Nothing smells like anything anymore
This is a true story: after a weekend of camping and hiking in northeastern Wisconsin, my brother and I stopped at a bar for a beer and a proper bathroom. I relieved myself first while he ordered. Immediately upon closing the door behind me I was met with an odor (not piss and shit, for the record) so unique and so familiar that I became seriously disoriented. I hadn't smelled this particular smell in nearly twenty years, and its origins were hundreds of miles away, in Nebraska. How was this possible? Where the hell was I? I collected myself and walked outside to find my brother waiting, knees turned slightly inward as if to say, "dog, I gotta pee."
"Tell me what you think it smells like in there," I told him as he scurried inside.
He emerged with a sort of ghastly look in his eyes and said, almost without pause, "the Conzemius's basement." The Conzemius's fucking basement. Exactly.
The Conzemiuses were a family who lived across the cul-de-sac from us growing up. They had three boys who more or less aligned with me and my brother's ages, which naturally led to us spending a significant amount of time in each other's driveways, backyards, and, certainly, basements. Most basements in the neighborhood were underground, carrying a vaguely dank, dusty smell. They were dark and always carpeted. The Conzemius's basement was a rare case: it featured a sliding glass door leading to a walk-out patio with a beloved hot tub. During the day, it was awash with sunlight that reflected off the tile floors. Rare, too, was its smell that felt as permanent a fixture as the big-screen plasma TV mounted on the wall. It was a smell that rejects any attempt at verbal descripton; I couldn't tell you what it smelled like if I tried. I was convinced it was a singular odor, found nowhere else on earth, nowhere else in the universe. But then I – then we – smelled it again, suppressed in the moist single-stall bathroom of a Door County bar.
This was four summers ago. I hadn't experienced anything so sensorially distinct and vivid for many years before that, and certainly not since. But when I was (much) younger, I remember assigning and registering these odors with some frequency. I don't mean, "that smells like gasoline" or "that's the perfume my aunt wears." No, I mean amalgamations of smells that combine to create this olfactory esoterica that belong to something, someone, or someplace. They may have had hints of some widely recognizable scents – sweat, wood, mothballs – but were ultimately inimitable. I remember, for instance, the dirty, metallic smell of my elementary school coatroom. My friend's mom's minivan smelled like freshly printed paper.
I won't feign in the slightest to understand the physiological and biochemical processes associated with scent; I'm sure it's a miraculous feat of human evolution and engineering. But how is it possible that a Wisconsin bar bathroom, overdue for routine maintenance, could so acutely resemble a sensation that it activated the memories of two people who hadn't thought of this family, let alone their basement, for two decades?
What's more: Where have all the idiosyncratic odors gone? I struggle to recall or even recognize a particular person, place, or thing's smell in the way I used to. Do young people still experience this magic of familiarity and meaning? Am I just old now? Have my four-or-five COVID infections ravaged my sinuses irreparably?
I write this mostly in jest, but also in absolute wonder. Please, just let me smell you, one last time...