The hour after rain in the Hřensko Valley is the most generous hour of the year. The wood gives up a number of smells in that hour that it does not produce at any other time, and you can collect them — quickly, before the wind comes back — by walking very slowly through the bottom of the valley with your mouth slightly open and your hands brushed gently against everything you can reach.
This is what I wrote down on the morning of the 28th, in graphite, in the smallest of my notebooks, with a wet thumb. I am copying it out now without much editing because the list is more honest in its first form.
List of smells, 09:00 to 10:00The first and largest smell is the obvious one — petrichor. The word is Greek and means, roughly, the blood of stone. It is what comes off the wet rock and the wet soil in the first ten minutes, and it is heavier than the others. It sits in the bottom of the valley like a low fog of smell. You can almost see it. You walk into a place where it is denser, and then a place where it is thinner, the way you walk through patches of cold air.
The second smell is the underside of leaves. This is hard to describe because we are not given a word for it, but if you press a wet hand against the underside of an alder leaf and bring the hand to your face, you will get it. It is greener than the top of the leaf. It is slightly bitter. It has the same quality of being slightly more honest, as if the leaf is showing you something it normally keeps to itself.
A wood after rain produces about fourteen distinct smells in its first hour, almost all of them invisible. The wind is, in this sense, very rude — it removes them within minutes of beginning to blow.
The smaller, more difficult smells.
Third is the smell of wet pine bark, which is sharper than the smell of wet bark in general, and slightly resinous, almost like the inside of a new violin case. Fourth is the smell of wet birch bark, which is sweeter and rounder and a little like vanilla. These two smells are completely different and were a surprise to me until I knew to look for them.
Fifth is mushroom — not a particular mushroom but the general smell of a forest floor that has just remembered that it is, in fact, mostly mushroom. There is more fungus by mass in a square metre of woodland soil than you will ever see, and the rain wakes most of it up at once. The smell is brown, if a smell can be a colour.
Sixth is what I would call wet stone, distinct from petrichor. Petrichor is the smell of the soil reacting with the water. Wet stone is just the stone, smelling of itself, which it apparently does, and which we apparently can only notice when it has been recently rained on. It is faintly mineral, almost the smell of a freshly opened glass bottle.
Seventh, eighth, and ninth are all variants of moss. There is the smell of moss on rock, which is the cleanest. There is the smell of moss on a fallen log, which is sweeter and slightly fermented. And there is the smell of moss on living tree, which is more bitter and has an edge of something else — bark, sap, the tree's own quiet defending of itself.
The last five, quickly, before the wind.
Tenth: the smell of a particular kind of fern — bracken — when it is wet, which is grassy and faintly almond. Eleventh: the smell of decomposing leaves from last autumn, which is brown again but a different brown, more like an old book. Twelfth: the smell of new growth from underneath those leaves, which is the smell of a thing being born, faintly milky. Thirteenth: the smell of a single hawthorn that was in flower, which I will not try to describe because I do not have the words. And fourteenth: the smell of the wet path itself, which is the smell of compressed earth and pine and the boots of everyone who walked here in the last week, all combined.
The wind came up around ten-fifteen. Most of these were gone within ten minutes of the first proper gust. The valley smelled, after that, of a normal valley.
I had got most of them down. I think — though I cannot be sure — there is also a fifteenth smell, which I almost caught, which has something to do with the way the inside of an old tree breathes out after rain. I will keep looking for it.