It Makes Scents

An odd smell at first then hissing gas from a metal tube erupts in a whoosh of fire. The fire sprays to an alarming height that shimmers and shakes like an angry soap bubble. The student responsible shields her face and steps back, wincing, sparker in hand.  She smiles, admires the fury.  Success. Her lab partner leans in, rotates the collar of the Bunsen burner, taming the wild flame’s throw to a tidy blue cone.  At an adjacent table, a girl with a long, straw-color ponytail attends her own stubborn, unlit burner. She bumps awkwardly into a kid crowding her, turns, says “Can I borrow that sparker?”

Five minutes earlier, I’d seen Dr. C shrug off her white lab coat, exchanging for a blue puffy winter coat as I’d entered her classroom.  

It was a Tuesday in January, the day after MLK Day, to be the only day of school that week, the next three days cancelled in Atlanta due to an inch of snow and seventy-two hours of sub-freezing temperatures.

I am covering her last period of the day, honors chemistry.  Typically, I’d be decompressing in the precious quiet of my room a few doors down.  Dr. C has twins in elementary school, a five minute walk from the high school.  After-school activities had just been cancelled due to the inclement forecast, including childcare.  Dr. C would need to cut her own class to retrieve her kids.

Covering an unfamiliar class can be nerve-wracking. Honors chem is hardly an unruly bunch, but tell my reptilian brain that. Dr. C’s handwriting is cursive, economic.  Tightly scrawled across the white board, row upon row of numbered instructions.  My anxiety wanes, the relief short-lived: a strange chemical smell. The door shuts.  Dr. C is gone.

Unfamiliar students are patient in the way of shoreline sharks: wary, watching for a mis-step as I strain to make sense of an unfamiliar lesson.  I’m often at a loss how to proceed. I brace for the shock, wade in, like a tourist seeking mercy from a baby-faced motorcycle gang, I plead, “Do you know what you’re supposed to be doing?”

No response. New tact, “Think there’ll be school tomorrow?”  

“No way,” they say, with a timeless mix of hope and glee.

The students set about like ants, on a mission, quickly past one another, pausing to consult, doubling-back, carrying on.  In the eye of this student flurry, the scent of unnatural gas hangs like a carbon chain around my neck.

I associate this smell with one particular early winter morning – 2:30am – in our previous house, years ago.  The gas furnace in the attic was on the fritz, spewing raw, un-combusted methane throughout our home, into our bedroom, and directly up my wife’s nose.  My nose was assaulted too, but I was tired and warm. It was the weekend, we were thirty-somethings after a date-night dinner and nightcap.  In the dark, a nudge, “Baby, what’s that smell?” The air was cool.  I pulled the comforter up. Another nudge, “Get up, Eric. Fix it.” A mild headache, growing, I inspected the furnace, the gas smell noxious, recognized the job beyond me, and powered off the furnace. The serviceman said we were smart to call. My wife has never forgotten my initial impulse.

A cluster of kids wait their turn at the chemical table.  Scoopulas dip into wide-mouthed jars conveying sand-colored powder the consistency of flour into crucibles.

Eight tables with groups of four, varying stages of progress.  Horizontal iron rings clamp to vertical rods, screwed into steel bases.  Upon the rings, rest fire-resistant mesh squares.  Crucibles sit atop the mesh like birds’ nests, exposed.  Two tables have working Bunsen flames.

A girl in a purple Furman sweatshirt (bold white letters – FU – seem to speak for her) grips a gas valve, wide open, full-throttle – yet no flame, no attendant sparker. She sees me looking.

I want to ask, can you not see the invisible gas filling the room?  I hear a hiss. Plainly. Interminable seconds pass.  No flame.  Her gangly lab partner strikes his sparker, scraping meager spittle, too far from the gas stream, about the right spot to ignite the entire cloud of methane.

A solution seems beyond them.

I search for a working sparker.  I ask a freckled boy wearing glasses under his polycarbonate safety goggles the purpose of the lab.  His skin flickers orange, captivated by flame.  The white powder bubbles and blackens. A thin stream of smoke rises.  The flame refracts through his polycarbonate goggle and bounces off his eyeglasses – the effect, I see four images of quivering flame, two pair, bright blue cones emanating where his irises should be.  I think, this must be what the crazed 19th century alchemists looked like in their quest for transmutation of gold.

The freckled boy says, “It’s supposed to turn green,” willing the powder to change, “then white.”  I ask, “Is the lab about conservation of mass?”  He turns back to the powder, stirs, “You flood with water, it goes to green again.”

The flint in his sparker is worn to nothing.  The class down to one working sparker.  This is not a bad thing, I can almost breathe again. Time to clean up.

In my room at my desk, a scrim of dust has settled.  Quiet, serene, not yet 7:00am, first day back since the snow.  A tentative knock.  It’s Dr. C.  She hands me a card with a transparent bag of pretzel rods dipped in chocolate and candy sprinkles.  I open the card after she leaves, “Dear Eric, Thank you so much for giving up your planning to coach my students through a lab on Tuesday.  Without your help, I do not know what I would have done.  I truly appreciate your patience and graciousness.  Sincerely, Marianne.”

Teacher-of-the-Month is a treat, but homemade, salted chocolate is a recognition worth savoring.  I am lucky and privileged to walk these halls, share airspace with my colleagues.  I untwist the tie and lift the bag to my nose and – as we do in chemistry lab – I waft. The rich, redolent chocolate is supernatural.