Outdoor Bob and the Leaf Blower From Hell...

We have this neighbor, see? I call him ‘Outdoor Bob’ because he’s ALWAYS outdoors. Bob frequently gives indications of being a real-life Tim ‘Tool-Time’ Taylor clone, since he appears obsessed with powerful, noxious and noisy mechanically operated garden tools.

Bob, so wifie learned some time ago from Bob’s better half, is a serious insomniac and since he has serious difficulties going to sleep at night, gets up at all hours and prowls around the neighborhood, ostensibly keeping an eye on things (Bob’s a one-time retired ex-prison guard).

That’s fine, since ‘Outdoor Bob’ is by rights a good fellow, communally spirited and a fine neighbor…except for his one truly aggravating idiosyncrasy and that’s an obsessive-compulsive relationship with his 200 HP, Dual-Hydramatic, fuel-injected, fully suspended and supercharged gasoline leaf blower.

Bob is so involved with this garden tool-on-steroids of his that he’s turned into a regular Leaf Cop in our section of the ‘hood. He obviously sees himself as being a Good Samaritan when he prowls about his front lawn (and that of his immediate neighbor, a wonderful, old retired Chinese-American fellow we all respect & love), eradicating tree waste products and making the world safe from rotting vegetation.

Regardless of his obvious motivational myopia, Bob clearly hasn’t a clue that some of us in this neck of the woods hate noisy, dirty leaf blowers so intensely that it occasionally drives us to fantasise about homicidal schemes involving firing-squads, pock-marked concrete walls, blindfolds, last cigarettes and short-lists of culpable neighborly urban miscreants.

Outdoor Bob, I have theorized, turned into the semi-crazed leaf bounty hunter that he is partly due to his OTHER immediate neighbor, an older fellow who has this HUGE deciduous tree in his backyard that grows right on the border between their two homes. The tree’s owner (let’s call him ‘Martin’) is a recovered multiple cardiac bypass patient, who strives to lead a stress-free and relaxed life, tending his roses and minding his own business. You see, Bob has a backyard swimming pool on his side of the fence separating his and Martin’s property and this tree, which is unusually large and overgrown, regularly deposits half its shed leaves on Bob’s pool. This, of course, drives Outdoor Bob mad with insane frenzy, since he is having to constantly clean up all the debris from this particularly messy tree of Martin’s. Admittedly, in his defense, it’s an annoying and irresolvable dilemma.

This bad experience with trees doing their natural ‘job’ (copiously shedding leaves) seems to have set Bob on the path towards becoming what I call a ‘Leafopath’ (something of a leaf psychopath, but I’m sure you know what I mean). Bob has become indeed that and he probably has accordingly armed himself with one of the world’s most powerful leaf blowers available in the Western world.

Since Martin (Bob’s neighborly nemesis) could care less about what his tree drops into Bob’s yard, they have reached an impasse whereby they can barely be cordial with each other and I’m sure Bob has become such an irritating complainer about Martin’s tree that Martin likely takes secret Schadenfreude delight every time a gust of wind makes a leafy new deposit in Bob’s pool.

Given that their dispute stands about as much chance of resolution as a Neo-Nazi Skinhead's chances of becoming a member of the Jewish faith, Bob seems to have (perhaps subconsciously) taken on a new role in life as the scourge of all leaves, everywhere. All of that is fine and good, except that Outdoor Bob also fancies himself a sort of ‘good-neighbor leaf vigilante’ and makes his rounds with the leaf blower every single day of the week. Not only that, but his leaf-blowing pathology has moved him out from the boundaries of his own property onto the neighboring lawns, where he takes it upon himself to rearrange THEIR leaves as well as his. He also ventures out into the street and again, acting somewhat like the Wyatt Earp of our block, blows the leaves in the street this way and that, mostly away from his own lawn.

Now, I personally have a distaste for ANY unnecessary neighborhood noise and particularly machine-created disturbances of all kinds. Anything that clanks, buzzes or moans excessively that is powered by a mechanical motor serves to irritate the hell out of me, since I am of the opinion that ‘noise pollution’ is an execrable and largely inexcusable intrusion into the needs of people in congested residential neighborhoods for peace, quietude and domestic reflectivity.

