What I Smelled from My Bike This Week

The leaves changed all at once this week: the maples got red, the oaks bright yellow. In the evening now, the air smells of the long-disused fireplaces and wood-burning stoves bleeding smoke again. On dry days like today, its rich scent is pervasive and differs from block to block, depending on what kind of wood they’re burning; on wet days like earlier in the week, I only smell damp smoke for an instant before I’m out of range.

There are lots of other smells along my bike commute. On Greeley, I often get noxious belches of exhaust in my face when the big trucks off Swan Island pass me. On Interstate, I occasionally get a noseful of the pungent steeping smell of wart boiling at the Widmer Brewery. During heavy rains the city’s sewers tend to overflow into the Willamette, and as I pass under the Broadway Bridge I can smell the sharp bite of shit water.

On a completely unrelated note: today on Broadway, I got cut off twice, and someone almost doored me– another cyclist slapped the person’s rearview mirrow and shouted, “You’ve gotta look!” As a north-south bike corridor through downtown, Broadway really sucks. Here’s my thought: the city ought to take the two streets on either side of the Park Blocks (which are already one-way streets with little through-traffic other than seekers of on-street parking), turn most of the stopsigns towards the intersecting streets, and make them bike boulevards. With some stoplights at major intersections like Burnside, that would create low-traffic north- and south-bound bike routes through the heart of downtown where I won’t get run over by RAZ buses, or by out-of-towners in rental cars pulling away from valet parking at high-end hotels.