Sense of scents

My 12-step meeting is in a 1970s office park in Austin’s Westlake neighborhood, among a smattering of two- and three-story tan brick buildings. The structures would be unremarkable except that they’ve been dropped into an acre or two of Hill Country vegetation: prickly pear, agave, mountain laurel, live oak, and cedar copses. There’s no landscaping, just clearings. It’s early December and cedar pollen dusts the cars in the parking lot. I’ve been looking forward to this.

The Spyglass Trailhead at the Barton Creek Greenbelt is just a half mile or so down the road from the meeting. My friend J., who is from California, and I are rambling down it on foot one morning when I tell her to be on the lookout for cedar trees. They’re a living link to my childhood, I say, and I’m in the mood for the scent, even if they’re basically poisonous. “You’re going to stick your face in one?” she asks.

“Oh, you don’t have to be close to a cedar to suffer once it starts,” I tell her. The pollen slips into everything and travels a lot farther than the aroma. I want to test myself early: Allergy season officially starts in a few weeks. She stands next to the trail and says she doesn’t smell anything, so I take needles between my palms and roll them. They leave an oily green tinge on my hands and release a spicy, thick scent. My nose was already running. Why not lean in?

Some people measure home by a skyline or sound; I measure it by what gets into my sinuses. I was 10 the first time I heard the term “cedar fever.”

Cedars were familiar. I went to nearby Cedar Creek Elementary School. The empty lot next door to our house was crowded with cedar trees, so gnarled around each other that they would arch into doorway shapes. I liked to pretend they were entrances to fairy worlds. “Cedar fever” sounded like it might be related to that. A madness of some kind?

I was not much older when I first got hit with the allergy itself: a sniffle and itchy eyes that my mom encouraged me to shrug off. “Be glad it’s not worse!”

Allergies are seasonal in more ways than one. They drift in and out with what plant is pollinating—and they can get better and worse with the body’s hormonal shifts. I’m grateful I lived out of state the years I was the most allergic. (Drinking can make allergies worse, and I was doing that a lot back then.) When I did drop into Austin for a conference or family visit, there were days my eyes swelled to a squint and my sinuses were too stuffed to even run. Phlegm just sat in the passages like sludge. I retreated to my hotel room rather than hit the bars. Eventually, my body came to tolerate cedar with just a daily helping of Zyrtec and a bottle of eye drops in every jacket pocket.

I never thought I’d do more than endure cedar fever. But five years ago, cedar convinced me to move back home. I was a little lost, and when you’re lost, discomfort can orient you in space.

My husband and I chose the rental house in Windsor Park, in northeast Austin, because of the yard, a full quarter-acre in the middle of the ’70s subdivision. It fell away from the back deck of the ranch-style house in one slope, like someone had pressed the plane of the land down. Chain-link fences policed the sides—we could see that one of the neighbors kept a chicken coop—and the end of the yard was a tangle of brush guarding a twist of mud that sometimes ran as a creek.

In Minneapolis, we’d lived in a loft-style condo overlooking downtown. Our German shepherd mix, Exley, got his exercise and daily relief on walks to a nearby dog park. But when the temperature dipped into the negative teens during the northern Midwest winters, we let him out on the balcony and the 3-by-4-foot patch of sod we freshened once a week. After COVID-19 revealed the fractures in our marriage, we decided all three of us could use a couple of months back in my hometown. We needed warmer air outside and more room to roam than a tiny concrete perch. And inside, maybe we needed more walls between us.

In December, as cedar fever season approached, the yard wasn’t much to look at: dirt, brown grass, a couple of naked ash trees on the sides. But I spent time there because Exley couldn’t be trusted to keep out of that brush and because when I breathed in, I felt my shoulders relax a little.

It smelled like woodsmoke, which made me smile: Back in Minneapolis, highs in the low 50s are practically summer. People will picnic. In Austin, people use their fireplaces long before you can see your breath.

I could sense the cedar in the air. Woody, green, a hint of black pepper. The pollen stung my eyes and made my nose run, and that was after I topped off on antihistamines. I was slightly miserable and a bit woozy. But I felt weirdly centered knowing exactly what was making me dizzy, and I knew that if I could just ride it out, there was relief on the other side.

People come to Texas thinking they don’t have allergies. What they have is a lack of exposure to Ashe junipers. The good news: You belong here now. Even better: You’ll never suffer alone.

