Scents take you places — for better or for worse

The hot blast of wind carrying the cocktail of jet exhaust and yellow plumeria is gone, but you can still smell it.

When you get off a Hawaiian Airlines flight from the West Coast and start the long trek to baggage claim, you can now enjoy a pleasant, air-conditioned stroll through a renovated terminal. The first impression of Honolulu for neophyte tourists had long been brutalist concrete walkways, the deafening scream of airplane engines, abrupt gusts of uncomfortably warm and dense wind and a smell so cloying and industrial it seemed like the exact opposite of every island-­themed scented candle.

But if that was your welcome home after a long trip or a hard semester or a lonely time away, you’d come to love that smell like mama’s biscuits.

Smell is funny in the way it evokes memory. It comes back as a whole, not just a little fragment or a corner. A song might bring you back to an event, but then you have to spend some time unpacking the details. A smell is like teleportation — you are there, you see it all, you feel the exact calibration of emotions.

If you’ve spent enough time in Hawaii, you know a place by its smell. One whiff and you can access your entire history with a place, the small details of architecture or foliage, the people who were with you and how it all made you feel.

Waikiki Beach smells like sunscreen and salt water that isn’t quite salty enough and hot shiny plastic that has been all day in the hot sun.

Kaneohe smells like rich mud and stink vines and the liquorlike sweetness of java plum.

Waimanalo beaches smell like barbecue meat and strawberry soda, and the sand smells heady, like creosote after a lightning storm.

In Nuuanu, even in the cramped neighborhood streets, the winds carry the smell of the upland forest down toward the city, and that scent is different from any other upland area in Hawaii — cool without being cold, sharp without being piney, verdant without being mud-soaked or decayed.

Wahiawa smells like rain even when it isn’t raining, and rain-soaked ferns and chicken feathers and somebody’s mother making dinner.

The North Shore smells like salt and sun, like the nutmeat scent of damp koa haole and the perfume of ripe, rosy mangoes and long-ago dust from the sugar mill that still leaves a haunting sweetness in the air.

And other things, too. Of course, other things. Maybe things nobody notices but you.

If you’ve been here awhile and were plopped down blindfolded into any spot on the island, you could probably pinpoint your location in one deep breath.

There’s another smell that is becoming familiar. It is the smell of sewage spills and leaking outflow pipes and people using the bathroom where there is no bathroom. Honolulu smells like this. Parts of the island smell like this. This is becoming a scent of home.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.