The Lizards, The Coal Age and Us

If you have ever owned a reptile or walked through the snake snake house at the zoo, you were probably amazed by how much odor blossoms from a lizard cage.  These things smell worse than the big cat house to me, but maybe that's because I live with five miniature puddings who are forgiven everything, even though at this point everyone is fastidious.  Would a lion use a litter box?  This is another essay at a later date after further research.  But the lizards, yikes.

Now, multiply that little green bean lizard by a few tons, and put it in a heated, steamy environment and you have a dinosaur.  Other than schmancy CGI and the skeletons remaining, we truly have no idea how these things walked, stomped, were colored, barked, behaved, or responded to dinosaur-sized crickets and mealworms.  Or smelled.  How did the world smell, in light of one brachiosaurus being tall as a four-story building and as long as two school buses, plus the whole herd just sauntered through your fern and gingko yard?  This was the Age of Reptiles, lasting for hundreds of millions of years (like my student loan), and even in the open air, you had to notice the aroma like when you go play cards at Aunt Myrna's house.

Now, plant-based digestion smells better than carnivore or omnivore, so maybe to country gal me who grew up surrounded by dairy farms, it wouldn't be like walking into a wall of solid air.  The trouble is, however, you have your T. rex, cousin Allosaurus, the giant flying seagull Pteranodons, and the smaller Deinonychus, all meat eaters.  In droves.  You tell me about the air, including the gas, the methane swamps, and the output of these giant galoots.  It was just a thought, as interesting to me as my hypothesis that maybe some of the dinosaurs could change colors, like chameleons.  I would love to go back there for a day, in an armored helicopter fitted with grenade launchers or at least a taser gun, just in case.

But let's move on from the natural into the beginning auspices of man as he tried to change the environment to support his family.  There were still the immense animals; ground sloths big as elephants, Baluchitherium, the hornless, eighteen foot high precursor to our rhinoceros, and herds of wooly mammoths.  Not so damp or warm, so maybe the aroma was tamed down a bit.  Once we ate everything and started building cities, industry became the progenitor of how things smelled.  Think of it, medieval aromas ranging from leftover food tossed to the castle floor for the dogs to harry, to the walls of the castle (people used to hang their bottoms out of windows for business) leading down into the moat.  People themselves didn't bathe as it was a symptom of debauchery, they instead carried pomanders and perfumed hankies.  Around the time of the French Revolution, the fashionable white skin was achieved through arsenic and mercury-based makeup; the resulting rot took one out of the social circles pretty fast, even in candlelight.  Let's jump up to the Industrial Revolution.

What did they smell like, these cities belching coal-based smoke, chamber pots still dumped out of windows onto streets?  You pretty much wore the same thing everyday until it was able to stand up on its own, and then soap was used, not for washing people, but for clothing.  But what about the shops, now that serfdom was over and a working paycheck was coming in? People had money to spend.  Candleshops, bakeries, confectionaires, shops for roast meats, smithies, grain mills, perfumeries, gardens; more pleasant smells outshone the rank business of disposal.

We live in the most hygienic time ever, at least in this country.  Microbes have been recognized and are held at arm's length, garbage is contained (except don't get me going on what we are doing to the ocean with our disposal techniques), and sewers have city departments.  We shower several times a week if not in a day, and eliminate as much of our natural smell as possible, and I say thank heavens.  There is still pollution, still toxic industry, still a reptile house at the zoo that will knock you over with one whiff, but you can't expect otherwise with animals.

Some of my most favorite smells come from times past, like when I would bury my face in my grandmother's taffeta skirt when I was three.  She smelled cool, like a garden of roses after rain.   The dry paper smell of the library up in my aunt's attic, found in a house built in the century before; the wooden smell of bannisters and stairs polished with wax in her foyer.  Strawberries picked in the sun and strung on stems of foxtail grass, or in winter, the smell of snow enhanced by the wafting aromas of each house making dinner as I would walk down the street to my own house.  Heavier smells such as the creel that held fish caught in the lake, or the grease that hangs in the air at a roadside hamburger joint, fish fry on Friday.  Try out a dog's neck, a cat's fur, a baby's skin.  A box of crayons or lumberyard.  Biscuits coming out of the oven.  My Mom's Chanel No. 22 (which isn't made anymore), the long hall at the science museum, the wooden trunk holding blankets.  Earth. Water. Sky. Fire.

The sun is lowering even now in late afternoon, the winds are still, the buildings around me are catching the last rays of sunlight and will go from this gold to orange to pink and rose and finally deep lavender until all is dark and the lights go on.  A quiet day, a soup for dinner day.  Sleep well, sleep well.  Goodnight.