The attic where I write is stifling for half of the Washington, D.C., year. But in the autumn, breezes gust through the open windows and so do the sounds of our neighborhood—children chatting on their way to school, a barking dog, the squeak of the mailbox across the street being opened, and the clang of it being closed.
Something has changed in recent years. Several times a day, a van pulls up somewhere on the street and a half-dozen Latin American men jump out. These are the leaf-blower men. A leaf-blower is basically an outsized, high-powered hair-dryer. A nine-horsepower motor, suitable for an outboard on a good-sized skiff, is mounted on a backpack and attached by a plastic tube to what looks like a giant baster.
There’s a sudden booming, revving sound that rises to a querulous squeal: zheem-zheem. The men stride onto the neighbor’s lawn like Marines carrying flamethrowers to the mouth of a Saipan cave, and suddenly leaves are being blown in every direction—the soggy ones stumbling across the lawn in clumps, the dried-out ones dancing in the air.
It takes the men half an hour to nozzle them into one big disorderly pile in the street, which they push into garbage bags and drive off with. And for that half-hour, everyone within a block-wide radius is living in an agony of noise. Nothing remains of what anyone moved into the neighborhood for. No coffee on the porch for the grownups, no piano lessons for the teenagers, no rope-skipping songs for the little girls.
To take the full measure of the bizarreness of this spectacle, you must realize that our block is an urban one. No one has anything resembling what an ordinary lawnmower-pushing American suburbanite would dignify with the name “lawn.” Our own yard would fit in a batter’s box. The guy across the street has a yard the size of a squash court. In our neighborhood that passes for a latifundium.
It used to be deemed possible to clear such a space of leaves in 10 minutes, with the help of rakes. These instruments, for the benefit of Washingtonians who have never seen one, made a jingling skring-skring sound, almost like a mandolin, and not so loud that a father and son couldn’t have a conversation before a college football game on a Saturday afternoon. Apparently we would rather have anonymous men invade our neighborhood several times a day with deafening industrial machinery. In most cases leaf-blowing creates disruption, annoyance, and unhappiness and is less efficient than the homespun process it replaced.
Unpleasant, hazardous work that produces zero gains in productivity: This requires exploitable low-wage immigrants. In my neighborhood the leaf-blowing machine is like a Mexican prosthesis—rare is the American citizen who has ever worn one. You can see how certain people might look out their windows muttering in bewilderment that it has been necessary to import people to help us to take this step backward. The workers seem to be the only people who benefit from leaf-blowers, aside from Hitachi, perhaps, which makes the 97-decibel Tanaka TRB24EAP. Or Husqvarna, which makes the two-cycle 125BVx, a machine that blows leaves at 170 mph and emits a noise that tops out at 98 decibels.
There is lack of commonsense in the way we use these machines. Enabling people to live as if their neighborhoods have no natural vegetation at all—is that the goal of the leaf-blower? If so, the old solution to this problem—moving to an apartment—still seems more sensible. Leaves will blow without your help. That is what leaves do. They fall off trees, the wind comes up, and they blow. You might as well have a machine to make water flow downhill.
Last week, WBZ-TV, the CBS affiliate in Boston, reported that the town of Newton had passed an ordinance prohibiting the use of gas-powered leaf-blowers from Memorial Day to Labor Day, and reducing permissible noise from 77 to 65 decibels, whatever that means. Some lady writer-of-letters-to-the-mayor had dreamed the measure up, and CBS did its very best to paint her as a shrew and a killjoy. There was a familiar lunatic-libertarian logic to the report: Well, if you don’t like leaf-blowers, then buy the houses of all your neighbors and order them to move! More reasonable people will place the Newton leaf-blower ban just ahead of Fenway Park, chocolate frappes, and steak tips on the long list of Reasons to Move to New England. Me, I’d be satisfied if someone awarded the inventor of the leaf-blower ban the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
