That Sweet Smell of Anticipation

Every Thursday night in the summer I turned twenty-four, I would get off work from my newspaper job between ten and eleven, climb into my soft top Jeep CJ-5, and drive east from Northern Virginia, sticky sweltering humidity churning in my wake as I crossed the Potomac River into DC, traversed Maryland, climbed the slope of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, and touched down on the Eastern Shore, salty tidewater behind me and the yellow sand of Delaware’s Rehoboth Beach ahead of me. Urban smells gave way to the night scents of farmland, rich and fecund and muddy, punctuated occasionally by the pungent odor of Perdue chicken farms, owned by Frank Perdue, himself bald and looking strikingly like a plucked hen. (“It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.”)

The roads were rural, two-lane, and empty. I drove in darkness, my window down, the buffeting air in my left ear, the sounds of Baltimore Orioles baseball games on the radio in my right, volume turned up high to be heard over the thwapping of the canvas top and doors. The Orioles were good then, and I was a fan, but the pleasures of a game broadcast on AM radio in the summer night are available to anyone who enjoys a good story and can be two places at once.

Within five or so miles of the coast, passing through a sleeping town like Georgetown or Harbeson, the smell of the ocean wafted through the window and the black shapes of trees and fields flickering in my peripheral vision gave way to the flat horizon and dune grass of a barrier island. One deep inhale took my mind to the edge of the sea and the coming days of body surfing, my attempts at board surfing, walking the boardwalk in search of sweet and salty fried things, and starfishing on the sand. A few minutes later, typically around one in the morning, I would park on the street in front of my friend Sam’s cottage, let myself in, and, if no one was up, crash on the couch. Another summer weekend had begun.

The hormone dopamine is well-known as a pleasure-producing, reward-triggered neurotransmitter, but less well-known is that dopamine is released in anticipation of a reward, not the reward itself. This is one reason online shopping can be such a potently compulsive activity, much more so than retail therapy at the mall—the delay between clicking “buy” and receiving the purchase leaves you awash in feel-good chemicals. Monkeys trained to press a bar and receive food produced twice as much dopamine when they only got food half the time; the uncertainty of the reward triggered more anticipatory pleasure.

Summer is the season of vacations and road trips, of seeing your routes narrow from wide freeways to skinny byways, blue highways, and, maybe, Forest Service dirt. It is the season of travel, long days, and warm weather. And of course, it is the season of open windows.

Modern vehicles are digitally connected entertainment and computing centers, built not just to protect us from the harm of accidents but seemingly from the lusty richness of life, too. Air-conditioned air isn’t just conditioned, it’s filtered and stripped of the terpenes and volatile organic compounds and petrichor that make being outdoors such a vibrant olfactory experience. Today’s cars are so hermetic, they feel more indoors than, well, indoors. But roll the windows down and that all changes.

Smell was the first of our senses to develop, and it needs the least interpretation, compared to sight, sound, and touch. With smell, “the effect is immediate and undiluted by language, thought, or translation,” writes Diane Ackerman in A Natural History of the Senses. Thus, rolling down your windows brings the world to you in a very real and tangible way: Those airborne chemicals, from the sweet tang of sage to the subtle vanilla of ponderosas, enter your nostrils, land on the wet membrane of some five million neurons, and become a part of you. Your trip includes the embodiment of the places through which you move: Small but powerful, you carry the coast, plains, desert, or forest within you.

Travel shouldn’t just be about getting from one place to another, but from one headspace to another. Transitioning from weekday brain to weekend should be less about movement and more about change: from who you are to who you’re about to be. Rolling the windows down is a great way to start. The dopamine will reward you, and the smells are better, too.