Free A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman Page B

she wrote, “has told me of a coming storm hours before there was any sign of it visible. I notice first a throb of expectancy, a slight quiver, a concentration in my nostrils. As the storm draws near my nostrils dilate, the better to receive the flood of earth odors which seem to multiply and extend, until I feel the splash of rain against my cheek. As the tempest departs, receding farther and farther, the odors fade, become fainter and fainter, and die away beyond the bar of space.” Other individuals have been able to smell changes in the weather, too, and, of course, animals are great meteorologists (cows, for example, lie down before a storm). Moistening, misting, and heaving, the earth breathes like a great dark beast. When barometric pressure is high, the earth holds its breath and vapors lodge in the loose packing and random crannies of the soil, only to float out again when the pressure is low and the earth exhales. The keen-nosed, like Helen Keller, smell the vapors rising from the soil, and know by that signal that there will be rain or snow. This may also be, in part, how farm animals anticipate earthquakes—by smelling ions escaping from the earth.
    People dressing for a dinner party on a stormy night won’t need to use as much perfume, because perfume smells strongest just before a storm, in part because moisture heightens our sense of smell, and in part because the low pressure makes a fluid as volatile as perfume spread even faster. After all, perfume is 98 percent water and alcohol, and only 2 percent fat and perfume molecules. At timesof low pressure molecules evaporate faster, and can waft from one’s body into the alcoves of a room at considerable speed. This is also true, even on sunny days, in high-elevation cities such as Mexico City, Denver, or Geneva, where barometric pressures are always low because of the altitude. The ideal time and place to overwhelm a restaurant with one’s new perfume would be at the 7,000-feet-high El Tovar Lodge, perched right on the sense-staggering edge of the Grand Canyon, when a storm is brewing.
    Helen Keller had a miraculous gift for deciphering the fragrant palimpsest of life, all the “layers” that most of us read as a blur. She recognized “an old-fashioned country house because it has several layers of odors, left by a succession of families, of plants, of perfumes and draperies.” How someone blind and deaf from birth could understand so well the texture and appearance of life, let alone the way our eccentricities express themselves in the objects we enjoy, is one of the great mysteries. She found that babies didn’t yet have a “personality scent,” unique odors she could identify in adults. And her sensuality expressed itself in smell—and explained an age-old attraction: “Masculine exhalations are, as a rule, stronger, more vivid, more widely differentiated than those of women. In the odor of young men there is something elemental, as of fire, storm, and salt sea. It pulsates with buoyancy and desire. It suggests all the things strong and beautiful and joyous and gives me a sense of physical happiness.”
A FAMOUS NOSE
    Those people with the nimblest sense of smell often end up working for perfumeries; some, if they are also imaginative and daring, create the great perfumes. In a sea of flowers, roots, animal secretions, grasses, oils, and artificial smells, they must be able to remember thousands of ingredients available to a perfumer, and the alchemical ways to blend them. They need an architect’s sense of balance and a bookie’s cunning. These days, laboratories can mimic natural essences, which is just as well, since we don’t have reliable natural extracts of such flowers as lilac, lily of the valley, or violet. But toproduce a persuasive rose oil may mean mixing five hundred ingredients. On Fifty-seventh Street off Tenth Avenue in New York City, International Flavors and Fragrances Inc. houses the best professional noses in the world.