The Last Vestiges (ROUND 8)
scent of the day: Burniss, by Havenhollow
An autumnal tobacco—a tobacco, in other words, transformed by sweet-hay deertongue from an object into a whole season.
If Cochise makes you think of the southwestern tribes, this one takes you out of the Blood Meridian atmosphere and more into the Pocahontas atmosphere of a tobacco ceremony around a cornucopia (not the European horn of plenty but rather the actual Native American equivalent: the gathering of corn, beans, and squash). All of the Havenhollows as far as I can tell have a common core—something very reminiscent of what we get in a variety of fragrances from Fate Man to Abu Madyan. I suspect liatris or deertongue is the hidden essence instantiated in most of the Havenhollows—liatris, a native perennial flower in North America that gives a tobacco aura of herbs mixed with hay, and maybe some immortelle, which gives a tobacco aura of maple syrup and rum. Liatris is autumn in a bottle and these all bring you there in some way. While it creates a lovely signature, whatever that core is in truth, it does blur a lot of these fragrances into each other. I have only worn Cochise maybe twice and this maybe twice. I have too big of a collection and so these deserve much more time to appreciate their uniqueness.
The tobacco is big here. You get various heavy cured tobacco notes: Havana, Burley, Perique, Virginia. But you also get Nicotiana alata (jasmine tobacco). That introduces a fragrant botanical aspect of the living flowering plant. There is a smoky menthol aspect (which I also get in Anachronism), something more in-between Akro’s Smoke and Nishane’s Fan your Flames: the firepit association of the former (I sense fire here where fragrant woods are burned) and the menthol of the latter. This is a tobacco scent indeed. And for whatever reason, maybe it is because Cochise was my first intro to the house and it set a Native American mood, I think of Native Americans smoking tobacco. In addition I get the autumn vibe from the liatris and tobacco and also of course from the honey and plum that evoke a late-autumn bounty—the preservation of sweet fruits and late-season yields. I get images of orange and red and yellow sweeping across whole rounded mountain sides. And because of that I picture in particular Native Americans from the northeast smoking this tobacco.
In areas like the Hudson Valley, where I am from, tobacco was a deeply rooted sacred plant, well before the Europeans came, in the two main distinct cultural and linguistic families that dominated the whole northeast: the Algonquins (Mohicans, Wappingers, Wampanoag, and so on) and the Iroquois (Mohawk, Oneida, Seneca, and so on). Tobacco was not a casual recreational habit. It was a holy medicine used to carry prayers or seal political treaties or welcome guests. Smoking at council meetings often would function like the equivalent of signing a modern notarized legal document.
I feel that Burniss is a fragrance in honor of ceremonies where tobacco played a central role. Because of the autumnal vibe I get from this fragrance and many other Havenhollows, I imagine this fragrance as being in honor of thanksgiving festivals (such as the Green Corn Ceremony and the Harvest Festival) where tobacco was the central spiritual driver of the entire ceremony. During these major harvest celebrations, the most sacred moment was the Tobacco Burning Ceremony where the community gathered around a big fire to watch the spiritual leader thank the Creator, the earth, and the three sister spirits (corn, bean, squash) for sustaining them. As the leader spoke he would cast pinches of tobacco directly into the flames, and that is what I get here in Burniss. Tobacco was considered an offering—something to feed the spirits before they could enjoy the bounty of their own harvest. And then this would culminate in a community feast and then perhaps, or so I imagine, a smoke session where elders sit in a longhouse surrounded by the newly gathered harvest (baskets of colorful flint corn, braided seed corn hanging from the rafters, and piles of winter squash) as they smoked pipes and talked about the upcoming winter hunting season or whatever.
A lot of this makes good sense. Deertongue leaves, the leaves of liatris, are packed with the coumarin that gives off that comforting aroma of sweet sun-dried hay and herbal vanilla and tobacco. This note perfectly mirrors the scent profile of sweetgrass, which is one of the foundational sacred medicines burned alongside tobacco in Northeastern ceremonial fires to invite good spirits. Cedar, furthermore, is another of the four sacred medicines in Northeastern Indigenous traditions (alongside tobacco, sweetgrass, and sage). It shows up big in Burniss and it would have been used as the basis for the harvest ceremony fire.
The drydown in Burniss is a tad soapy—an earthy, fresh, sweet soap a lot like the real deal native american product. Yes, I get an earthy botanical soapiness—much different from the fatty tallow associations of old European soaps, which could be slightly rancid in smell. The soap here instead reminds me of modern handcrafted botanical ones. That makes sense given that this fragrance is filled with dried herbs and cedar.
This has none of the funk that Europeans brought. Natives were downright shocked at how bad Europeans smelled. The castoreum here adds a clean leatheriness and serves to ground the woods and simulate the cozy, textured environment of a longhouse lined with winter furs.
Cochise I still think is the star of their offerings, even over the one everyone searches for: Anachronism.
*Let’s workshop this poem about a pocked-marked meth head (eyelashes loaded up on mascara like one of those NASCAR redneck slores) out for cash from her mother, who watches her toddler each day
*Worked all over but added two new lines—one to the first stanza, another to the second. The last version had a great economy and a gritty atmosphere. This new version introduces specific narrative friction that elevates the piece away from just a bleak portrait and into a devastating living scene.
The Last Vestiges
Happy Meal box battered (fries stiff, having clocked a night’s share of miles), the meth-mouth mom sighs at the door. Into her childhood home she whirlwinds (“Heyy my big boy!”), scooping up the TVed toddler in a centrifugal hug that streaks away her prom gaze still over the fireplace. Unlike that pit reek cartoonified by curbside Febreze, that fluttering cheer cartoonified by curbside mascara (and by a toke, coughs held back, in the visor mirror) wilts in on itself mid breath. Cash must be coaxed out of Granny, shifting kitchen items.
She does that teen sway, one foot behind the other— men, smoking against the car, framed in the window, crank-cricket vigils etched in scorched-earth craters surfacing on her too: “Mom, it’s an allergy. I told you.” Too fast the day approaches when—against the fixity of that reek, too contagious to stand—the transience of that cheer, no less contagious, will flare so bright that the boy, little fingers fretting the toy’s contours, will understand the necessity of becoming immune to hope at a level of consciousness before his time.
