Penn Pandemic Diary Penn Pandemic Diary, Entry #43: Smelling Uncertainty

Josh Weiner is a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in Political Science. He was a summer intern at Perry World House in summer 2020.

I remember boarding a bus as a 19-year-old soldier in Tel Aviv one Friday morning, heading home for a weekend leave after a month of grueling training on a military base in the south of Israel. Groggy from a 4:00 a.m. wake-up and mandatory run of the base’s combat-obstacle course, I reeked. An older gentleman sitting across from me, a sure veteran of Israel’s conscription military, recoiled slightly, turned up his nose and said to his young grandson: “I’d almost forgotten what army smells like.” 

The old man wasn’t wrong. Months of infantry training in the desert bakes sweat, dirt, blood, and excrement into your boots, uniform, and hair until the grime becomes a sort of pungent second skin. The scents mingle into a telltale olfactory cocktail. It packs a sharp punch.

Even now I can smell it. The sweet stench of sweat and wet wipes, and how a week’s worth of the mixture calcifies white on a shirt. The metallic miasma of endless cans of tuna. The sour tang of hastily-applied boot polish. These smells quickly yank me from the comforts of the present and revitalize the specters of the past. The eternal hours guarding miles and miles of silent, patient sand. Brief, worried phone calls from family members. Panicked arguments with an anxious partner. The nagging uncertainty, the questions reverberating across every combat soldier’s consciousness: Will I die on this patrol? Will one of my friends die? Will I have to kill someone?

Three years later, and life smells better. Hot showers are thankfully staples of modern American life. Peppermint iced tea sits in a pitcher. Bread bakes in the oven. And still, uncertainty runs amok: my father spent nearly three weeks self-quarantining in his room with a constant low-grade fever, officially diagnosed with COVID days later. He took brief excursions to the backyard to feel real, natural sunshine before disappearing again behind a closed door. I saw him sparingly over the period, but I asked questions while running, working, and doing the dishes uncannily similar to those I asked as a soldier: will I get sick? Will my father get better? Will my mother, severely immunocompromised after a decade of living with blood cancer, be OK? What if the answer is No? 

I’ve found uncertainty in the acrid cloud of gunpowder, body odor, and tuna fish tethered to a shooting range on a distant military base. In the stale, filtered, antiseptic air of a hospital room, woven into my prayer that a parent recovers from pneumonia post-chemotherapy. Hiding mischievously in the delicious fragrance of freshly baked bread on a kitchen table in a suburban home, as I wait for a pandemic to graciously see its way out. In moments of panicked silence, uncertainty doesn’t smell like anything.  

My father’s fever broke on Day 20, and my mother never got COVID. It can seem like the choppy waves of life are punctuated by islands of certainty, little sandbars where you can ground your feet and catch a breath before diving back in as another swell crests overhead. Recently, I’ve experimented with a different approach. Buddhist teacher Trungpa described life as such: “The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.” 

What do we do, where do we go, when we are confronted with uncertainty? How do we feel when we suddenly find certainty? The questions I used to ask, and still sometimes do, could only be answered through time and patience. Exhaustively ruminating over potential outcomes and possible plans of action and getting ready to get ready is painfully deceiving. Paradoxically to our control-oriented minds, the future eludes preparation: it is too expansive, too complex, too surprising. The casualty of constantly anticipating a ground that doesn’t come is that we live fearfully clenched, braced for impact, eyes desperately straining for a sandbar. 

Forget the sandbar. Pull your family close and smell the bread in the oven. Letting go doesn’t erase fear, but it may allow you to refocus hope. 

The views expressed in the Penn Pandemic Diary are solely the author’s and not those of Penn or Perry World House.