You can fake an accent, buy a pair of cowboy boots, adopt a football team, feign a favorite taco truck, appropriate “y’all,” and complain about Californians—while stepping in front of your own license plate. But the allergic reaction to cedar pollen is both involuntary and impossible to simulate. The only thing up to you is how much you complain.

A native, or someone who’s been here a season longer than you, will tell you the two irritating truths about cedar fever: The trees we call cedars are Ashe junipers, and their pollen rarely causes a genuine fever. But the specificity of the plague is genuine. This is not the illusion of possession, like breakfast tacos or cowboys. A map of the trees’ density distribution shows a dark green bubble that starts slightly east of Austin and goes west into the heart of the Hill Country, extending north just short of Dallas and south past San Antonio. Satellites drift over the rest of the state. The trees exist in other states. They smother Central Texas.

Generic “hay fever” was first identified in the early 1800s in England by Dr. John Bostock, who presented his autobiographical findings. He described “a feeling of small points striking upon or darting into the [eye]ball … a feeling of want of room to receive the air necessary for respiration,” as well as “languor, an incapacity for muscular exertion.” Yes, that.

The affliction upon Central Texans appears in literature 100 years after Bostock named his own ailment. In the first issue of the first volume of the Journal of Allergy, published in 1929, Dallas physician J.H. Black examined “Cedar Hay Fever,” noting the specificity of our common ailment in a backhanded way. He dismissed it as an almost parochial complaint: “Very little evidence has accumulated to show that it is of any importance in other sections of the country.”

A mere decade later, University of Texas at Austin researchers flagged cedar “hayfever” as something more urgent: a threat to productivity and the population of Texas itself. Howard E. Degler, a professor in the engineering department, suggested alleviating symptoms with subsidized air conditioners—at less than $100 apiece. He noted that without mechanical aid, “hayfever victims in the cedar-pollen area find it advisable to travel several hundred miles to get out of the pollen area and obtain relief for the weekend.” ACs might be expensive, but they’d protect the Great Depression era’s most precious resource: the gainfully employed.

Today, cedar fever’s singular regionalism is a unifying burden rather than an excuse to dismiss it. Yet there have been no follow-ups to Degler’s call for systemic solutions. His “hayfever victims” are still desperate. We’ve got communal complaints and individual hunts for relief, but not much in the way of institutional support.

That’s why you see multiple lengthy Reddit threads about home remedies (smoking weed, drinking tea made from cedar berries) and daily intensity reports in the news. But no one at the statehouse is calling for a fund or a panel. Pollen fog makes adults miss work and kids miss school. Lord knows how many cancel food truck dates. After almost 100 years of suffering, cedar fever has yet to cross into a public health emergency. It’s just a personal one.

On the other hand, Japan treats cedar allergies as an attack on the body politic. It is considered the only other region in the world beset by evergreen tree allergies at a scale comparable to Texas’, thanks to postwar reforestation with fast-growing native cypress. As urbanization cleared older forests, pollen counts skyrocketed and doctors began to recognize seasonal allergies as a widespread cause of sick days.

By the 1980s, an entire industry had emerged around allergy abatement: specialized curtains, masks, goggles, even pollen-resistant clothing. Since the ’90s, the Japanese government has treated kafunshō, or “pollen illness,” as a matter of national policy, instituting large-scale mitigation efforts. Today, some companies allow employees to work remotely during cedar season from places where the air doesn’t actively attack their immune systems.

Japan’s aggressive interventions are no more or less imaginative or ambitious than the ones traded over pickleball. The large-scale reactions reflect a country fighting a battle they believe they can win. They’re mobilizing against the landscape as an enemy.

But I don’t think of cedar fever as an invasion. It’s more of a friendly dispute, or maybe just membership dues.

That cedar makes one sick and nostalgic all at once might be less rare than people admit. Scent is a primal sense, wired directly into the amagdyla. Olfactory memories are emotionally heavy and vivid. They are also whole in a way that other memories aren’t. When you smell something, you remember an entire experience, not just what was good or bad about it. Here are entries in my scrapbook of senses.

Honeysuckle: I think of huge, draping vines cascading over fences and weathered arbors. I think of my mom teaching me to pinch off the green base of the flower and delicately sip the drop of nectar waiting there.

Mesquite: I’m back on the field trip my third grade class took to Pioneer Farms in North Austin—not too far from our rental. We made pan de campo out of mesquite flour and cooked it over a fire, everything saturated with the dark cinnamon smell most people associate with barbecue. I’m reminded of honey butter and burned fingers.

