Life, Leaf-blowers, & Locusts

 

Hear this, O elders, give ear, all inhabitants of the land! 

Has such a thing happened in your days or in the days of your ancestors?

 Tell your children of it,  and let your children tell their children,
    and their children another generation.

What the swarming locust left,   the hopping locust has eaten, 

, 

and what the hopping locust left, the destroying locust has eaten.

Joel 1:2-4

Hear O Belleviille, if you can hear above the din. In the beauty of the Autumn the leaf-blowers have swarmed the burbs causing all to scatter before them, onto the streets and neigbours yards. The leaves are vanquished, and so too are the humans. 

If you have indulged me through the years of this blog you'll be all too aware that I despise leaf-blowers and their evil companions leaf-suckers. They are the high-pitched machines which ruin the peace and quiet of those who live anywhere within ten blocks...I may exaggerate slightly. Even though we can remember the day when a rake or two would be sufficient for Fall leaves every household must have one now. 

We have several people living in close proximity who head out at least once a day, and some twice. One of them begins in April (I kid you not) and is out there every...damn...day. I have said aloud to Ruth that I'm tempted to bag up leaves from our yard and scatter them on their properties in the night. What holds me back? The possibility of security cameras. 

 Enter a New York Times opinion piece in which celebrated writer Margaret Renkl bemoans the plague-like spread of these machines. Gas powered models can have the approximate noise level of a plane taking off and whose inefficient engines spew fumes equivalent to a pick-up truck. She even uses a biblical image, the swarms of locusts which show up here and there to speak of God's displeasure with those who are unfaithful:

They come in a deafening, surging swarm, blasting from lawn to lawn and filling the air with the stench of gasoline and death. I would call them mechanical locusts, descending upon every patch of gold in the neighborhood the way the grasshoppers of old would arrive, in numbers so great they darkened the sky, to lay bare a cornfield in minutes. But that comparison is unfair to locusts.Grasshoppers belong here.

What is my problem, you ask? A desire for some window in each day for tranquility and a vain hope that we could establish an "acoustical commons" where noise does not prevail at all times. 

I keep wondering when noise polluiton will become more of an issue in municipalities where the levels of sound continue to rise. I do feel that we have the right to "hear ourselves think" and -dare I say it - that is a physical health and spiritual health issue. 

Our ears matter and so do our spirits. Bring on the snowblowers!