My green hoodie I wear like every day still kinda smells like this guy, Greg, from Black Canyon City, Arizona, a little town just north of Phoenix on the Agua Fria River.
It was supposta smell like a Philadelphia Vireo, a very rare species for the area, which had been spotted there several times over the previous month.
In January tho there are still leaves on the trees there – Cottonwoods, Sycamores, Willows, Mesquite – enough to obstruct small creatures and brush against you thoroughly as you bushwhack down to the creek.
And the wash had some water trickling thru, and it interacted with the soil to form mud, and without the right kind of slicky-boots it got all over your feet and sometimes made you slip. But you hadta slog up and down a certain stretch of it to give yourself the best chance at the bird.
I really just wanted the Vireo – little, fidgety, yellow, distinct-eye-stripe, supposta-be-in-Central-America-right-now bird – to fly right into my hoodie’s hood and smush its scent around in there for awhile before posing for a photo on a point-blank branch in front of me. The photo would be proof to the world that I saw it too, and the smell would lodge itself inside my memory forever like all the good smells do.
But I didn’t see it. Even going for it 3 times and dedicating several hours. Too hard. Too unlucky. Too smell-of-defeat.
As I headed back to the car there was Greg. Big white-bearded local with a bit of the kook-eye and a certain strong but indescribable odor of his own.
By way of some mutual contacts, I had permission to shortcut thru his property. I was grateful it saved me some time, but I didn’t want to talk to some stranger guy and his vague but intense musk, especially after coming away empty-handed like I had.
“Didn’t get it,” I grumbled.
“Oh,” he said, “well, have a seat here.”
I didn’t wanna have a seat, but he’d done me a favor so I felt obligated at least for a moment.
His place was humble, but he did have a nice backyard, which he’d clearly spent alot of time working on. In between a variety of spiky-cacti there were hand-placed rock pathways and hanging twinkle lights and lots of feeders up. He explained it all as I sat down on a nearby patio couch.
The smell was not like body odor. It was not like something anyone had eaten or drank or smoked either.
“Here,” he handed me a large photo album, “look at this.”
It was full of bird shots he’d taken in his backyard. I figured maybe I could quickly thumb thru a few pages and then get outta there.
The smell was not chemical, not industrial, not man-made.
“So I hear you’re some kind of Professor,” he said.
“Yeah, English.”
“Don’t they already know English?”
“Um, yes.”
The photos were actually pretty good. A lot of interesting species came thru the habitat. There was a nice close shot of a Costa’s hummingbird, a male with a shiny ridiculously big purple gorget.
The smell was not like flowers, fruit, perfume, or cologne.
“I grew the beard out during the pandemic,” he said. “I didn’t get the jab and never will.”
There was a good one of a Cactus Wren alighting on a full yellow bloomed Saguaro Cactus.
The smell was getting stronger, it wasn’t a burning smell, it wasn’t a wet smell.
“Yeah, those Phoenix people are gonna keep sprawling up toward these parts” he said. “It’s always been dirt cheap here til now but just wait.”
He’d gotten photos of alot of bright red birds at his feeders. Northern Cardinals, Summer Tanagers, and Vermillion Flycatchers.
It didn’t smell like anything unpleasant exactly, it was just like some kind of alien puzzle. Now I kinda wanted to stay for a bit just to try and pinpoint what it was.
“Alot of people don’t know this, but you pronounce it A-hwa– Fria River not Ogggwa Fria,” he said.
The next photo was a beautiful bright yellow-orange Hooded Oriole with a bug in its bill.
No, maybe the smell wasn’t actually that weird. It was like a sort of familiar smell from my past, but I couldn’t tell from where or what age.
“I won an award for that one,” he pointed to the Oriole. “Back when I used to get out.”
Another was a particularly shiny teal-green Broad-billed Hummingbird with its long tongue sticking out of its long watermelon-licorice-colored bill.
I was starting to get hooked on that smell whatever it was.
“I heard you were the first one to see Broad-billeds in the county a few years back,” I told him.
“Yep, they were regulars at my feeder, and birders from all over Yavapai used to come here to see them.”
“Used to?”
“I guess you can find them along the river now too… No visitors at all for a long time.”
Could the smell have been something abstract? Was it fear or loneliness? The suffering of humankind? The inevitability of death?
The last photo – a great wingspanned Turkey Vulture with it’s melted-skin looking freak face.
The smell of… the right word was close, it was coming to me, it was right on the tongue tip, it was going to explode out and then I don’t know what…
“Well, Professor, I’ve kept you long enough, I s’pose.”
I felt obligated to get up even tho I hadn’t been able to to solve the smell mystery and articulate it out loud. We got up and he led me to my car in his driveway.
“Well,” I tried to start an awkward goodbye.
“You want to identify what the smell is before you leave, don’t you?” he said.
“Uh yes, yes I do!”
“I don’t know exactly what it is or what to call it,” he gestured to the air. “The smell was here before me, and it’s the reason why I bought this land. It’s so pure and clean. The smell is just itself and does not try to be anything else. It’s like something bigger than us. I think breathing in the smell here is making me live longer. Maybe the smell is like some kind of Salvation. I don’t know, maybe an English Professor can describe it better than I can. I just want other people to know the smell exists! Maybe it will give them hope.”
“Well, I’ve smelled it too now,” I said and suddenly knew just what to call it. “I will call the smell, ‘Greg,’ and share its existence with the World.”
“Thank you, Professor.”
“Thank you, Greg.”
Then we nodded and shook hands, and I drove back home. And I liked liked liked liked that my green hoodie that I wear pretty much everyday kinda still smelled like Greg well after I’d left his place.
Jonathan Bluebird Montgomery 