The SMELL OF GEOSCIENCE
This text is was originally written for an audio story that can be found here.
Can science have a smell? And if it can, what would it be? For me, geoscience smells of rockrose and codfish fritters.
It would all start on a Sunday evening, sometimes on a Monday. My mother would lay out the holy trilogy: flour, eggs, and cod, and then mix it in a batter seasoned with onion, garlic, and coriander. The very fritters my grandfather used to eat with his mates at day’s end in his grocer’s-turned-tavern, two hundred kilometres away (but that’s another story).
The smell of frying would spread through the bright tiled kitchen, seep into the house, and probably drift out into the neighbourhood too…. and you know fried food never fails, does it? Like my good italian friend Francesco put it years later at a reception at Imperial College: ‘It’s fried, man… of course it’s good!’”
As the fritters crackled on one side — that comforting sound of hot oil — on the opposite side of that 80s dark-cupboard kitchen, my father would be slicing bread, chorizo, cheese and wrapping it all up in tin foil and little Tupperware boxes. For years, I thought he was preparing a picnic. A picnic! And I loved picnics. So why… why wasn’t I invited?
On that night, just before dawn, probably around 4 or 5, half-asleep, I’d hear his boots softly throughout the house. Careful steps, one after the other, until the door clicked shut — softly, almost without a sound. And then he’d be gone three, sometimes four days at a time. Then, on a Thursday or Friday evening, the bell would ring: Dad’s home! He always rang, even though he had a key. And in he came: worn - dusty - jeans, buttoned up shirt underneath a thick khaki green wool jumper. In his hand, a faded green canvas bag — tough as anything, as if it had seen a war or two.
And that smell…. Rockrose.
You know, that bag’s still around at my parents basement, and it still carries the same scent. For me, that’s my father’s perfume. And if a science can have a smell, then geology has his.
But I just realised that I didn’t really tell you what geology has to do with my father…Well, that’s what he did: He spent his whole life as a geology technician at the Geological Survey of Portugal. Started young, eighteen or nineteen, out in the field with a Geiger counter, prospecting for uranium. Later, with sharper eyes and a steady hand that could trace the finest of lines on a map, he devoted decades to geological mapping. And alongside the smell of rockrose — and those cod fritters — our house began to fill. All the things he brought back from the field… At first they were just stones. Then they became rocks. And then — when I began to see how fascinating they were, how many stories they held — they turned into specimens.
On school holidays, I’d sometimes go with him to a place that felt almost like a refuge: the Geological Museum of Lisbon. A proper time capsule. Not only of the nineteenth century, when it was founded, but of geological time itself. For me — a child barely tall enough to peer into the heavy wooden and glass cases — the endless halls, lined with portraits of stern-looking men with bushy moustaches and ribbon ties, became a playground. A place where my imagination — perhaps fuelled by VHS’s of Indiana Jones and Back to the Future — took me into the most extraordinary adventures.
Finally, when my legs were strong enough to keep up with a man used to long, strenuous hikes, I got to follow him out to the field…. and that’s when my whole world changed… I must have been about ten. After a bumpy ride on an old Land Cruiser, we stopped on a hillside, deep in the Portuguese interior — I now know it was Ordovician. I stepped out of the car and there, right at my feet — as if it had been waiting patiently for millions of years for a child’s hand — was a small trilobite. To this day, I still don’t know if it was beginner’s luck, or the quiet foresight of a father keen to spark curiosity. On those days, I couldn’t keep up with hours of walking. So the ritual was always the same: I would tire, and he would hand me an Estwing hammer with which I spent hours hammering Ordovician shales hoping for trilobites. I found a few… but I broke far more stone than fossils. It didn’t matter. At last, I was part of my dad’s picnics.
Well, maybe, surrounded by all those ‘geo-things’ — my mum was a geography teacher, after all — I was bound to turn into a ‘geo-person’. But life’s never that straightforward. At seventeen, when it came time to choose a degree, people around me were saying biology had more of a future than geology…. and we all know how a late teen is easily influenced, right? So, reluctantly, I chose biology instead of geology. But life, of course, is anything but a straight line. And maybe because I lacked the passion, my marks weren’t high enough for Biology. Never before or since has rejection made me so happy.
I got into Geology at the University of Lisbon and twenty years on I still love cod fritters and rosebuck scent. Oh, and of course, I’m still as fascinated by this science as I was on that remote hillside, when I found my very first trilobite.
Sérgio Esperancinha
