Red Pine, Blue Sky
By Phil Britton
Growing up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, along the sandy coastline of Whitefish Point, the endless, freewheeling summer days of adolescence had a near ubiquitous piney backdrop. We didn’t have a “yard,” per se; we lived near a swampy stream in the woods surrounded by a mix of red, white, and jack pines. Every step outside from spring to fall was accompanied by the smell of decaying pine needles, laying in thick mats over the sandy soil.
Untold eons of evolutionary development have structured our brains in such a way that the sense most closely related to memory is smell. Likely due to its direct connection to our limbic system, bypassing all the “thinking” gray matter that we boast as humans, it also seems to be the sense that most surprises us, catches us off guard, often resurfacing an old memory we had long filed away in the folds. Sometimes it whispers of a memory truly gone, but an empty shape of which still remains.
Ghosts are smelled, not seen.
These triggers tend to be oddly specific, too, and the memories take on an aliveness that looking at a picture or hearing a song can't replicate. We catch a whiff of a favorite (or not-so-favorite) dish, a perfume, a flower, and we're instantly, sometimes viscerally, transported. Before we know it our palms are sweating, our stomach is clenched, we’re feeling anxious or excited or hungry or comforted – all before our prefrontal cortex has time to figure out what’s going on.
It’s not so much about smell or memory as how we mark significant moments or periods of our lives. Or rather how they become marked for us, through no choice of our own, our nose impassively recording these events in the deepest, most primitive part of our brains. It’s just a way to wrap language around how everyone is on their own journey, and at the end of the day we're all just trying to find our way. “Ways” are truly only ever found in retrospect; all we can do in the present is keep going along the path that's under our feet, but we do have waypoints, moments on our journeys that can guide us, act as a compass.
For me that’s the pungent aroma of pine, which was also present in the places synonymous with exploration and adventure. It represents transition. It represents new beginnings, growth, the liminal space between where you were and where you're going. That pivotal, turbulent time of being thrust into adulthood, of discovering yourself and the world around you, of learning how to live with and exercise new measures of freedom, where the phrase "be yourself" takes on new meaning – all of this was woven through with the earthy smell of warm pine.
Wandering the banks of the Two Hearted, walking through the pine groves that border endless miles of beach on Lake Superior’s southern shore, the camp at Piatt Lake where friends and strangers and I would play basketball for hours and hours, walking along snowmobile trails looking for something to do while bored out of our minds, and countless other fond memories of good times. It was the smell that greeted me when we visited Paradise, Michigan for the first time as tourists-no-longer, but as residents, and it accompanied me as I put down roots in my new home of Marquette.
Even now, decades later, while walking at Blueberry Ridge or through the red pine grove at Picnic Rocks or along the North Trails or a million other settings – a deep breath through the nose will cause my heart to beat a little faster. A Pavlovian response, unconsciously eager with anticipation about what new adventure or discovery might lie just ahead.
Phil Britton is an amateur artist, budding printmaker, freelance consultant, and full-throated Yooper who enjoys exploring off-the-beaten-path places and ideas. His most recent projects include reinterpreting the tools of Quality Management Systems for small businesses and reviving a hundred year-old letterpress. He lives with his family in Marquette, MI.