I stood on the boardwalk at Seaside Heights, N.J., and all about me lights flashed and glimmered and glowed and collectively held back the night. Red and blue bulbs defined the downward curve of the "scenic railway," as my mother called the roller coaster, and from off in the dark I could hear the artillery crump of waves as they hit the sand. I was 3 years old and could taste the salt in the air. I felt the moisture of my mother's hand holding mine as we watched the cars click by with my two brothers, on the ride, laughing, their hair flying.

As I stood there creating the earliest memory of my life, I detected a strong aroma. It rose from the boards beneath my feet, and sealed this memory indelibly in my mind, the way a

drop of golden sap in a Baltic forest creeps over an insect and holds it fast for all time.

It was the smell of creosote. I never forgot it, never will. Always, it evokes the beach.

Human beings, I have read, can detect about 10,000 different odors. These can't always be identified or called forth. But the sense can, and does, differentiate them. We all have favorite smells, but it is uncertain how or why favor is bestowed. Because the smells are sweet? Floral? Erotic? Or because of personal experiences associated with them?

Would the scent of creosote, an oily, black, gummy substance distilled from coal tar, and for years the preferred wood preservative, be pleasing to me absent the events of that night? Probably not.

It is clear that odors lock up memories, good and bad. They are like little strongboxes. The smell of creosote holds my happiest memory; it is a child's memory of a moment uncompromised by && knowledge of time's capacity to annihilate all, happiness and grief alike, before the realization that all things end.

Some people come to escape this tragic knowledge. People with Alzheimer's disease, I have read, lose their ability to smell as they lose their memory. Their little strongboxes are stolen from them.

Our family has been vacationing at Bethany Beach or Rehoboth off and on for about 25 years. We avoid Ocean City: It is noisy, crowded, dirty, vulgar, paved over, treeless and full of other qualities we want to escape. But it has its points: It is insanely unrestrained and overstated, completely free of the middle-class smugness that characterizes the "Quiet Resorts" farther up the beach.

Once a year we drive down to the boardwalk at Ocean City and let the children indulge themselves until they babble with happiness and then grow cranky and wind up getting yelled at. In Ocean City, the senses are brought under siege. Children grow dizzy after half an hour there.

It is difficult to say what the boardwalk at Ocean City smells like: If there is a brisk sea breeze, most of its myriad fragrances escape unarrested; if the day is still and hot, it smells like everything at once. All 10,000 separate odors within our range become one vast solution that washes over an olfactory sense not evolved enough to know one from the other.

This year we tried to record some of these smells sequentially. Wife Susana had an idea: recruit extra noses, acute noses. Cute noses. Thus, both grandsons, Nicholas and his younger brother, Stefan, were invited. We meandered down the boardwalk from 11th Street to the amusement pier; they were alert to their mission. This is what they reported:

Caramel, popcorn, crab pepper, cigarette smoke, hot rubber, burned meat, the bay, (Assawoman) yew bushes, wet sand, candle wax, frying dough (we stopped for funnel cake), burned meat again, tomato sauce, fresh soap emanating from clean skin, tattoos (I can't quite explain that one), tomato juice, sweet lemonade, a noisome antiseptic aroma wafting out of the public toilets, wet concrete (the boardwalk yields to that near the pier), a perfume, bubble gum, hot grease, vinegar, another perfume.

At that point in our count a ferocious storm broke over our heads; the amusement pier closed, and wooden shutters slammed shut all around and everybody ran for their cars or crammed into dark bars. Every smell but that of the rain vanished with the tide that rolled through the streets in an immense hydraulic purge. We got drenched and smelled very much like the dog frequently does.

Turning a page

The beach in winter is richer in smells for me. This, on the surface of it, doesn't make sense: heat generates odor, agitates its molecules and flings them into the air. That's why warm food is always tastier than cold: Its aroma rises invitingly to meet you.

One year in Rehoboth, our beach house was full of books. The books had been years in that house, and their pages were suffused with smells that evoked the aridity of the cold seasons there. It was information parallel to the texts. The odors contained in old books at the beach lead the mind to the washed sky over the sand in January; they recall the dark annoyance of the sea, the hysteria of the wave's spindrift. They bring forth the reality of monkish solitude and the memories of the scrubbed faces of nuns.

