Hauling Secrets

My ankle has mostly healed and I’m back to work. Thanks for all your well-wishes.

So the other day Wonderboy and I are cleaning out the place next to the maintenance garage at a huge student condo complex where all the residents throw out their large items before moving. The maintenance guy tells us they’ve had problems with new residents scavenging from these piles and complaining later about bedbugs. It’s pretty nasty. Mostly mattresses that have been sitting out getting rained on for weeks.

A completely waterlogged full-size futon cushion, by the way, is one of the heaviest and most awkward things a hauler will ever have to carry.

There’s a faint smell of skunk the whole time we’re doing this job. It gets stronger as we get deeper into the pile. The maintenance guy tells us they’ve been smelling it for weeks. So me and Wonderboy are expecting to see a skunk under every mattress that we pry up from the wet dirt. And when you’re expecting to see something, you start to think you see it everywhere. A few tense minutes go by before I uncover this:

I make a mad dash away before I realize that the skunk is dead. It must’ve been there for weeks. And we had to smell it for the time it took to load four truckloads of nasty student apartment castoffs.

Hauling is not all games and treasures. We have to go through things like this in order to get to the good stuff.