Volunteers sniff around Tacoma for a book exploring smellscapes

David Lepore took a big whiff of air in Tacoma’s Lincoln District near Lincoln High School on a cold Wednesday in December. He walked the area with a clipboard, following his curiosity and his nose.

“Before we got to this point it was more like fresh bark, leaves and moss,” Lepore said. “But when we got closer to the school it was more like a clean smell.”

He and other volunteers documented the smells that make up the neighborhood, and there was a lot to take in. Here’s what volunteers Kevin Le, Erin Guinup and Lindsay Wills recorded:

“I smell like a lunchroom smell — someone cooking in there. That’s what I smell,” Le said.

“I’ve smelled spices and fresh greens. Some crab,” Guinup said.

“And syrup from Buddy’s, which smelled delicious,” Wills said, referring to the restaurant Buddy’s Fried Chicken and Waffles.

The group of volunteers were part of what’s called a “smell walk.” That’s when a group of residents walk around their neighborhood and record the smellscape.

And it’s no coincidence this happened in Tacoma, where the rotten egg smell that hung in the air has largely gone away. One of the last manufacturing plants that was partially responsible for the “aroma of Tacoma” closed a little more than a year ago. The group of volunteers helped document what the city smells like after the closure for a book.

Catching, hunting and exploring

The tour guide of the group was Ann Sutphin, who recently retired from urban planning with the City of Seattle. She described herself as a person who is led around by her nose.

“You learn a neighborhood in a way that you don’t know it, even if you know it really well,” she said of smell walks.

Sutphin’s smell walk was broken into three parts: catching, hunting and exploring. Volunteers noted characteristics of each smell, including intensity, duration and whether they liked it. They were also asked to name each odor.

Sutphin gave an example of a nearby tree.

“You can say a Doug fir smell or you can say — it can be a poetic name, it reminds me of the tree behind my mom’s house,” she said.

Sutphin led a number of these free walks in different parts of Tacoma, including in Point Defiance Park and the Foss Waterway area, where industrial smells that garnered the city’s nickname originated. She pitched her exploration as “Tacoma Aroma: From Stigma to Discovery.”

“So I wanted to investigate Tacoma aroma — get under the hood of a big, heavy title or label, and investigate a city, which is obviously really so much more than that and really fascinating,” Sutphin said.

The everyday nose

The data Sutphin and volunteers collected will be used to map visual representations of the smells in a book titled The Atlas of Scents, Smells and Stinks, coming out later this year. New York and Newport, Rhode Island, will also be included.

Kate McLean-MacKenzie, a UK-based artist and professor at the University of Kent, is writing and designing the book. She said the removal of those industrial smells in Tacoma and the stigma associated with them is what piqued her interest in this part of the world.

“But I’m always interested in things like that, because those industrial smells, they have been a part of people’s lives for a long time, so they become sort of like a smell of home to them,” McLean-MacKenzie said. “And then when you remove those, what do those people think about the Tacoma aroma? Has it changed?”

McLean-MacKenzie runs her own smell walks, manages a website dedicated to smell walks and has been quoted in news articles and scientific papers.

She’s well known in the world of smell walks, which is how Sutphin found her. Sutphin contacted McLean-MacKenzie to learn more about the process. McLean-MacKenzie agreed to help Sutphin, and then use the information she collected about Tacoma for her book.

McLean-MacKenzie said it’s important for the data to be collected by people who live in and know the area they are documenting.

“It’s about taking the everyday through the everyday nose, so it’s very much a community project,” she said.

Human difference

McLean-MacKenzie said smell walks are about exploring and being aware of a person’s neighborhood through a different sense. But, she said, something magical happens at the end when volunteers share their experience out loud.

“And with that, you get this incredible understanding about human difference and how we can all be sharing the same experience but actually noticing it in different ways,” she said. “And that, to me, is one of the sort of more poignant and really good outcomes from a smell walk — is learning to accept and acknowledge difference in something that we have limited preconceived knowledge about.”

And this played out at the end of Sutphin’s December smell walk. The volunteers talked about an Asian market encountered on the walk, when volunteer Erin Guinup said she came away from the experience reflecting on her habits.

“Those smells are so strong, but they’re unfamiliar to me,” she told the group of volunteers. ”And so, it’s making me question why I’m not doing more of my shopping there.”

Guinup said it made her realize she needs to push herself out of her comfort zone and have new experiences.

Sutphin agreed. She said her exploration has taken her inside a tattoo shop, a Chinese herb shop and to a cannabis farm to smell new things.

“We tend to like things that are familiar to us. And we tend to dislike — a generalization — things that are not familiar or foreign to us,” Sutphin said. “I’m really passionate about that – I think smelling can help sort of break those barriers down.”

This month, Sutphin will travel across the world to Italy to document the smells of a small village, as part of a fellowship. She said she hopes to continue the smell walks in the Pacific Northwest when she gets back.

Freddy Monares is a reporter with KNKX Public Radio newsroom. This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.

It is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit our journalism partnerships page.