The New Smells of Winter

I've been scratching my head trying to figure out what exactly it is I smell, on my weekly evening bike commute. At least once a week I ride to an evening meeting on two wheels: I choose the bike over the car even when it's cold, dark, and rainy because I love riding through the chill. One longstanding blessing of winter riding has been the smell of wood fires. Not any more. I've written eulogies to natural wood fires, now increasingly frowned upon. I live in an area with lots of auto and industrial smog, a not coincidentally high rate of breathing problems, and therefore a high sensitivity to politically-correct burn behavior. I understand the need to put less smoke and stuff in the air, but I just can't be happy about the "green" solutions (gas barbecues, gas heaters), when they require the burning of petrochemicals to address an air quality problem caused primarily by the burning of petrochemicals.

Today, as I pedal around my town, I smell the wet rotting leaves (that's one of the good smells), yummy dinners of different ethnicities, and now, with increasing regularity, I smell burning wax. It took me a few nights out before I realized what it was. I mean I knew I was smelling burning wax, but I couldn't figure out why I smelled it so powerfully on the street, and over and over. Then I got it. DuraFlame. I'm smelling fake fireplace logs made from sawdust and wax.

And it really breaks my heart. I know these fake logs are supposed to be better than wood for burning. I know the numbers. 70% less stuff coming out your chimney. They are supposedly made only with natural waxes (at least today they are). But the only reason the burning of natural logs is bad is because of all the other crap that we load the atmosphere with on this overcrowded planet. I mean, really: does it have to be the wood fires that go? It's perfectly alright to keep my hummer, but I can't have a wood fire?

When you go looking into this strange fake-log market, you learn that there is an old-school version of the fake fireplace log. Pres-to-Logs were made from sawdust leftover from lumber production (so no waste, and no trees cut for the product) pressed into shape under high pressure, with no wax or other binders. Pres-to-Logs have been around for 75 years and are made by a company that makes pellets for wood burning stoves. Why aren't we burning those in Los Altos? I know: because they don't light themselves. Too inconvenient. I can hear the pitch now: "We're going to give Americans a fire they can light with one match and no fuss! All we have to do is make a product that is basically a massive sawdust candle." I can smell the lesser of two evils and DuraFlames are not it.

Even if Pres-to-logs are way better than DuraFlame, and they certainly are (I'll be looking for a local distributor for the next logless fire), they do not come close to the look and sounds of a natural wood fire.

I know that fake logs are better by the numbers, but the whole thing stinks. I mean that in every sense: it just seems wrong ... and these things are making my neighborhood smell like a fire at a candle factory. In my economy, if something stinks, it's probably rotten.

DuraFlame has no power here

The smells of success

My family just spent some time at a lake house as guests of good friends. It was a nice vacation: I think we all got the kind of readjustment that we were looking for. There was water-skiing, swimming, sun-worshiping, fishing, and ... we even got in a hike to a small jewel of an alpine lake called Crystal Lake (that's my happy place). There was also much consuming of barbecued meat, and, although you can do that back home, for some reason barbecued meat tastes better next to a lake at 5000 feet surrounded by friends and by pine trees that are catching the setting sun after a day of fun when you know you get to have another day of fun right after that. I think that's a culinary principle.

To get to this lake, we had to cross over the Pacific Crest, the high-elevation spine that runs through California. I love the change in atmosphere as you climb out of a hot-and-dry valley like the Hwy. 5 corridor. First the temperature changes--but not like you'd think: the air is crisper and feels colder, but the sun is more intense, so it can feel hotter. The air is thinner, which means you'll be out of breath for a few days, but your body will adjust. Then there is the smell. On a drive like this, I can't wait to roll the windows down and be done with the air-conditioning (and air-recycling) needed to survive a hot valley highway jammed with traffic: up high, the air seems so much more breathable. It's the smells.

Above 4000 feet, the air smells fresher, cleaner, and richer. You can smell the herbal shrubs when the sun hits them and they release their perfume. You can smell some of the giant trees, like the pines that cover these mountains. You can even smell the dirt ... and it smells good. One of the most powerful (and I'm ashamed to say, most satisfying) smells comes when a logging truck carrying felled pine trees passes your car. I know that's not so p.c., but the trees are logged sustainably in this area, and anyways, it is such a surprise to smell something good behind a truck that it catches me a little off-guard.

Speaking of trucks, two of the families at our house towed boats up to the lake. One was a fishing boat, and the other was a sport boat that pulled the water skiers. Both of these boats were towed by the original giant sequoia of the road, the Chevy Suburban. Though I am a low-and-green-tech kind of guy who would like to see less big gas-burning cars on the road, I can't deny that these are the very cars you need when towing six people and a boat up to the mountains. Or, as one of the dads said as sixteen of us piled into the two Suburbans for our trek up to the trailhead for an afternoon of hiking, "... Probably the most fuel-efficient way in the world to move 16 adults and kids up to 7000 feet. Prius just wouldn't do it."

I'm inclined to agree, and anyway, this is not the crowd to blame for SUVs crowding the roads in the cities and suburbs: these families are actually using their trucks as trucks. But too many people buy SUVs for their (perceived) safety, their (very-real) projection of power, or the (dubious) image of success they bestow, and then proceed to drive them like cars to and from the market and soccer games. The Suburban has the right size engine for towing and climbing mountains, but way too much engine when all you're towing is ego and attitude. Just because you can afford the gas to drive an empty truck doesn't mean you have a right to burn it: that aroma on the roads of Silicon Valley just may be the unintended smell of success.

