beware the rat

well my nose does not lie to me. friday morning, when i topped that little rise on south state, by the varsity tennis center with those thoughtfully-designed stormwater detention basins out front, with the reeds and cattails and tall grasses that make such a nice home for the red-winged blackbirds, who now sing "ok-a-lee-ee" to me every morning as i pass by, and i thought i smelled that slightly rancid smoke smell, the smell of a burning building that has been largely extinguished and is mostly soaking wet with maybe a little smoldering going on in a corner, beneath some rubble, and i wondered why i was smelling that and what building could have burned because i didn't see anything, and anyway i was tooling along cheerfully and just sort of taking in the smells as i rode by, thinking about how when you look out across a forest after you have climbed a hill and you see hundreds if not thousands of shades of green and brown, or maybe it is autumn and the greens and brown have been supplemented with reds and oranges and yellows, and all those different colors are almost too much to imagine but really you like it, because it's beautiful, and how that must be like what happens when a dog steps outside and takes a breath of the outside air, that the dog takes in and recognizes as many smells as we do colors, smelling all the different animals and plants, the urine and musk of hundreds of rodents and the mold spores and the exudate of the snails on the garden walls and the motor oil that some bonehead poured onto the street and a mcdonalds hamburger tossed from a car and a bunch of things that we don't think of as having any smell at all but of course they do. anyway i read in the paper that the pto thrift shop, which was down the other side of that rise off state street, out of view of the street (next to where ann arbor plastics used to be, i used to go there a lot), burned the night before, pretty much a total loss although fortunately no one was hurt, especially the firefighters who would have just as soon kept playing their euchure game all night. and that explained the residue of flares i saw at state and stimson, where the police must have been directing traffic from southbound state onto stimson so the firefighters could do their work without interruption.

so my nose doesn't lie to me. years ago, when i was working on the paint booth scrubber water project, we were having a meeting talking about how the project was going, and how we were coping with keeping the bioreactors alive and happy during the july shutdown, and i commented on how i could tell the paint solvents were beginning to degrade in the storage tanks because of the change in smell, and the lead researcher from ford (who was a native of korea) said "you have a very sensitive nose...were you born in the year of the dog?" and i replied "no, i was born in the year of the rat" and he said "that's very strange" and the room was quiet for a moment, before we moved on. i've always wanted to ask him what he meant by that.

the weekend was spectacularly beautiful, saturday anyway, and i took a soul-nourishing ride along huron river drive, not an extreme workout or anything, just an hour or so of spring beauty (well, not spring beauty per se; the hepatica and bloodroot and even possibly rue anenome were in bloom, and probably spring beauty as well although i did not pick any out as i rode past), watching the sunlight wash the forest floor in the absence so far of leaves, and reflect off the wavelets on the spring-swollen river, just a light breeze from somewhere north and west, breezy enough to make it easier to get home than to leave home, which is how i like it. just me and the white bike and the sun and the breeze.



later i changed the tires on the commuting bike, off with the knobbies and on with the smooth ones, not slicks exactly, something with some tread that will shed water because i do ride in the rain and i'm not interested in going down on my ass (or shoulder or thigh, more likely). and that change of course makes the commuting bike almost totally silent, so there is once again that wonderful moment of peace when i first get on the bike in the morning, and am rolling my way off the robin hills of vesper heights, before i begin battling for my piece of road with those clowns who are furiously racing their way to work before there are only jelly doughnuts left, because my god who wants to eat a jelly doughnut? total loser, that says.

but today i'm good.