On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes (32 page)

I did not know more than this about the people who had passed, shedding their gloves. Certainly, they now had chilly hands. But were they happy or sad, old or young, healthy or ill? Did they live nearby, were they passing through, did they walk with someone or alone? Apart from the difference between a child’s mitten and an adult’s leather glove, any personal details eluded me. I did not yet have the perceptual ability to determine who those recent passersby were—though I suspected that information was there to be discovered. As Finn would soon tell me, the dog can see it.

One thing puzzled me about Finn’s baluster examination. Once I saw what he was sniffing, the graffitied sprays and splashes were easy to spot. But Finn did not always go directly to the message. He sniffed around it, as though not sure where it was. A dog’s vision, though not nearly identical to ours, surely lets him see what I saw here. Finn could see the urine mark, but he was “scanning” the area, just as we scan a scene with our eyes. To see a scene is not to stare fixedly at one point; it is to open our eyes to everything in front of us, looking to and fro. Similarly, to
smell
a scene, Finn approached it from the side, from above, sniffing the air to see if the artist who concocted this particular odor splotch was anywhere nearby. A dog can smell something different in each noseful—and there
is
something different there to smell. This taught me something about smells: they are not at fixed points, nor are they static and unchanging. They are a haze, a cloud, spreading out from their source. Viewed as odors, the
street is a mishmash of overlapping object identities, each crowding into the next’s odorous space.

I leaned in closely to watch Finn’s sniffing. He stopped at once, of course, possibly wondering why I was giving him the eye. What I did see was that he was sniffing
fast
: dogs can sniff up to seven times a second. Humans sniff about once every two seconds. If you try hard, you can do a good run of a dozen sniffs, but then you must stop to breathe, and in exhaling, all that good scented air gets expelled. Should you want to avoid smelling something, give a good strong exhale from your nose. If you are out of its cloud when you next inhale, your olfactory receptors will be none the wiser.

Not only do each of Finn’s nostrils pull in odors, they collect a sampling of different slices of the world, which may allow dogs a kind of stereo olfaction. Just as we humans locate the source of a sound by unconsciously and instantly calculating the difference in its loudness hitting our left and right ears, a dog can gauge the difference in a smell’s strength between his left and right nostrils. And I was happy to learn that by watching dogs’ nostrils very, very carefully, researchers have found that dogs use their right nostril first when smelling a new but nonaversive scent (food, people), and then switch to the
left
nostril once it becomes familiar. By contrast, both adrenaline and the sweat of veterinarians (yes, the researchers collected vet sweat) prompted a bias toward sniffing with the
right
nostril. These nostrils, and the olfactory cells they lead to, send information to the same sides of the brain: right nostril, right hemisphere. The researchers conclude that right-nostril activity is associated with stimulating an arousal response, of aggression, fear, or other strong emotion. The left nostril, like the left hemisphere, is involved in calming experiences. In theory, if you looked closely, you could see if a dog considered you friendly or not by watching which nostril is sniffing.

All this sniff rumination got me back to Finn’s sneeze. Starting our walk, he sneezed a good sneeze. After I had interrupted his sniffing, we resumed walking, and he sneezed again. He was cleansing his palate. Sneezing is a dog’s way of clearing everything out of the nose, so the next good stench can be inhaled. It is the dog’s version of the polite, throat-clearing cough timed to end one conversation and move to another, or the self-conscious
ahem
done to break the silence in an elevator or other closed social space.

Similarly, by licking his nose, he was readying it to catch things to be smelled. You may have noticed that the world outside your door smells brightly new after a rain, when the ground is wet—and especially so in summer, when every surface is well baked and warm to the touch. Those molecules of odor that have settled on the ground, latent odor traces, are unlikely to be detected by a passing nose. But warm air—warmed by the sun or from the inside of a dog nose—makes odors volatile and more likely to be sniffed. And wet air (or noses) allow for better absorption of an odor. This is also why Finn may lick or nose-print a surface: he is not trying to eat it; he is attempting to get the odor closer to the vomeronasal organ, where it can be smelled further.

