The Written Word
for April 29, 2001

Winston Churchill once famously remarked – I don’t have the exact quote – that the greatest aid to memory was smell. And he was right.

There has always been a special smell to places I intend to fish, for example, be it a lake, a river or an ocean. It may just be that the sense of smell is heightened just by the anticipation of wetting a line. Paths through pine forests smell neat – so does seaweed.

The smell of water, especially though not exclusively salt water, has special meaning for any who have had much to do with it. Recently, while in San Francisco, I smelled (through the pungent odours of hamburgers and other fast foods) the salt air at Fishermen’s Wharf. It reminded me of a day very long ago when, as a young law graduate, I had foolishly decided to go to Edmonton and make a career as an oil tycoon. I became hopelessly homesick and turned tail and went home to Vancouver six months later. When the bus came into the old Dunsmuir bus terminal, above the prevailing stench of oil, and from the lavatories’, stale and not so stale urine, I caught to smell of the sea and I knew I was home to stay.

Not especially meaning to make this a bathroom discourse, I also remember with some sentiment the smell of horse manure. It brings back to mind, and nose, the days when I was young and so was Vancouver whose streets were still clogged with horse drawn bread and milk wagons. The smell of horse buns was on every residential street in those days.

But of all the animal smells – can anything come remotely close to the smell of a Labrador puppy? Especially if it’s just become yours?

And the smell of fresh baking. I would like to draw a tear from your eye and tell you it’s all about the bread Mum use to bake but it wasn’t – it was Barers Bakery in Kerrisdale. A bakery boycotted for a bit in the Second World War until people realized that they were Dutch, not German.

And there was and remains coffee. It makes me think of Murchies, again in Kerrisdale. I would go in there with my mother and smell each bin. Notwithstanding all medical counsel to the contrary, I still love coffee – and with the rise of Espresso then Cappuccino, it’s better now than it ever was.

They say that hard liquor is an acquired taste. Perhaps. Even though, God knows, I’ve drunk enough of it in my life, I never have liked the smell of rye whiskey. Gin can sometimes bring back pleasant evenings of a hot summer and of course many wines are evocative of pleasures nasal and often carnal. But Scotch whiskey – especially a good single malt (is there a bad one?) – always reminds one of coming of age. You may drink before you’re supposed to but the day you become a drinker of whiskey – not abusively so, one hopes – is the day you realized that a certain drink of Scotch Whiskey, acquired taste or not, marked your maturity. (It is not my desire to be any more provocative than necessary here or elsewhere so I cheerfully admit that the same experience can be had with Irish whiskey, especially malt.

Churchill, as with so many things, was so very wise. I daresay that there are few events in one’s life that do not evoke memories of a smell – perfume, perhaps; a sizzling steak or more likely the delicious addition of mushrooms; a changing-room after a hard fought match; chocolate chip cookies; or even the sherry when you wished the old dear had some whiskey in that cabinet of hers somewhere.

It isn’t only dogs for whom a smell brings back memories both good and bad of where we’ve been and who else has passed that way too.