Gripe : ‘Leaf Me Alone’

If hell exists, then the devil must employ gardeners with leaf blowers to punish the fallen souls. As a reward for the misery they caused on earth, Satan’s helpers will torture the damned with thunderous decibels for eternity and laugh. No doubt this is appropriate for purgatory, but it shouldn’t be allowed in our earthly neighborhoods.

It never seems to fail. When I am sleeping, eating or working, a gardener will start that confounded engine of suffering. Worse yet, when one begins, another one usually answers, like voracious Molochian crickets.

As we endure the noise of a leaf being blown away, a precious bit of peace in our hectic world is carried along with it. Even the prescient William Shakespeare understood: “What cares these roarers for the name of King?” he wrote, appropriately enough, in “The Tempest.”

Isn’t it strange how we quietly tolerate these assaults on our senses just so leaves and papers can be heaped in piles? We would never allow DC-10s to roar off from our neighbors’ yards, yet in effect this is what plagues our communities daily, except that we can’t board a leaf blower and fly away to somewhere peaceful.

Recognizing the problem of sound pollution, the Los Angeles Police Department operates a four-person Noise Enforcement Team. Yet despite the fact that approximately 15% of the complaints they receive yearly regard leaf blowers, gasoline engine-powered blowers in the city of Los Angeles are not against the law, per se. Only if the offending machine reaches above 65 decibels, measured at a distance of 50 feet, is it considered to be in violation--an unacceptably permissive standard to most people’s ears.

According to Officer Maria Peppers, noise enforcement coordinator for the LAPD Noise Enforcement Team, the last time a citation was issued for this pervasive nuisance was in 1988.

Almost anywhere I go in the city, I can watch the drama of someone whipping up debris and then chasing it down like a farmer scurrying after a bunch of unruly hens. Maneuvering papers with a multi-horsepower engine is simply overkill when picking them up by hand would require just a few quiet seconds. As for the fallen leaves, I say let them stay! They make our neighborhoods look more rustic.

Finally, now that we’re no longer facing a water shortage, the leaf blowers have lost their biggest mitigating factor--sidewalks can again be hosed down. “Give them a rake,” should be our motto. “And leaf me alone.”