Where There are no Cornfields

There were times during my trip to Australia when I was struck by how much it felt like home, times when it felt so un-foreign, so normal; times when I felt like we could easily just be on a road trip somewhere in the States. There were subtle differences, of course, the driving on the wrong side of the road, the large stretches of undeveloped land that were just land and not cornfields, that it was November and Christmas and summer were approaching simultaneously. But often it all felt very familiar. Because of this I tried extra hard to take note of the things that were very unfamiliar.

There were things I wrote down, things I took photos of, and then there were the things that I didn’t record because there was no way to capture them, things that I could only savor in the moment and hope they would come back to me one day. I attended a liquor tasting recently and the smell of a certain rum triggered one of these memories.

Our first stop in Australia was Cairns, Queensland, from there we quickly headed north to The Daintree Rainforest. We drove north until we couldn’t go any farther and then we drove in. We drove into the thick of the Daintree with all the trees, frogs, birds, and bugs. And then it rained. It rained hard and often. It rained so much it felt like a Hemingway novel.

We eventually made our way out of the rainforest because we were sick of being damp and because it was just time to move on. And it was there, somewhere between tropical rainforest and tropical beaches, that I first smelled the scent of sugar cane mixed with the wet heavy air from the Daintree. It was there where you have to watch out for the cane trains, there where you can still see the steam rising from where the rainforest meets the ocean.

The smell of sugar cane, especially burning sugar cane, is sweet, deep, and earthy. It’s complex and layered and too much to take in at once. It hits you first as a dense wall and is a little startling especially when it’s something you’ve never smelled before. It burns a little and you can taste it in the back of your throat. But then you recover and you breathe it in deeply. It moves through you slowly, like molasses, and you hope you will never forget this smell and the feeling it brings; this smell that is so foreign, that smells like a place that is a world away from home.