The Smell of Smoke
By Teddy Dondanville
Partway through the month of July, smoke from Canadian wildfires migrated its way south overnight and settled in the Hudson River Valley of New York, where I live. When I woke up, I was greeted by a stuffy haze, an uncanny and somewhat apocalyptic orange sky.
From inside my home, I could see that the air quality had plummeted. But compared to the true destruction occurring in various parts of Canada that I read about in the news, the smoke in New York was only a minor inconvenience.
Having grown up in California, I was used to seasonal wildfire smoke. In 2009, Los Angeles County’s largest wildfire, the Station Fire, burned over 160,577 acres and threatened over 12,000 structures, including my family’s home.
With this in my past, I was relatively unalarmed by this smoke, from fires hundreds of miles away. I stayed inside and began my day like normal.
It wasn’t until later, when I went outside to take my dog Dottie on a walk, that I smelled the full extent of the newly arrived smoke. The odor was impressive. I perceived the smell as a mixture of BBQ and bonfire as if the fires were raging just a few miles away and not somewhere far off in the Canadian wilderness.
The smell of smoke immediately evoked old memories. I learned later that odors can trigger something called “olfactory cognition” for neuroscientists, or simply “odor memory” for the layperson.
The concept of odor-evoked memories was first popularized thanks to French author Marcel Proust. In his 1923 novel, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time), Proust recounts being overwhelmed by long-lost autobiographical memories after tasting (but mostly smelling) a madeleine cookie dipped in tea. The first documented “Proust phenomenon,” as it later would be called, inspired what eventually developed into modern olfactory neuroscience.
Now we know that odors, in particular, take a direct route to the limbic system in the brain, which includes the amygdala and the hippocampus, regions intimately connected to emotion and memory.
Because of their relation to the amygdala-hippocampal complex, odor-evoked memories are significantly more visceral and evocative than memories triggered by other cues, like sight or sound. So evocative, in fact, that some people are brought to the original time and place of their memories, compared to when the same events are recalled through other verbal or visual cues.
So, despite strolling through my neighborhood in the summer of 2023, I was transported decades into the past.
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It was the week of Thanksgiving. We were corralled in the Mojave Desert of California outside the town of Mojave, just north of Los Angeles. On one side, my cousin’s family rig was parked near ours. Together, our families had two pickup trucks with accompanying camper trailers, and four dirtbikes, one for every adult.
Because we were just kids, we rode a life-sized, plastic battery-operated ATV. We also tooled around on our bicycles. Occasionally, we got pulled behind my grandpa’s dirtbike in a red wagon or sat between our parents and the gas tank on their motorcycles.
On the other side, my grandpa and other uncle had their trucks parked. Their respective dirtbikes leaned up against the tailgates.
In the middle of our camp was the firepit. A circular collection of stones organized at some point by who knows who. The remnants of charred wood, broken beer bottles, shotgun shells, and nails from burnt-up pallets of wood signaled that the previous inhabitants of this campsite enjoyed themselves thoroughly.
The beginnings of the night's fire were already burning. The smell of smoke signaled the end of a good long day and the beginning of nightfall.
The adults tended to adult things, like cleaning up after dinner in the trailer and readying the beds for us kids, and my sister was off with my other cousin Reese.
Meanwhile, I was out roaming around the campsite with my cousin Kyle. Who knows what we were up to? Probably just chucking rocks, chatting in child-like gibberish, and looking for forgotten relics buried shallow in the red desert dirt.
At some point in our play, we lost track of how close we’d gotten to the fire. Ultimately, it was our naïveté. We were kids.. And with all the adults distracted, no one was there to stop Kyle from tumbling into the flames.
I heard my mom scream. I remember seeing her through the trailer’s side windows with the bedsheets in her hand. On the other side of camp, more screams spilled out of the other trailer as my aunt watched her son fall in.
Quickly, from behind his truck, my Uncle Ed sprinted over. I remember the sounds of his lungs huffing and wheezing from, the exhaustive efforts of a daily cigarette smoker called to perform cardio.
He bent over and scooped Kyle out of the fire. Shocked and somehow relatively unharmed, Kyle, too, began to scream and cry.
Despite this memory being somewhat traumatic, its happy ending transformed it into a funny story of my cousin's rambunctiousness as a child and the no-good mischievousness we get up to when we are together. Since then, any harbored trauma from the event has been overshadowed by exponentially more positive experiences of camping in the desert as a family.
