"Airplane travel is natures way of making
you look like your passport photo."
-Al Gore
No scent intoxicates me more than jet fuel.
For most, this combustable cannot compete with the smell of baking bread. Kneaded with labored love, laid in well oiled pans, cut at the top, butter baptized and pulled from the oven with mothers mitts, it is a holy right of human passage to tear apart the steaming mass with bare, burning hands.
And who can refuse the etherial aroma of apple soaked tobacco? A marriage of fruit and leaf, It soothes both the destitute and divine. Like poetry in a pipe, it rises as prose to the gods, filling their nostrils with unspoken prayers. Like incense to an emperor, so is smoke to the celestial. It is earth kissing heaven.
However, for me, nothing compares to incinerated fuel, because its odor means travel.
Approaching the airport, I whiff the clean burn. I listen to turbines whine and spy the metal missiles, like stallions, waiting for me on hot tar. In that asphalt reek, I breath the sands of the Sahel, blowing across desert roads. I hear the goats,with crude metal bells, chomping and gnawing on scrub under watch of Arab eyes. I feel wet white sands of Zanzibar squeezing through toes, washed in ebbs and flows of sea and morning prayer. I inhale Serengeti’s lion strewn plains, touch cool, lapping waves of the Ganges and stroke gilded skin of Bangkok’s Buddhas.