Unfortunately, the concept of ‘noise pollution’ as an increasingly serious environmental problem (quality of life) seems to be beyond the remotest awarenesses of far too many people, most having been socialized by our technologically enslaved American culture to equate noise, power and goodness with anything that rises above 68 or so decibels.

As for myself, I have been an environmentalist all of my life, starting off back in undergrad school days in Berkeley (CA), and have also been an ardent outdoorsman, mountaineer and champion of natural things. That sort of outlook clearly makes an instant enemy (to me) out of anything made by man that is artificial, noisy, polluting and/or aesthetically deleterious. In today’s highly mechanized society, that makes leaf blowers one of the prime offenders against otherwise peaceful domesticity…especially when one’s urban neighbors are typically only a few feet distant from you.

Leaf blowers, surely one of the nastiest and most annoying inventions since the snowmobile and the chainsaw, are not just excessively noisy (why? Because engineering effective mufflers & sound deadening devices for small gasoline engines is more R&D money than manufacturers want to invest in their machines), they are also smelly and create clouds of pollen saturated dust that fill the streets with spores and other hay-fever-causing materials to create major havoc for the majority of people who suffer from seasonal allergies (probably about 85% of us, at least).

Ask any runner or bicyclist who has had to run by or through such a cloud of leaf-blower-created, dust-laden effluent on his/her daily jaunt and he/she will affirm the fact that leaf-blower use should at the very least, be carefully regulated like firearms, pet owning and/or human procreation (read: ‘baby-making’, for those who are not imaginatively adept at drawing inferences). That is, given their potential for creating untoward effects and sparking ill-will between aesthetically sensitive people and less broadly aware individuals, the use of leaf blowers ought to be at the very least restricted to specific times or days and perhaps even decibel ‘do-not-exceed’ limits. Personally, I’m a believer in the quiet & therapeutic value of good old fashion manual leaf control devices (rakes) and would love nothing better than to see leaf blowers banned outright.

Aside from powered outdoor tool freaks (like Outdoor Bob), the present industry of garden & lawn maintenance service providers argues that the leaf blower has enabled them to adopt an extremely cost-effective ‘blitzkrieg’ approach to performing lawn services. What used to be quite labor-intensive (lawn mowing & leaf raking, for example) is now a relatively quick, precise and simple procedure, enabling them to exponentially expand their customer base, thereby increasing income and simultaneously decreasing man-hours of effort.

My reply to that argument? Tough patooties! The way leaf blowers are used these days results not so much in leaf containment & disposal but in what I call ‘leaf rearranging’. This is a particular specialty of Outdoor Bob and his megamonster leaf blower, since he doesn’t seem to understand that leaf-blowing when there’s ANY kind of a breeze is not just ineffectual but absolutely stupid. ‘Rearranging’ leaves that will in the next gust be right back where they were before takes a unique and special kind of brain-cell failure, in my opinion.

Yesterday Outdoor Bob unlimbered his trusty blower and persisted in battling leaves despite the fact that the local wind was blowing steadily at 30 MPH. That’s not an exaggeration, either, since the pert little, big breasted female weather person on the local media channel confirmed what was all too evident to anyone standing outside and nearly being blow sideways by the gusts (“Steady at 30, gusting to 45” was how she phrased it).

And that’s fully part of the problem regarding Outdoor Bob. He just doesn’t seem to either understand or care about ‘leaf-to-wind speed’ considerations. Further, his manic leaf blowing has begun to resemble a sort of OCD therapy that he is compelled to engage in every day (he's already been out there TWICE today, fer gawd's sake!).

But wait…there’s more! Yesterday Outdoor Bob mounted a particularly massive offensive against errant leaves and not just tried to clear his (Chinese-American) neighbor’s lawn, but that of the neighbor on the far side of the Chinese gentleman’s lawn, since the wind was blowing his leaves merrily down the street onto everyone’s lawn that was downwind. Um…hello? What don't we understand about the effects of WIND?

Finally, in a massive final assault on his hated leafy enemy, Outdoor Bob turned towards our home (located across the street from him, sort of catty-corner) and started to blow leaves that had come from our beautiful, big camphor tree back onto our lawn. He even came into the driveway and walked on our front lawn, trying to corral and contain OUR leaves on OUR lawn.