 • • • 

Although we had resumed walking, it was at a slow pace. We made regular stops for Finn to sniff the ground, an errant hubcap, or a paper bag on the sidewalk, or to stand and sniff into the wind. What olfactory fireworks must reach his nose on a brisk wind! Smells not just from our street, but from around the corner, from down the hill. Scents from New Jersey! Scents from great heights, from the past, from the place we were walking toward.

At this pace, I began noticing things on our route I had never noticed before: small faucets attached to sides of buildings; brass pegs in the sidewalk that are, I subsequently learned, part of a
national registry of such pegs;
³
the difference in the ratio of shade to sun on the north and south sides of the street. After stopping at each block’s fireplug, I realized some had sentinels: short guard posts flanking the fireplug. I suspected these represent a historical glimpse of unhappy automobile/fireplug interactions. I began looking a little too closely at the innumerable spots on the sidewalk (look! they’re there!): black bruises that on examination are darkened, smushed gum or splattered liquid.
⁴

At a tall apartment building, something caught Finn’s attention at the entrance, three short steps above street level. I followed his gaze. With much fuss, two people were settling a large, older gentleman standing in the doorway into a wheelchair. It looked difficult and exhausting for all involved. Seeing us looking, the man gaped back at us. I smiled and, being a human being, turned away out of politeness. Surely this man did not want me staring at his difficulty in sitting down. But Finn was transfixed. Not only did he continue to stare, he locked his legs, settling his weight on his heels when I encouraged him onward. As the leash became taut between us, I looked back at Finn. He was certainly being impolite.

But, of course, no dog is polite or impolite. It is we who attribute these characteristics to them. Dogs are perfectly culturally
ignorant. Despite their neat insinuation into our homes, they do not notice or concern themselves with our customs. Perhaps a dog may learn to “not stare” if an owner punishes him each time he does, but not necessarily: the dog may just learn
watch out for your owner, she’s coming for you
. Politeness is a human concept, and it is at best bizarre to imagine that dogs have it.

On the other hand, I could feel, and I suspect the wheelchaired man could feel, the fixedness of Finn’s gaze as discomfiting. I knew Finn was just looking, but I felt I needed to relieve the man of being watched, even if only by a dog.
⁵
It is a testament to the power of the dog’s gaze that we can be unnerved by it, as though the dog were seeing us for who we really are. Both Finn and my son, in their ill-mannered staring, have done more than any psychologist or sociologist to make me more aware of how material gaze is.

 • • • 

When I convinced Finn to move on, I thought to pay attention to where other dogs we encountered on the street were gazing. Nearly all were more interested in getting their noses into Finn’s nether regions or wagging face-to-face than in staring at me. Often, though, a dog looked at me—or maybe smelled me. It felt like an invitation. The dog’s gaze is simply human.

One dog, an energetic brown-and-white houndy type, galloping toward us against the restraint of the owner he was pulling along, seemed to smell particularly interesting to Finn—and Finn to him. They wagged mightily at each other, tails high in the air, the wags taut and vigorous, then set to an intensive sniff dance. I call it a dance because they moved
together,
like long-term dance
partners, doing some behaviors at once, and others in response to each other: first, mutual sniffing of the low bellies; then back upright, faces close; then a circle step, caused by each trying to get his nose right at the base of the other’s tail. I smiled up at the person at the end of the dog’s leash, which seemed appropriate as our dogs were getting familiar. She was tall, wearing a raincoat on an unrainy day. Her hair looked expensively cut, but her face was weary, harried. She barely managed a smile back. I thought about what information Finn was getting about her dog with his sniffs: mood, opinions, disease? My Philadelphia physician Bennett Lorber sniffs the tissue samples of his patients. We humans, trained sufficiently, can detect the scent of illness. When physical exams were more literally physical and less mediated by machines, it was common for trained doctors to identify disease in their patients by smell. What were charmingly called “lunatics” in the nineteenth century were said to smell “like yellow deer or mice” (that presupposes that one knows what those animals smell like; perhaps once you get the chance to smell a lunatic, it becomes obvious). Typhoid smells like freshly baked brown bread; the measles, of “fresh-picked feathers”; scabies is moldy; gout, like whey; tuberculosis, reminiscent of stale beer; diabetics, unbearably sweet, like rotted fruit.

