A Love Letter to Woodsmoke

You can be fifty years old, in a city you've never lived in, and smell woodsmoke from a restaurant's chimney, and be back at your grandfather's cabin in 1982 for just a second before the world reassembles itself.

There's a reason for this. The brain is full of them.

The olfactory bulb — the part of your brain that processes smell — is one of the oldest pieces of neural hardware a vertebrate has. In human brains, it sits just above the nasal cavity and sends direct signals to two other ancient structures: the amygdala, which handles emotion, and the hippocampus, which handles memory formation.

This direct wiring is unusual. Sight, sound, and touch all route through the thalamus — a kind of switchboard — before they reach the memory and emotion centers. Smell skips the switchboard. It goes directly into the oldest, most primitive parts of your brain, the parts that were handling danger and food and mating hundreds of millions of years before a primate ever looked up and wondered about a star.

This is why smells evoke memory more powerfully than any other sense. You don't remember a smell the way you remember a face or a song. You become the person you were when you last smelled it. For a second, the years between don't exist.

Why woodsmoke especially

Of all the smells a human can encounter, woodsmoke has one of the deepest evolutionary hooks. For something like a million years — the entire run of our species plus some earlier branches of our genus — the smell of woodsmoke has meant safety. It has meant warmth. It has meant food. It has meant other people.

A human in a cave, a million years ago, smelling woodsmoke on the wind, knew two things at once: the people were nearby, and the night would be survivable. That response is still in us. It is not cultural. It is not learned. It is older than language. Babies who have never seen a fire will relax at the smell of woodsmoke. Dogs do it too. Almost every mammal does it to some degree. There is something reassuring about the smell at a level that predates reasoning.

When you sit around a campfire, in other words, you are tapping into a response that is hundreds of thousands of years old. Your shoulders drop. Your heart rate slows. You become more sociable, more talkative, more honest. These are not vibes. They are measurable physiological effects. There have been real studies on this. People who sit around a wood fire for an hour show lower blood pressure and report feeling more connected to others than people in a control group who sit around a space heater. The fire is doing something to you that a gas burner cannot.

The specific memories it makes

Here's what I mean. Take a moment. Think about fires you've sat around. Any of them. Don't try to remember — just notice what comes up.

The beach bonfire with three friends from college, the night before one of them moved to Seattle for the job that would change his life. The backyard fire after your wedding, when your brother finally told you what he'd been going through that year. Your father's hands, smelling like oak for days after a long fall weekend splitting wood. The first time you slept in a cabin with somebody you were in love with, and the fire was almost out, and neither of you wanted to get up to add a log.

These are not the memories you think you'd have. You'd think you'd remember the big moments — the weddings, the graduations, the funerals. You do, of course. But the fires surface differently. They come up as texture. As the color of a particular afternoon. As what the air smelled like. They come up whole.

This is because the brain stores memory in multiple formats. The big events get stored with dates and names and facts. The fire memories get stored in the olfactory system, which means they come back as sensation — light and heat and smell — rather than as narrative. They are the memories that are least like watching a movie of your life and most like being there again.

What this means for the fires you're sitting around now

The people around your fire this year — your kids, your friends, the college roommate you haven't seen in a decade — are being imprinted with the smell of that specific fire, in that specific cabin, on that specific weekend. They will carry it for the rest of their lives. Decades from now, when your kids are adults, they will smell woodsmoke on a city street and think of you for a second without quite knowing why.

This is not sentimental. It is neurologically accurate. You are making memories that will outlast almost everything else about this trip. The photos will fade. The names of the cabins will blur. The particular argument you had on Saturday morning will seem small in ten years. But the smell will stay.

A fire is the one form of memory a person doesn't have to work to keep. It keeps itself.

What the fire asks in return is not much. It wants the right fuel. It wants a little tending. It wants you to sit around it long enough that it can do its work. It wants you to not be on your phone.

The specific smell of hardwood

Softwoods — pine, cedar, spruce — smell like softwoods. Resinous, sharp, a little like turpentine when burned poorly. This is not the memory smell. This is the Christmas tree smell.

The smell that lives in your deep memory is the smell of hardwood. Oak and hickory and maple and cherry. This is the smell our species evolved around. Our ancestors in the Ohio River valley, the Shawnee who lived in these hills for centuries before the European settlers came — they all burned hardwood, because hardwood is what grows here. The deep memory smell is specifically this smell, because this is the smell our ancestors actually encountered.

When you smell a properly-burning hardwood fire in the Hocking Hills, you are smelling something very close to what your great-great-great-great-grandfather's grandfather smelled. The response in your brain is the same response. The warmth in your chest is the same warmth. It is an almost unreasonably direct line to a feeling that does not exist anywhere else in modern life.

A last thing

It's common to say that modern life is too fast, too distracted, too online. This is true. It's less common to say that the specific thing modern life is missing is slow shared time around heat. This is exactly what a fire is. An hour, or three, or five, where nothing is happening except warmth and the people near it. A medium of communication our species has been using for longer than we have been our species.

The cabins in the Hocking Hills are full of fire rings, and most of the weekends they're not being used. Use yours. Order the kind of wood that burns clean and steady. Sit until the fire goes down to coals. Don't talk if you don't want to. The smell will be in you by morning and will stay for the rest of your life.