Dartmouth Smells

Caroline McKeldin '88 has produced the world's first scratch-and-sniff guide to the Big Apple. Each page of New York Smells (St. Martin's Paperbacks) is a black-and-white, ready-to-mail postcard of a Manhattan icon—soft pretzels, the fish market, St. Patrick's Cathedral, a New York taxi—along with an accompanying sealed-in odor that you can release with a fingernail. Why the reader would willingly take a whiff of a subway at rush hour goes unexplained but, hey, we're talking New York here.

We couldn't resist asking McKeldin for the smells she would go after if she were to make a Dartmouth scratch-and-sniffer. She immediately e-mailed us the list below.

Lemon and cookies at afternoon tea in Sanborn. Mung: Each frat has its own unique, complex combination of fraternity-basement ooze. Slushy noodles at Thayer Full Fare. (Is that a traditional New England dish?) Sssssteam heat. Fried food wafting from the Hop's Courtyard Cafe. Ozone emanating from all that machinery at Kiewit. Peter Christian's honey-mustard sauce. Homecoming two-for-one special: Creosote-covered railroad ties that morph into bonfire ashes. Winter Carnival: No smells. Frozen nostril hair prohibits any olfactory action whatsoever. Mud season: Dog doo thawing on the Green. The rubbery gym floor. Industrial-strength cleaning fluid: Those old slate stairs always smelled worse after mopping. The smell that won't leave: Microwave popcorn in dorm kitchens.