Time Travel

It really is amazing how the sense of smell can instantly bring back memories that otherwise are buried so deep that the recall time can stretch into days. You know the feeling. Try to remember something, that will come back to you much later, usually in the middle of the night. But smell a certain odor and memories will come streaming back in technicolour.

I had that happen as I passed some creosoted poles on a hot day. I was instantly transported (not by Scotty) back to the docks on the Fraser River on a warm summers day. Creosote does that to me. I know it's not ecologically friendly but I love creosote or rather the smell of creosote. The same with Stockholm Tar. It's a great friendly smell of tar distilled from pine trees and used for centuries in ship building. The smell of tar instantly takes me back to a long, dim shed in the 1960's in which I "wormed and parcelled with the lay, turn and serve the other way" on ships rigging for a three-masted barque.

Some smells are dusty. My old friend creosote has a dusty smell to it in railway yards. I suppose it is a combination of creosoted ties, rock ballast and whatever leaked out of old leaky boxcars. Walking along tracks sometimes makes you wonder whether some cars arrived at the destination with anything left. Lots of grain is sprouting next to the tracks, mixed with white sand and wood chips.

This smell thing often takes me on a little side trip (mind trip). The smell of raw diesel will put me in a boom tug at the Crown Zellerbach mill in Kelowna. Diesel exhaust will take me to any number of boats at the coast. The fresh ocean smell of fish takes me to the cannery on the Skeena River. Wood smoke is a winter smell. And who can sniff a freshly sharpened pencil and not remember their first day of school.

I know that people often talk about the smell of fresh mown lawn but unfortunately for me that is just a bad smell. The same for me with the smell of plywood. Many people like the smell of plywood but it just brings memories of unpleasant work for me. Other wood smells are fine. A logging truck load of freshly cut trees has that forest smell. Making sawdust from fir or hemlock will take my mind back to building houses with dad. Of course, yellow cedar and teak will instantly transport me to a boat shed on the river.

Taste will also do that to a lesser degree. Just a sip of Retsina will take me back to a winter in 1971 when that was all we drank because it was cheap. Carole King singing a song from her Tapestry album (vinyl you know) will take me back to that same winter. It's funny how that part of memory works but as I get older, regular memory seems to work in fits and starts. Maybe we just need a collection of familiar smells, bottled and boxed, that we can tap into when we need to jog ourselves back to certain places in time. Mind travel seems to be the way to go if we could just figure out the forward gear.