Petrichor: The scent of fresh rain has regional terroir, and in Texas it’s the wet penny smell of post-drought limestone concrete and clay. I remember the summer in junior high when I stayed with my dad in a duplex with just a window unit AC, tearing out of the house when it started to storm, stomping my feet in water that had yet to cool the pavement.

So, I don’t believe Central Texans only think of raw noses and hoarse throats when they’re hit by winter air dense with fine cedar dust. They also remember Christmas and college bowl season. They remember the holiday when some well-meaning youngster brought in cedar boughs as decoration, drenching the place in toxins, and everyone had to go to Aunt Cindy’s house to open presents instead. They remember commiserating but getting to the other side.

Besides, cedarwood is a fundamental building block of thousands of perfumes. Cedar isn’t the problem. My olfactory journal has far stranger entries than that.

Sometimes, I pass a septic tank in a particular constellation of winds and think about my grandparents’ small ranch outside San Antonio. Not that the thick umber scent of sewage alone makes me wistful, but if I catch a pungent tendril of waste along with a whiff of cordite or smoke? That’s the smell of shooting tin cans off rusty barrels, lying on my stomach in red clay dust with a can of Dr Pepper—destined to be a target itself—beside me.

The first time I came back to Texas to steady myself as an adult was after rehab, when I moved into a sober dorm. It was the summer of 2011, one of the hottest, driest, and deadliest on record. Over 100 days of at least 100 degrees yielded the most intense drought since state weather records began in 1895 and the worst season of wildfires ever. Four million acres burned. But that background smell, ashier and wilder than woodsmoke, is also the smell of my first tender months of recovery.

A couple of years ago, in the wake of Windsor Park and divorce, I moved, alone, into a cozy bungalow in South Austin. I have a smaller backyard, so Exley and I walk. I smell wildfire smoke regularly here, and I would prefer to not smell it, or to know that everyone is safe. Yet that thin, burned-straw ghost is also the smell of driving to daily 12-step meetings in a crappy little Nissan Sentra. It’s inseparable from the acrid smell of that last cup of coffee burning at the bottom of a carafe at the back of an AA meeting, as familiar as the list of steps at the front.

The little bungalow is the first house I’ve lived in by myself. I have had four rounds of cedar fever since I was standing in that barren backyard in Windsor Park. Each season in my smaller, also threadbare backyard, I wonder if Texas is where I really belong. The scent I have become most familiar with in that time isn’t deeply Texan at all. It might be the opposite—Trader Joe’s vegetarian chili, my comfort meal on the nights I am too tired to cook and too cheap to order in.

My first year here, I was terrified of something going wrong. A mystery leak erupted in my kitchen the first spring—still unsolved, though there’s a rug over the water stain now. The sod that the house flipper planted died. I resodded before I realized a Texas lawn would never really live. The chimney flue turned out to be cracked. The 50-year-old walls have excessive personality—bumps and warps and curves. These are all concerns that rise to the level of “perceptual” but not “emergency.” They just keep my system at a constant hum. When I smelled rotten eggs during my first winter there, I seized up a little: What? I don’t have natural gas in the house.

I sniffed around the perimeter of the house and stood in the backyard, scenting with my nose up like a hound. The weather was cool and windy. The internet’s answer: the Luling effect, named after the oil fields in Luling, almost 40 miles south of Austin. The cold air traps hydrogen sulfide near the wells overnight, then a southerly wind brushes it through Austin. I did not call 911, though people apparently do. Instead, I inhaled deeply. “The Luling effect,” I said to myself. “OK.”

Hydrogen sulfide is far more dangerous than cedar. I was breathing in poison, if a very minor amount, but I felt a tiny sense of relief over it. The problem had a name and, while it was a problem, it wasn’t mine alone to solve.

I finally learned to let Texas come to me. I waited for the familiar smells to rise from the ground and wrap around me like a weighted blanket: cedar, mesquite, honeysuckle, woodsmoke, asphalt in the rain, the ghost of fossil fuels. And they did. Some brought comfort. Some brought the opposite. But I took them all in because I didn’t have the energy to go looking for anything else.

Now, I think maybe that’s the next step. If I’m really going to live here—not just reside, not just recover—I might need to venture out of my own backyard. I’ve spent years bracing against what the air might throw at me. Maybe it’s time to seek out what might delight me instead.

Sage. Laurel. Wild roses. Plants that don’t announce themselves by making your face swell up but still know how to say, “You’re home.”