edge conditions walking the shoreline of Lake Ontario in Prince Edward County using scent as a guide
Ian Chodikoff
Ian Chodikoff
I live in Prince Edward County, a large island roughly halfway between Toronto and Ottawa. Here is a world of subtle landscapes: field, forest, wetland and shoreline. Exploring the shoreline is as much about the human interventions as it is about the evolving natural landscape. This subtle, rural landscape is less a retreat from my urban world of architecture than an opportunity to discover the importance of smell, and a pretext to gain a new appreciation for the land. I am learning perfumery through a global network of online classes and workshops. I have built a home laboratory that brings a new kind of spatial awareness. Architecture taught me to ask what a material wants to do, but perfumery asks what a material does over time, such as how it volatilises, blooms, and fades. The County continuously teaches me that volatility is also a description of weather. The sky here changes with the wind. Onshore breezes pull the lake’s coolness over hot dunes. Gusts bring clover, cut hay and poplar resin; a storm front drags ozone across everything like a wash. I smell perfume accords — little olfactory compositions — at the water’s edge, which the weather has mixed for maybe only an hour. Perfume is weather in miniature: the sparkly aldehydic smells of a morning mist, a heavier heart in the afternoon, or a lingering woodsy and sweet floral drydown of a summer night.
The south shore of the County meets Lake Ontario as a wave- cut limestone shelf. Red cedar and balsam warm up in the thin alvar soil behind the beaches and rock. Limestone, one of the most primordial land-based scents, is what we call mineralic , often a clean, flinty, earthy and sometimes slightly metallic cool sensation in the nose. On the shelves near Point Petre, rain collects in rust-stained pools of water, where a boundary is set between the wet and dry limestone. When our rocky ground becomes wet, we can smell the earth, sand and the seductive qualities of geosmin, the after-the-rain molecule detectable in near-homeopathic traces. The wildflowers we see may lack a convincing smell, but they create an implied olfactory sensation amidst the eroding bluffs, woody roots and broken stone. A terpenic register, defined by the resinous compounds of pine and balsam, thrives here. At Point Traverse, a small harbour once sheltered generations of Indigenous, then commercial and recreational, fishers. The only remnant is a wooden lighthouse nearby, erected in 1881 to guide ships to safety. The musty clapboard lighthouse contains rooms of cracked plaster and dusty floral wallpaper smelling of old paper. Driftwood and mollusk shells on the cobble beach complement this smellscape.
Somehow, we believe that we’ve been there before.
26 on site review 49 :: shorelines
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