The Road has a smell.
By “The Road,” I don’t mean a specific road. I mean all roads. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that there is only one great Road, and that all the world’s streets, highways, sidewalks and trails feed into it, the way a stream feeds into a river, and a river, the ocean.
Since I first read that, I’ve spent as much of my life on the road as off of it. Speaking only for the lower 48 states of the U.S., I’ve found Tolkien’s view poetic, comforting and perfectly accurate. This country’s roads connect its people intimately, more than its language, its money, its music or the internet. Every interstate, state highway, city street and county road shares characteristics with all the others. The people you meet on Route 66 are much the same as the people on the Capital Beltway. The food I eat in Washington, DC is the same food I eat in Washington state. As years pass, dialect is becoming less and less indicative of where you are. And, as I said: there’s the smell.
By now I should know what it is, but I don’t. If you’ve smelled it before, you’ll know immediately what I mean. When you first notice it, you’ll wonder how you haven’t noticed it before. One day you’ll get on a Greyhound bus that hasn’t been cleaned in a while, you’ll put your cheek against that headrest and there it will be: the Road. I imagine it’s made up of dozens of different scents: truck exhaust, asphalt particles, tire particles, brake particles, skin particles, sweat, 2nd-day socks, truck stop floors. That weird Subway bread smell. The creepy Pepto-Bismol liquid soap that rest stops use.
In tropical climates, they say that when the rainy season lasts long enough, nothing stays dry. When you’re on the Road long enough, its smell permeates everything. Showers help, sure, and laundry, when you can get it, but in the end you’re sitting right back in the same bus seat, grabbing the same greasy suitcase handle, tying down the same instrument cases with the same grungy straps, handling the same shoes.
It soaks deepest into soft things: car upholstery, carpet, sweaters, wooly hats. But it clings to your hair, too, and your hands, and your face. If you’ve never smelled it, there are some things you can smell that will give you an idea.
Dust from your car’s floor mats.
A steering wheel you’ve been using, gently squeezing, for twelve hours a day for the last three days.
Greasy money that’s been handled too many times, that feels more like cloth than paper. Usually only $1’s and $5’s will get to this stage.
An article of clothing that isn’t dirty enough to justify washing, but that you’ve worn for many days in a row: an outerwear fleece pullover, maybe, or a pair of socks you wore over a second pair while on a long, cold-weather camping trip.
None of these things quite captures the smell of the Road, but all of them are contained in that smell. While it sounds unpleasant, if you’re around it long enough it becomes so familiar as to be almost comforting. I-35E, which runs North/South through Dallas, Texas, is the same Iowa county road I grew up on, and the same Maryland street I live on now. Even if home isn’t a perfect place, it’s home, and it’s what I know.