For years the Mojave desert functioned as a meeting ground for our families to leave behind the congestion of Los Angeles and embrace the wide open landscape of the desert and all its dusty, dirty, windy, and sunny glory. As kids, teenagers, and then adults, we spent our days in the desert digging holes, taking naps, riding dirtbikes, shooting BB guns, playing Rummikub, and reading books, ending every night with a bonfire and smores.
All of which I am fondly reminded of when I smell smoke, the stench of gasoline, or hear the roar of a two-stroke engine.
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Over the course of my walk with Dottie, I began to become accustomed to the wildfire smoke and stopped smelling it completely. Then at some point, the wind shifted. I was smacked once again with a thick and acrid stench of smoke, triggering another memory of the two years I spent living in Peru.
In the part of the Peruvian Andes where I lived, about eight hours north of Lima in the department of Ancash, burning trash was commonplace. Fortunately, most towns had a trash service that transported the city's waste to dumps or landfills.
But in the in-between spaces outside of city jurisdiction or in the campo (country), where access to the waste management system was hard to come by, disposing of your trash in massive burn piles was the preferred technique. Not everyone did it, and trash piles were not burning at all times of the day. However, the strange smell of burning trash wafted through the air on a weekly basis.
The smell of the smoke varied depending on what was added to the pile. Burning plastic and other non-organic trash had a particularly severe smell, and the smoke was uniquely thick and opaque.
When organic items burned, like the remnants of the corn harvest, or other brush and debris from the chacra (farm), the smoke smelled oddly pleasant, a scent reminiscent of the campfires we burned in Mojave.
Despite burning being an inequitable way to dispose of trash, the smell of it still brings back fond memories of Peru. I am reminded of memories of people with whom I became friends and memories of the landscape in which I had the privilege of living.
I had the privilege of living with two host families. Before these two families, never in my life had I experienced such unconditional welcome from strangers. The mothers and fathers of the families treated me like a son, and the children embraced me like a strangely colored brother. I still remain in contact with my host siblings to this day. We often daydream about the time when I can visit again or when I can return the favor as they visit my home in the United States.
I’ve also never lived in such a scenic setting. The town where I lived was called Matacoto. Matacoto sits on the western side of the Rio Santo smack dab in the center of the Callejon de Huaylas and directly across from Peru’s largest mountain Nevado Huascarán.
The town itself is small and semi-rural. Most inhabitants dedicate themselves to raising livestock or growing avocados. There is a small school for local children, a health post, a wonderful plaza, and of course, an artificial turf soccer field.
During my stay in Matacoto, I had everything I needed, even a family. But what made my time in Peru even more enjoyable was my proximity to spectacular rock climbing. In the valley below Matacoto, I climbed on boulders that exfoliated off the North Face of Huascarán from an earthquake that struck in 1970. These boulders eventually became the venue for a climbing workshop I helped design for the local high schoolers. Later, for those interested in heights, I helped design a top roping workshop at the local crag down the road.
But there wasn’t just bouldering. Practically any place you look up or down the Callejon de Huaylas had rocks to climb–slab climbs on glacier-eroded walls, pumpy sport climbs on volcanic conglomerate rock, and granite towers and big walls in idyllic alpine meadows.
So sometimes, when I smell smoke, I am brought back to the Peruvian rock that transformed me into the climber and guide I am today, as well as all the other wonderful smoke-centric memories like cooking and baking over a fire with my host family, massive castillos (castles) of fireworks used to celebrate patron saints, and the surrounding smoke from the annual yunsa carnival celebrations.
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When I got home from my dog walk, I was finally able to get out of the hazy smoke. With all the windows and doors shut, I could shelter myself from the polluted air outside. I no longer smelled the smoke, but nonetheless, I was happy I had.
For me, fire and its counterpart, smoke, played a large role in who I’ve become as a person. In one way or another, fire and smoke have accompanied me in beautiful places, connected me with wonderful people, burnt me, and helped nourish me.
In those moments, it was the fire that was the centerpiece. But afterward, it's the smoke that brings me back.
Teddy Dondanville is a freelance writer focused on the outdoor industry and adventure sports. When not enjoying the cerebral and caffeine-fueled pursuits of writing, he works as a rock climbing guide in upstate New York. You can learn more about Teddy on his website.
