Coming To Our Senses In The Stinkin' Hot Borderlands

Like most creatures, we can sense what’s in the world not just by sight and sound but by fragrance and taste as well. Fortunately, the desert borderlands are as good a place as any to exercise our underused faculties for perception.

We live amidst some of the most aromatic floras in the world, for arid-adapted plants layer onto their leaves and stems volatile oils that protect them from damaging radiation (sunburn!), heat, and dessication, as well as overly obnoxious browsers. But we are the indirect beneficiaries of how plants and their microbes use scent to either repel and kill, or lure and seduce other species with which they interact. These same plant chemicals can calm us, literally reducing our cortisol stress chemicals, or excite and arouse us…which I will leave to your imagination.

What most desert dwellers don’t realize is that many global manufacturers of perfumes and colognes gain their most potent ingredients at our doorsteps: sweet acacias, cactus blossoms, bushmints, creosote chaparral bush, blue sage, and desert lavender. We have understory herbs in our mesquite grasslands that I can smell from literally thirty feet away, which is nothing compared to the sniffing prowess of our Aussie shepherd.

Some of the two dozen aromatic herbs and shrubs in the Mountain Empire of Southeast Arizona have curative, culinary, and perfume properties of global interest. For those of us who walk daily in their invisible clouds of aromas- their osmosis - we may benefit from lowered stress (cortisol) levels, greater alertness, better immune responses, and reduced sensitivity to allergens. In other words, we feel better because of their presence in our lives.

Yet smell is often tied to deep memories, some of which evoke images and feelings from the past that we hardly have words for. Try this little exercise for size right where you live, and allow it to shift your attentiveness to the hidden treasures on your home ground, opening up fresh ways to appreciate what is out your front door:

Snuffling Your Way Back Home

Try blindfolding yourself

And have a friend or neighbor

Drop you off somewhere

With nothing

But your walking stick and nose

“Oh the land is angling down …

The winding trail is descending…

Wait …Is that the hint of elderflowers

Guiding me down the dry watercourse?

And are those caper-like beeweeds

Stinking up a patch of sand excavated

By a front-end loader two years ago?

I must be getting close to where the road

Crosses the arroyo and comes out at the field

Where the baby-puke stench of buffalo gourd vines

Are holding ground until the soil is tilled.”

“If I walk down that dirt road under the shade

Or pecans, I must turn Ieft where the nutty scent

Of the pecans turn, and follow them

Until the first hit of desert lavenders

Reach into my nostrils.

But what is with them?

Is that the delicate bouquet of the redbud

That our former neighbor Boyce planted

Before he hightailed it to Florida? It must be time

To climb uphill to find our driveway curving up the ridge.”

“Oh, I now have that feeling of coming home, for I hear

The bees swarming on the purple sage, its herbaceous force

Hitting me from a dozen feet away, and then our orchard trees--

Cherry, mulberry, apples, quince, pomegranate and apricot--

Joining in the chorus. I must have arrived at our front yard

For the dreaminess of jasmine and lavender are calling me in.”

‘’Something is cooking on the kitchen stove! Pasta with pesto,

Reeking with garlic, sweet onions, pinyons, basil and olive oil,

Cannelloni beans with oregano and thyme, which must mean,

 I smell home, I am home!”

Gary Nabhan