The Rare Road

I was driving angry to the library. After the humiliation Chef Nonnier had just put me through, I hardly cared about the tailgating and stop sign rolling. Yeah, my experiment with cayenne pepper, peanut butter and filleted tuna screeched to a scrambled, flavor-smash wreckage. However! In no way did my curiosity deserve Nonnier's repeated spitting, complete with blubber tongue scraping, while he lectured for half an hour. Stick with tried and true basics in Culinary Arts 101.

I was in the middle of picturing every color of vegetable smeared on his face, when about twenty feet from the corner of March and 9th, I pulled over. A thin gravel trail I noticed a month ago lead into a pine forest. The forest was normal for St Holms, NC, but the manicured path disappearing into it was not. I figured finally taking a walk to find out why would be a polite way to settle down.

Not three steps into the pines, I smelled apples. Swollen and warm as if I’d walked past the pie booth at St Holms’s Summer Fair. I traveled deeper in to find where the aroma came from, but the air changed to the strong scent of orange marmalade, sappy and tart, followed in a few more steps by an unmistakable fragrance of banana pudding complete with vanilla wafers. Any minute now the path would open to a meadow filled with a family larger than the county itself having a reunion picnic. Instead, the trail stayed as shaded and confined by branches as ever, and the air shifted to traces of mint freshly boiled into a tea so strong my nose and throat opened with the cool-green crispness. I ran, my sneakers crunching into the gravel. My lungs drew waves of salty blue water, where if I’d closed my eyes I could have sworn I was jogging ocean-side, but I had to keep watching my way through the trees. For just a minute, a velvet lavender soothed the strangeness around me, masking all trace of the other smells, until a few strides brought me to stand on the road again, the engine of my Civic still knocking and ticking as it cooled.

I hyperventilated trying to suck in anything of what I had experienced on the path. I thought of running through again, pausing this time at each smell to analyze the realness of it. But my stupor lead me to open the car door, the ding of the seat-belt light welcoming me. I sat, fell in, rather. I wanted to put up a sign. How could I leave behind nothing but engine fumes?

I shut the door, heard the silence, said, “Forget it!” out loud. That path would stay unmarked for all I cared. Consider it a gift reserved for the curious.

Photo Attribution: Paul Cézanne [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons