18 More Manly Smells Ode To Manly Smells “Loads of great memories here. Add a few more, some subtle like: fresh maple syrup in the morning when my dad made pancakes (or the smell of ANYTHING cooking for breakfast after a long night camping); the whiff of scent of a freshly lit Zippo lighter; the faint ozone and oil of slot car racing or model railroad engines; that sweet airplane glue or the clear dope you painted on tissue paper covered balsa airplane wings; and Cox model airplane fuel burning in a micro two-stroke spittin’ and barking in your hands. The sulphur of model rocket engines when they launch; the fresh pigskin smell of a brand new football. The grassy plastic smell of “Jarts” on a summer afternoon before do-gooders made them illegal. And a few not so subtle: August-hot creosote on the fresh telephone poles my dad would climb when he was a lineman; the smell of engine, black grease, dust and the acres and acres of crop you were working under your grampa’s tractor when he trusted you to do the field when you were just 11 years old; black powder smoke from the shooter’s point of view on a firing line of muskets in a Civil War reenactment; ether engine starter spray; waterproofing on G.I. tent halves; mothproofing stuff on canvas webgear and new uniforms; LSA cleaning solvent for your M-16 or M-60 (and the sulfur, burning grass, and white-hot metal smell whenever you had to change barrels); deuce-and-a-half diesel exhaust; the smell of the inside of your combat helmet (the steel pot kind); jet exhaust, dust and just a hint of somebody else’s barf as you exit the tail of a C-130 over a blistering hot tarmac – weird as it might sound, still striking good manly memory smells.” -B.S. Whitmore
Interestingly enough, my brain took a trip back in time and started providing those “memory smells” whilst reading your post. Each smell was as if I was sitting right next to the culprit providing those odors. That said, when I hit the LSA smell, it was a sharp remembrance but took a change with the M-60 to diesel fuel. I always cleaned my 60’s with it. Strange but napalm and the smell of burning JP-4 also came to mind. Weird how those things happen.
Not only do I distinctly remember the smell associated with a Zippo lighter, but that distinctive "click" of the open/close mechanism. My dad was a smoker and he always had his trusty Zippo. Another smell that takes me back in time is pipe tobacco; my grandpa smoked a pipe.
Something that smells really good to me is a barn full of fresh hay. Particularly alfalfa hay. They don't grow alfalfa here, but they do haul the square bales in, in large semi-trailers, mostly for horses. A newly opened bag of alfalfa pellets smells just as good. To me, it is similar to yeast bread baking, but with a little more sweet smell.
I could smell it while I read your post. I smoke. Think I'm going to get myself one just for the smell.