I take my bike rides at night during the hottest time of the year.  The hilly streets around here are quiet, lights flash on the front and back of my bike, I wear white, and a helmet.   I can get a good aerobic, mind-clearing ride while listening to Bill Moyers, the timer in my pocket counting down an arbitrary 37 minutes.

One thing I’ve noticed this summer is a stinking garbage truck that races down the Avenue between 1 and 2 a.m., the same time I’m usually pumping up and down the hills.  Since the streets are empty, the truck rumbles along at top speed, trailing a wake of wet stink that hangs in the humid air for two blocks behind it.

I keep an eye out for the stinking truck, and smile when I manage to turn up another street to avoid breathing in its humid reek.   Last night, though, they were doing road repairs on both ends of Seaman Avenue.   The broad avenue was blocked off by trucks running their engines to keep the overtime crews inside cool.   I found alternate uphills on a much shortened route and was coming up Indian Road, a fairly steep incline, when the stinking garbage truck roared around the blind turn and came at me on the narrow street.   That I was riding a bicycle uphill and they were speeding the wrong way on a one-way street did not come into the equation for anyone but me.

“Motherfucking stink merchants,” I muttered as I managed to leap a mercifully low curb and continue up the sidewalk next to the narrow one way street.  Then I turned right, breathing hard, and headed into two blocks of the truck’s foul backwash.