparent smell. There were more beer cans and bottles littering the area, though I did not bother to smell them. I remembered the distinctive smell of yellow and black birch, and decided to see if the decomposing black birch in my plot of woods still had the same smell; I peeled off some bark from a smaller branch and found that it had lost its former odor, and now smelled of dirt and rot. There was some wild garlic mustard along the edges of the woods, which had the familiar savory smell that their name suggests. The moss upon a rotting log also had no apparent smell apart of dirt. After smelling several of these plants, I was distracted by a crow’s caw. I paused to listen for a brief while, and also heard the chattering of a squirrel and the mewing of a catbird. The latter two, are sounds I have heard frequently, but the crow was a rarity. I saw a chipmunk dart into a crevasse in a large Norway maple, and I re-focused upon smelling the area.

The under story of the woods was surprisingly green, due mainly to the number of invasive exotic species (namely honeysuckle and buckthorn). The pokeberry, which was brown and wilted, still had two or three berries left. I grabbed them and easily mashed them in my hand. The purplish-blue smudge smelled like blueberries and V-8 juice. I looked for some of the buckthorn fruits, but saw that they were no longer on the trees. The winged euonymus’ orange fruits and the Japanese barberry smelled the same, a relatively strong odor, which I had difficulty placing, but finally decided they smelled like squash. The mulitflora rose, which was also still green had berries that had a weak, but sweet smell once they were pulverized. The leaves of the honeysuckle and buckthorn had no apparent smell.

In retrospect, it would have been better to have examined the smells of the area earlier, which I prevented from doing by a head cold. I do not have a particularly strong sense of smell, though it would have been nice to have more leaves, berries and even flowers to examine. For instance, it would have been nice to smell the butternut, which I mistook for a black walnut, so I could determine if the two smelled alike.