The beach in summer is perfumed. Around Bethany tthe pitch pines and Loblolly drench the seacoast with their heavy primal fragrance; the bayberrys bring forth the rusty aroma of their gray fruit; sweet honeysuckle saturates the air; lilies kick in. The atmosphere just back from the beach is riotously floral.

On the beach people douse themselves with lotions and oils and musky perfumes, mosquito repellent, hair fixative. They cook in the open air, bring pungent dishes out of Styrofoam containers. They sweat, use too much deodorant. That is what summer does, masks the more fundamental smells of the seashore with all these shallow, short-lived aromas.

In winter, the mask comes off and the first hints of rot advance. Where the perfume was comforting, exciting, encouraging, lusty and even reassuring, the smell of rot troubles the mind. The trouble derives from our ambiguous response to it: Rot is repellent, but it has a faint appeal. The sea sends word of dying fish, and expels the corpses of crabs and turtles. Salt covers all, and salt is the antithesis of fresh.

Fresh is our announced preference. But it is an inadequate descriptive for what is truly desirable. We are beguiled by the idea, or the word: "fresh." We regard it as a perfect if brief stage in everything before us, especially that which we propose to eat.

Think about it! We demand fresh fruit and vegetables. But fresh is immature; fresh is green; fresh lacks fragrance, richness of odor and color, deep taste. A new blossom has none of the heady fragrance of one fully developed. Nor does an orange that is too taut, or an unsoft peach.

Ripe is what we really need. We buy cantaloupes at stands on the roads leading to the shore. We squeeze them; they must give way to the pressure of the fingers. We have to catch them just before they turn, when decomposition is very nearly at hand. When we get them home and sit in the kitchen and cut them open the fragrance that springs forth gives a shock of joy to the blood, a sudden electric pleasure.

It is all indescribable. That is one of the problems with scents and odors; they lack a rich vocabulary of their own. That's why Diane Ackerman, who wrote "A Natural History of the Senses," describes smell as the mute sense. The sunrise is red or gold or lilac. The sea is green or black. One can feel the rough surface of the cantaloupe or the fuzz on the peach. We can see the color, and approve or disapprove. But what is the scent of a peach? Or of a cantaloupe? Can you say it? Could you describe it to someone who has never experienced a cantaloupe?

Can you smell the sea? What is the scent of a wave? This is not impossible to know: If you get turned over in the surf and inadvertently take some of it in, taste it, you will know something, but not all, of what it smells like.

There is a town a few miles to the east of Bethany that calls itself Ocean View. It is a fraudulent name. An anecdotal history of the region records that years ago a farm boy at a town fair climbed to the top of the tallest pine tree and shouted: "I can see the ocean from here!" Evidently the chamber of commerce liked that, so they officially renamed the town. (The same history doesn't record what it used to be called.)

Though Ocean View is utterly without ocean view, it is not without pride - or smell. It describes itself as the epicenter of the Sussex County broiler chicken industry. It is surrounded by chickens and chicken houses.

About three years ago, grandson Nicholas took an interest in these low structures that mar the landscape throughout the three states that share the Delmarva Peninsula. He asked to see inside one. So, on a very hot summer day I took him by the hand and we went out and found one in Ocean View. What he saw was the broiler chicken version of the Black Hole of Calcutta, and what he smelled was a reek and a stench I'm sure he'll never forget. You can bet on that.

Another day we visited the boardwalk at Bethany, a small thing compared to the endless wooden road at Ocean City, and without all the commotion of pleasure to it. It was not a windy day, but I was unable to detect the scent of creosote that hovered beneath those odorless, greenish, salt-treated boards (the preferred way to preserve wood these days). The superstructure, I knew, was still coated with creosote, the deeply-thrust pilings and thick cross boards. I tried, but I couldn't draw it up. I thought briefly of going down underneath to taste that pleasurable memory I knew was there.

But Nicholas wanted to go to the arcade up the street, so of course that's where we went. There are always new strong boxes to be filled.

Pub Date: 7/13/98