Sillage, pronounced “see-yahzh”, is the French word for “wake”, like the wake of a ship in the water. In the perfume world, it refers to the scent trail that a perfume leaves behind as it evaporates. SALLE PRIVÉE.COM
In Joni Mitchell’s song, “Big Yellow Taxi,” she croons the famous line, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Too often, it does seem to go this way. A few days ago, I was hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park, the fog squatting solidly on the mountain tops for hours until, at last, the sun sliced through, and the entire day broke open, the mountain peaks now sharply silhouetted against a true blue sky. And though I stood amazed–for a moment–I continued my hike, my pack weighing more heavily on my back as I completed my final mile. But this moment is rarely enough, for even as I marked the experience with a photograph and a sigh, I knew that I wouldn’t know what I’d gotten here until I’d left the park and drove across the plains towards home.
As I drove, I breathed in deeply and found the aromatic trail of pine filling me. It had been a day since I left the Rocky Mountains, but the sillage of pine hung on, refusing to evaporate. And it wasn’t just this scent trail. It was the visual trail of aspens that jewel the mountain sides, blindingly golden, almost fluorescent. And it wasn’t just this visual trail. It was the auditory trail of bugling elk and the bass notes of water coursing over rocks in the Big Thompson River. And it was the spiritual trail of women who came to this retreat to share their hearts and hopes and pain. It was all this–and more. This is the sanctuary of sillage, the place that follows you, an evanescent reminder of all that’s gone before.
In the world of perfumery, sillage is considered as one of the most distinctive, the most powerful characteristics of a fragrance. It’s measured as a person moves and dispenses a trail of scent. A perfume with great sillage refuses to stay close to the skin but rather takes to the air. And if you’re in the vicinity of one wearing this perfume, you’re the unbidden recipient of this scent trail. It may delight or repulse you, but it enters your nostrils and lives there for quite some time.
I remember tutoring a freshman in college who, in an apparent attempt to impress me, wore what had to have been an entire bottle of Brute cologne. My eyes watered furiously as we hunched over his essay draft and made our way through one tortured paragraph after another. When I left and entered the autumn air outside the campus library, I breathed deeply. The sillage of the last 45 minutes lived in every pore of me, and at the time, I was desperate to purge it, to live once again in a Faberge-free land. I confess, however, that for years the smell of Brute brought me right back to that cubicle in Calvin T. Ryan library and that boy who wrote of his first search and recovery dive for the city of Omaha. In that cloud of Brute, he shared the trauma of finding a body, long submerged in the Missouri River, and his ongoing attempts to process this. To this day, the sillage of his raw confession is a scent stronger than Faberge could ever concoct.
Even the worst scents, the very scents that bring us wretching to our knees, may leave a bittersweet and necessary trail. The day that my third grade class took a field trip to the city meat-packing plant, I huddled in my bus seat, utterly and naively unprepared for the day. For months, I’d ridden over the viaduct where the meat-packing plant lived below, the foreign smells seeping through the bus. But when they ushered us onto the cut-and-kill floor, when the sickly scent of blood overpowered us, when even the sights before us cowered to the smell of death, that’s when I vowed not to eat meat again. It wasn’t so much a conscious decision as a foregone conclusion: I would live on peanut butter. Which I did for months to come, my mother lovingly placing the jar of Jiff on the table each meal. As an eight-year-old, the sillage of this field trip became a constant companion for months. I smelled death. I saw death when I closed my eyes each night. I walked with death as I spent time with my family and friends. In years to come, however, I grew to see this experience as my first coming-of-age rite. And as with all such initiations, this began a necessary–albeit painful–transition from childhood to adulthood, the recognition of mortality a trailing and persistent scent.
My father, Nebraska poet Don Welch, wrote: “We come to love by love, leaving less of who we are behind.” This is the sweetest sillage, a faint trail of our very essence: the top, middle, and bass notes mingling and lingering. At its best, this is a trail that leaves one wanting more, a trail that leads one to the possible chemical combustion of love, all the best notes of self brought forward to happily mix –undiluted–with another’s.
As I sit on my porch this afternoon, I breathe deeply and find the sillage of pine sliding into the scent of newly mown grass. I find the sillage of rich conversation with a host of incredible women sliding into the solitude which marks many of my Iowa days. The Colorado retreat now over, the scent that trails behind is a heady one that will catch the updraft of my remaining years.
