Good Luck Noses

Here’s what they don’t tell you about Texas: the sunlight has a smell. Something like the texture of honey, slow and impossible to get off you once you make contact. You feel it on you all day whether you mean to or not, a persistent badge of earthy indulgence. But let’s face it: you don’t exactly mind.

But in that moment, from an icy ditch in an Iowa blizzard, sunshine felt a million miles away. Tram couldn’t stop shivering, but not from the sub-zero chill. It was the kind of shivering that comes from almost losing your life in the middle of nowhere from the passenger seat of a 2006 Toyota Camry.

Being from Minnesota, Tram is familiar with the middle of nowhere. But pitched forward in that ditch, she realized that near-death experiences severely amplified the feeling. One moment she’d been snoozing peacefully against her Squishmallow, a fuzzy blue fellow named Dean. The next, she felt the car’s wheels spinning out on a patch of black ice, and then off it into an even blacker ditch.

With the visceral crunch of metal on ice, the spinning stopped. She and her roommate, Vivien, turned to each other, shock slashed across their faces. After making sure they (and Dean) still had all their limbs, they dared to ask: Should we turn back? They had been driving for 19 hours.

Shaken as they were, Tram was not the giving up type. She certainly wasn’t the type of person to pick up and move across the country in a borrowed car with nothing to show for it. Since being evicted from campus, she’d done nothing but try, try, try, build, build, build — to varying outcomes, sure, but with universal resilience. As they waited for the tow truck, she looked back across the horizon toward Minnesota, where she’d come from. And then, inhaling Iowa’s stench of manure sharpened with snow, she steeled herself like the toes of boots in Texas, their destination.

As they say in Texas, it wasn’t her first rodeo. Tram had been building a life in Austin since last semester after googling “Best cities to live in when you’re young and broke.” The city did not disappoint. Guitars strumming amidst construction’s cacophony, a fresh adventurousness that drifted through the window along with the smell of food trucks. Tram perfected her chicken stir fry (the secret ingredient, she reports, is hella honey), in addition to the art of “heading out to study” with an overnight bag slung over her arm. But this semester, returning to Austin at 40 miles an hour after a tow truck had pulled them out of a ditch, she was searching for a more connected sense of adventure.

And Tram is the sort of person who finds what she’s looking for. Not content to smell sunlight through the window, she talked to strangers in Butler Metro Park. She wandered along new streets each day, Austin’s many streams glittering like the change she tossed into almost every open guitar case. Back at home, she’d put her aching feet up and get down to business on dating apps.

That is, until she came across a handsome profile populated almost entirely by pictures taken by water. Yet to Tram, the real beauty in those scenic photos was their subject, a fellow Harvard student with defined features and the kindest smile. He glowed in the sun. On their first date in Zilker Park, they bought a Shamrock Shake to celebrate St. Patrick’s day — and learned of their shared lactose allergy in a Texas-style standoff of who would sample the first sip.

Together they took their glow on the road in long drives to San Antonio and other destinations in the Southwest, Carlos the Camry their steadfast steed. Sun-faded paper maps and skydiving, aged ruins and fresh flowers, laughter over Home Culture dinners across the table from newfound University of Texas friends: This was the life that Tram had built.

Tram’s sister in law had once told her that she possessed mũi may mắn— a good luck nose. I realized she was right — anyone could see that Tram’s nose was good luck, even from just a passing glance. But I also knew that luck had hardly anything to do with it. Tram’s opportunities to smell sunlight — she built those herself. Tram knows how to make your life your own by always being down for adventure. Sure, sometimes you end up in an icy ditch, or sneaking out of your own apartment like you’re grounded in high school. But if you keep on going, you’ll end up gliding across the desert in the red glow of a Texas sunset, fresh blooms keeping your Squishmallow company in the backseat. Because the smell of sunlight doesn’t come to you, no matter how lucky your nose is. If there’s anything Tram has learned, the true good luck nose is the one that sniffs out adventure amidst adversity.

The author extends her deepest gratitude to Ngọc Trâm Nguyễn ’22 of Leverett House. Thank you for contributing your story.

— Abby T. Forbes ’22 is a Philosophy concentrator in Adams House. Her column “The Trades” appears on alternate Fridays.