Suddenly I felt it again: a yellow-brownish smell, a mixture of damp, dust, burnt bread with the bitter note of smoke, assailing my nostrils like fine sand blown by hot desert winds – the smell of my youth.
It was a hot summer back then too (though quite pleasant by today's standards), with street temperatures in the high Nineties and even higher in the vicinity of the gigantic furnaces incinerating half of Massachusett's municipal waste. The furnaces had to be heated up to 1562 degrees to properly to combust communal waste and I still remember the hellish heat emanating from the boilers built from fireproof cinder blocks. Their maintenance was my first job as a young engineer.
Coping with the heat was the easy part, getting used to the smell another one entirely. If it wouldn't remind me now of my youth, I'd just call it a stink. But some memories refuse to fade. How ironic that this bitter smell is still able to evoke such memories, even decades have passed since almost all such facilities closed down. It seemed cheaper to bury our waste at landfills. To me, it looks like waste is even more reluctant to vanish than decades-old memories.
Anyway, it's time to move on. I see a bulldozer has opened a new path through the garbage heaps. Good. People have been demanding a short-cut through Central Park for a long time now. The smell still lingers in my nose as I put the breathing mask back on and continue walking down Fifth Avenue.