When our families arrived at the trailhead for our hike to Crystal lake, one of the moms got out of the car, took a deep breath and said, "Oh! It smells so good here!" And it did. I said to her, "There's lots of good smells back home too, we just don't know it, because there are too many other smells on top of the good ones." I don't like the idea that it can only smell good far away from home. That sweet smell of the naked earth, uncluttered and unmasked, was one of the rewards at the end of our long ascent. But what about those hidden smells back home? How should our home towns smell?

As in the case of the giant, pine-scented logging trucks laboring over the mountains, one powerful smell can mask another. On mountain roads, I learned, pine trumps diesel (and how cool is that?). Back home in the Bay Area, the smells of nature are more subtle and diffuse than cut-pine: as a bicycle commuter who often spends time wedged between SUVs, I can tell you what smells are winning. I wonder: is there anyone still living here in suburbia who remembers what this place really smells like?

A lover's quarrel

My friend Heather writes a beautiful, honest post about returning home to Georgia and the tension of how things change. She talks about Georgia like one might a former boyfriend--winsome memories of lovable qualities, and a hard encounter with all the reasons why it could never have worked out .... Her clear-headed reflection on the imbalance in the urban/rural relationship is itself balanced and evocative.

When I return, I feel...I feel betrayed. Atlanta has sprawled beyond her rightful and necessary boundaries. Or you could say the symbol Atlanta is of urban commerce has overrun its banks and flooded the rural landscape that gives that commercial river the right to flow in the first place. I'm not naive enough to say that commerce is bad or that cities are bad but I am principled enough to say that when the balance of urban and rural gets knocked off its fragile footing both sides lose.

From Heather's blog, Garden Street Farm: A song of you comes as sweet and clear as moonlight through the pines.

Silence

I love it when the power goes out. I'm not immune to the inconvenience: I am a computer user after all (note that I don't publish these essays on parchment paper). But the possibility of a power outage is no real threat to me because I'm a laptop user (built in battery backup, you see), so I never worry about losing work, or even productivity. But if the power does go out, I will save my work, fold my laptop up, and revel in the silence and the dark.

Last year, I was in my favorite coffee shop near my office, Printer's Cafe in Palo Alto, when the power went out. It was shocking: the overwhelming silence was a major surprise. There was, normally, so much noise in that place--the fridges, espresso machine, blenders, microwave, dishwashers, the general hum of unseen appliances and infrastructure--that the sudden absence of it was almost unnerving. I got tingles. There is a kind of silence that is hard for a city kid or suburbanite to adjust to. It's heavy. I wish it could be recorded, but like most beautiful things, there's no real way to capture it.

I love it when the power goes out: I often threaten to throw the circuit breakers in my home because it just doesn't happen often enough. To light candles and just be in the beautiful glow of little flames and listen to the subtle, natural sounds ... wind, footsteps, pages turning. To move from one orange and shadowy space through dark passageways to other orange and shadowy spaces. Of course, this is a treat because we don't have to live without power the rest of the time. It's a little unplanned vacation from modernity. I am glad for the conveniences of electricity. But there are always consequences that result from our tireless pursuit of convenience.

Take a mental walk around your work space or living space right now. Where's that noise coming from? Central air? Refrigerator? Computer fan (or some deeper, subtler electronic movement)? Lamps are always buzzing, whether fluorescent, incandescent or the high-powered kind above streets and blazing behind warehouses. Then there are the radios, televisions, Internet media, and the loud-and-low, primevally-musical thumps and rumbles coming from passing cars, or teenagers' rooms.

There is an episode of the radio show This American Life, from the end of 2007, which includes a segment on the sounds that surround us. In the episode, reporter Jack Hitt visits Toby Lester, a musician who pays close attention to the ambient noises in his environment. Lester discovered that the sounds of his office heater and telephone dial tone combined to form an "augmented fourth", a musical interval that has the unfortunate distinction of being described by medieval catholic monks as the "most reviled sound ... feared as the diabolus in musica, the devil in the music." Certainly the monks never imagined a place so terrible as The Office Cubicle, but it would not have surprised them to encounter the devil's harmonies therein.

Musicians work very hard to combine sounds that are pleasing to the ear, just as artists use light and color to create images to please our eyes. But we live and work in places that could be described as cesspools of noise pollution: most of the noise in our work and home environments is the unintended waste product of technological progress. Our aural experience could be described as collateral damage in the endless campaign to power our lives. The only way to beat the noise is to cover it with some noise of our own choosing--music, or television: noise-isolating earphones are a growth-industry. Sometimes, mercifully, the wind picks up and overpowers the noise inside, briefly masking it. But our homes are well-insulated against nature, and so ensure that we remain prisoners of our comforts for most of the time. We could buy one of those tiny machines that synthetically reproduces natural sounds and rhythms to relax us (ocean waves ... gentle rain ... mountain storm). Or we could pray for the power to go out.

Sure, the world has always been a noisy place, and not all the noises are pleasant. But Lester notes in the radio spot that we're the first generation of people to live in an environment with so may appliances steadily droning at us. That, of course, is the difference, when compared to the always changing sounds of nature that have surrounded humans for eons.

Having the power go out and encountering the silence of it, is like the feeling of walking out into the warm sun after a week of being in a sick-bed in a dark room: a little uncomfortable at first, but then you remember something you didn't even know you'd forgotten.