Follow Your Nose

This outdoor flower stand was photographed
just last month in Berkeley, and it does not have the magic
nor the scents of the San Francisco ones described below.
Pretty though!

The Sunday Scribblings prompt is "guide."

And what better guide than your nose? Would it lead you to fresh-baked bread? To fresh-brewed coffee? Would it warn you to avoid noxious fumes?

By the time children start to kindergarten most have words to describe much of what their eyes perceive. They know the names of basic colors. They can tell you that someone is short or tall. They know the names of circles and squares, and, due to the good fortune of having binocular vision, whether an object is near or far.

They have other senses as acute as sight. But who among them has adequate vocabulary to describe odors? (“Yucky” and “nice” come to mind!) Yet my childhood is evoked most clearly by the memory of the scents that filled that long-ago world.

Come on a journey with me. (And here you may consider me the co-guide with Nose). It is eighty-two or more years ago, and I am less than five years old, too young for kindergarten, my brother not yet born. Mother and I are on the way from our little brown-shingled Berkeley house to “the City”--San Francisco.

The first part of the trip is a few blocks on foot to the electric train that will take us to the ferry dock in Oakland. The air is cool, as befits a summer day near the bay. I smell a newly mown lawn as we walk past, then the tickly, dry smell of wild oats in vacant lots.

The electric train is not a mere streetcar with a spindly trolley. I must be lifted up the high steps. The interior has a slightly burnt smell of electric motor and also the sweetish scent of the seat upholstery, which, as a child, I thought to be woven of flattened straw with a slick coat of shellac.

The train lurches on through the aromas of the Palmolive-Peet soap factory (pungent, yet suggestive of coconut) and the Sherwin-Williams paint factory, and comes finally to a screeching stop in the cavernous ferry depot. Here are steam engines too, with the hot smell of mingled steam and coal smoke. As we join the throng of commuters surging onto the ferry, the fresh cool air on the deck carries the salty, slightly fishy scent of water lapping at creosoted piers.

We climb the stairs to the passenger lounge. The room smells of coffee and tobacco and something unidentifiably mechanical. We watch the screaming gulls that follow the boat and skim the water for the occasional treats someone throws to them.

The interior of the ferry building in San Francisco is large and dark and fascinating to me, mostly because of the little movie screen, high on a wall, showing cartoons of Felix the Cat. It is the first movie I have ever seen. But it is intended to amuse those waiting to embark. We exit on the city side of the ferry building at the foot of Market Street.

The bay smells are drowned out by smells of this particular city: coffee roasting, fish frying, automobile exhaust, chocolate and the wonderful fragrance of flowers, a fragrance that waxes and wanes as we approach and pass the many flower stands on street corners.

Did flowers have more fragrance then? Or has my sense of smell deteriorated? Maybe it’s just that nowadays most flower stands or florist shops don’t display heavily scented flowers such as the shallow trays of gardenia corsages. (Years later, on trips to The City with other Stanford coeds, we would each treat ourselves to a gardenia, pin it on, and feel glamorous.)

My guided tour is over; other years would create memories of San Francisco that too are rife with scent-sory input. Of Chinatown, incense and straw in the shops, ginger and garlic wafting from restaurants. Of North Beach, “Little Italy”, odors of cheese and salami, garlic and olives at the Veneto restaurant where my father took me for a seven-course dinner (twenty-five cents!). San Francisco sourdough bread baking. Crab pots at Fishermans’ Wharf. Roses beside a steep stairway zigzagging up an even steeper hill where one could again smell the ocean.

Notice that my descriptions of scent have very few sensory adjectives--“sweet”, “pungent”, etc.--but must depend on the reader’s own memory of, say, a rose.

Still, for a little while, as I took you on my journey, I was a little girl again, sensing a world that would go on forever and forever.