Well, that was definitely waaaay overstepping the limits of both proprieties and common sense, since camphor trees shed several times a year and my wife and I (who have no problem with falling leaves naturally doing their ‘gravitational thing’) have a lawn service person over every Wednesday to take care of our front lawn maintenance (unfortunately they too use a leaf blower, but at least it’s only once a week).

Living in Sacramento (CA), a small hinckty cow-town that coincidentally is also the State Capitol and whose motto is ‘The City of Trees’, there’s little quarter either given or taken on the issue of leaf blowers by the city council (a group that exercises about as much in the way of municipal wisdom as all Three Stooges combined). Thus, those of us who suffer interminably from the noisy thoughtlessness of our fellow citizens seem perpetually doomed to suffer through this epidemic of leaf-blowers without respite.

As would be reasonable, given my mightily suppressed urge to castrate Outdoor Bob for his outrageous leafy excesses (and thereby help prevent future iterations of his spawn), I turned to the internet to see if others have been tempted to take the law into their own hands in dealing with domestic harmony disrupters like him. Naturally GOOGLE immediately turned up at least a dozen or more recent instances in which some outraged and temporarily driven-over-the-edge citizen beat the living pahootie out of such an idiot, typically resulting in a legal ruling of unjustified homicide (without intent to kill…perhaps just maim a little?). It was a sobering reminder that it’s never easy living anywhere among other humming beans, whether in a community or in an even tighter residential context.

Basically, there’s no convenient option to deal with the noisy intrusion of these infernal devices (at least here in the…groan…’City of Trees’) other than the fermented grape juice that God presented humanity, thousands of years ago, as a sort of natural handy ‘local anaesthetic’ to treat grosser violations of normative human behavioral conduct in a community.

Since I knew that any protest directly to Outdoor Bob delivered in person by myself would likely result in a rapidly hormone-charged escalation of mutual antagonisms, I wisely let my sweet little 5 foot tall wife take her rake out there and ‘shame’ Bob into retreating back onto his own lawn. It seems to have worked, as she innocuously button-holed him (he’s a fairly reasonable fellow, after all) and subtly suggested (with a friendly smile) that his blowing the leaves back onto our lawn (mind you, this conversation conducted in the midst of a howling 30 mph wind) merely complicated the pending job our own lawn service people faced. The ole female guilt trip works every time (on ANY man, for any reason).

Worked like a charm (at least to get Bob to realise to a sufficient extent that he was way overstepping the bounds in his leaf-destroying, evangelical enthusiasms). Amusingly, it reminded me of an old Student Leftist tactic we had employed, back in my 70s Berkeley student protest days, of getting all the women and children ‘up front’ between us & the pigs. After all, if you can’t deal with them directly, hit ‘em up with some inherently instinctive normative, Christian logic (i.e. women and child abuses are definitely NOT acceptable to good, God-fearing Christian people, no matter who you are or how far along your personal psychotherapy program is progressing!).

Sigh. Speaking of that, I wonder how Bob’s insomnia is doing. At least he’s not prowling the neighborhood streets at night with his infernal leaf machine!

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Postscript

A last word on Outdoor Bob: Did I mention that Outdoor Bob also has two evil little Cocker Spaniels that bark their heads off all day long at the slightest provocation? Well he does. And they are among the most neurotic little sorry-excuses for canines I have ever seen. My Uncle had one and he was just as bad.

One of the reasons I am a Siberian Husky fan is that they are NOT prone to barking. That isn't to say that they NEVER do, but they are NOT maddening little yappers like most American Cockers tend to be. Siberians are normally very quiet by contrast and, naturally enough given that trait, make terrible guard dogs (but I don't keep dogs for that purpose; I value loyal companionship above all else, which Siberians are noted for).

It's been noted by several on-line dog authorities that if not carefully selected from a concerned and reputable dog breeder, Cockers can be among the most neurotic breeds found (right up there with Jack Russells and...ugh!...Chihuahuas.

At any rate, I suppose it's fitting that Outdoor Bob be burdened with hyperactive, hypersensitive and hypernoisy pets. Let them drive HIM crazy!

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[A related specific instance concerning leaf-blower related aggression, for your amusement.]