Editor's Letter

“What does the color green smell like?” That’s what the girl with the freckles asked me.

I was talking to a roomful of second-graders about wildlife in Arizona when she hit me with the question. I glanced over at the teacher, with a look of desperation: I thought they’d ask me about coatimundis and ringtails. She just smiled and shrugged her shoulders.

Like a walk-on freshman looking into the pool from a 10-meter platform, I stood there for a few seconds, afraid to move. “Ummm … that’s a very good question,” I finally said to the young Barbara Walters. “I think the color green smells like … I think it smells like fresh-mown grass.”

There was no response from Ms. Walters, but one of her classmates raised his hand and started talking about his dad’s John Deere lawn mower. He was proud, as if his father were the head groundskeeper at Augusta. Maybe that’s something he’ll remember when he’s older. I can still remember my grandfather’s riding mower. Not the brand, but I remember that it was yellow, and I remember the smell of cigar smoke mixed with fresh-mown grass. Especially the grass.

For me, that’s the smell of green. It’s also the smell of summer. Along with campfire smoke and chlorine and Coppertone and petunias and burnt marshmallows and alfalfa and black dirt in a vegetable garden. Those smells bring back memories.

As a boy, I lived for summer. It’s in my DNA — my mother’s French surname means “of the summer.” And summer is when I learned how to water-ski and pop wheelies and flirt on the beach.

Even better, summer is when my family would hit the road to go camping. Like Hannibal’s army crossing the Alps, we moved a lot of gear from one Northwoods lake to another. We didn’t take the kitchen sink, but we did take the cast iron frying pans. That’s another smell of summer: my father making bacon and eggs in the old Griswold frying pans.

“Summertime is always the best of what might be,” our friend Chuck Bowden said.

And summertime is the time to hit the road. It’s been that way in Arizona for a least a hundred years. In our second issue, we published our first editorial. It was focused on the swarm of locals who were fleeing to California for the summer.

“One of the most worthy movements launched by the civic and commercial organizations of Arizona is that of ‘See Arizona First,’ ” the editorial from May 1925 begins. “Each year citizens of Arizona, whose scenery and climate is far superior to that of the Pacific coast, journey to California to spend the summer months and untold sums of money.”

The untold sum was estimated to be $2 million. And we were intent on getting some of it back.

“ ‘See Arizona First’ and travel over Arizona’s highways,” the piece suggests. “The White Mountains are now open and accessible to the public. The Rice-Springerville highway is now in such condition that a trip by automobile through the heart of the mountains may be made without the least difficulty. All who visit this section this summer will be delighted with the beauties of the mountains, the magnificent forests, the enticing trout streams and the invigorating air. Why not spend your summer vacation in Arizona? With all that Arizona has to offer, why should her sons and daughters strew $2,000,000 along the beaches of our Sister State?”

The point is well taken, but even the most dogged aficionados have to admit the beaches next door are pretty spectacular. Limantour in Point Reyes, Pfeiffer in Big Sur ... we don’t have beaches like that. We do, however, have an incredibly diverse landscape that ranges from arid deserts and canyonlands to forested mountains and glaciated peaks. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, there are 52 Level III ecoregions in Arizona, including subalpine forests. That’s where you’ll want to be this summer. With an elevation of about 8,500 feet, the daytime highs in those forests are usually in the upper 70s. It’s even cooler when the afternoon rain comes down.

People ask me about my favorite place in Arizona. I have a few, depending on the season. In the summer, there are two in particular, and I’ll be at both of them this month.

Up first is the North Rim, where the subalpine forest is thick with Engelmann spruce, corkbark firs, blue spruce, white firs and aspens. A few weeks later, I’ll be in the White Mountains, camping with my family in another subalpine forest. Our camping gear is more sophisticated than it was in the 1960s, and the load is lighter, but the memories my daughters are making are similar to mine. And someday, maybe, they’ll be triggered by the smell of something from this trip.

Although our sense of smell isn’t utilized as much as hearing, touch, taste or sight, it’s the sense most closely associated with memory. That’s because our brain processes smell differently than the other four senses, and the brain’s “smell center,” known as the olfactory bulb, is directly connected to the hippocampus, which holds our memory. Literally, those two parts are tied together, and that connection can transform the smell of Old Spice into memories of a grandfather’s medicine cabinet.

For my family, there won’t be any campfire smoke this month. Not with the inevitable fire restrictions. But there will be the resinous scent of Engelmann spruce. And petrichor, that earthy fragrance that comes when rain falls on dry soil. I’ll have my old Griswold, too, in case I’m allowed to use my camp stove. I hope so, because breakfast in the backcountry is one of the best smells of summer. It makes me think of my dad.