New York Minute 91 - Bag Overboard

Trash stinks. But when large piles of garbage bags sit out in the sweltering summer sun waiting for the Sanitation Department to come along and collect them, their inherent rancidity is amplified to an intensely putrid level. Welcome to New York in July, a place that’s not well-suited for the faint of nose.

The other morning, on a day when the mercury was forecasted to push into the high nineties Fahrenheit, I walked past as one of the Sanitation Engineers tossed a pile of bags, one by one, into the back of a smelly, rusty truck. As the man walked on to the next stack of bags, one of the bags that he had just picked up rolled off of the back of the truck and into the street. 

I thought about calling out to the guy, but he was already halfway down the block. I doubt if he wanted to retrace his steps. The tumbled sack faced one of two potential outcomes. Either it would bake in the heat for another day, or some vehicle would collide with it and spread its rancid contents far and wide. I cursed my indecision, but the garbage man was now a block away, and I didn’t relish the thought of him cursing at me.

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