Abruptly, the dog bolted and the two of them, wafting their odors in their wake, headed off to the next entertainment. Finn sniffed after them, then turned and trotted away. I refrained from sniffing after the woman. For a few minutes, no one passed us on the sidewalk. Finn took to conducting a detailed examination of the objects of the street. He poked his nose into all sorts of openings. Low basement windows abound in my neighborhood, I learned through following him, and each seemed to have its own currents of dog-alluring scents. Spaces between cars were exciting, as they allowed sniffs of the filaments of odors from the other
side of the street. We spent a lot of time with lampposts. I would characterize most of Finn’s behavior as
merrily interested,
but as we approached a large Dumpster parked by the sidewalk, I got a taste of his alarm, too. A plastic tarp over the Dumpster had come loose from its moorings and slapped against itself. It was a distinctly different sound than the whip of the yellow “do not cross” tape surrounding a wet square of concrete nearby. Both seemed to spook Finn with their air-snapping and whipping movements in the wind. But he was brave. He held his ground, leaned as far forward as he could while keeping all four feet planted, and inched his nose ever closer to the mysterious tape. Ten seconds—seventy sniffs—later, he determined it was harmless, and even dull, and we moved on. I listened for the other sounds of wind on the street. I tried to listen with the ears of a sound engineer. The round-leaved trees rustled differently than large oak leaves—and both were distinct from the sough of small linden leaves. Finn did not seem to attend to these one whit.

He had something else in mind. Suddenly, after a long slow ramble, he was pulling me, his nose in urgent pursuit. We wound up at the stairs outside a short apartment building. Every week, I watch spellbound as his nose leads him on a wending course to locate the handful of well-slobbered tennis balls that have been waiting in a field of ivy since we visited the prior week, but this time his nose seemed to have led him astray. There was no ball. There was nothing. Only a still, closed door in our face.

Three minutes later, we were on the stairs to greet a woman I recognized from morning dog walks, leading her charge out for a bit of midday relief. She had, she explained, just returned home. I goggled a bit and tried to explain to her our presence on her stoop, while Finn happily wiggled. Shortly, he was ready to move on, and it was I who wanted to loiter and think about how he knew where she lived.

I should not have been at all surprised. Buildings do not typically wear prominent evidence of their tenants, but each person leaves tracks, individual odors in our footprints, even in the smells that radiate from us into the air we move through. Catch an elevator just after it has dropped off a perfumed rider or a smoker and you see what I mean: the evidence of her presence still hangs in the air. Whether trained in tracking or not, dogs can detect our individual odors, and even the direction in which we have gone. Each step we leave has, over time, a slightly different quantity of odor than the one before and after it. The newest step is the smelliest; the oldest is the least smelly. For tracking dogs, five steps is plenty to determine direction through this change of odor concentration.

Finn saw this woman’s recent return through her steps. The city block, for him, was covered with evidence of familiar and unfamiliar people and dogs passing by. Each time I step out my door, I see more or less the same block. No wonder Finn stops when we exit: it is a wholly new street, wearing odors of the six hours since we were last outside, waiting to be sniffed in.

 • • • 

A long stretch with nary a tree guard nor lamppost nor fireplug to visit, and we were moving along at a decent clip. Even while I aimed to observe what Finn observed, I found myself mostly observing Finn. He was, after all, a part of the city block, I reasoned—as were all the other dogs we routinely pass. I focused on his bearing. He held his tail high, a friendly sickle curved over his back. He was doing a very particular kind of walk. Dogs, like us, can launch into any of a variety of strides, from
walk
and
pace,
to
trot
and
amble,
and, in a pinch,
gallop
. Between balusters, Finn
walked
: his left rear foot gently chased his left front foot, which started his right rear foot chasing his right front foot. This walk is considered “sloppy” by trackers: the footprints walking dogs
leave do not directly register one on top of another; instead, the right front and left rear slightly overlap, leaving a distinct mark for each pawprint. Watching Finn walk, his hips swaying slightly as he moved, I felt that “sloppy,” technical or not, was the wrong word for this stride. Maybe
languorous
or
unconcerned.
It was an easy, carefree movement that likely took as much energy as my putting one foot in front of another.