It’s a gorgeous early spring day, the minus 15 Celsius wind chill factor notwithstanding, and I’m thinking, “what’s missing?” But not for long. The controlled explosions of two Makita ® BBX7600N, 75.6 cc Gas Backpack Leaf Blowers come as a beautiful post-apocalyptic symphony to my ears. Who could have guessed that was just what I was looking for. The after breakfast silence was just so stressful, as though some evil force wanted me to relax. Mercifully, the pair of hired landscape attendants was sent to keep me sane. Imagine, I might have gone through an entire postprandial promenade in unnatural silence.
Left wing groups, such as Citizens for a Quieter Sacramento, [http://www.nonoise.org/quietnet/cqs/leafblow.htm#grandma ]who would rather live in North Korea, where there are no purring labour saving leaf blowers, try to bully us with facts and reason. They point to the 70 – 75 dB noise levels and become positively hyperbolic about the World Health Organization’s recommended 55 Db levels, a measly 20 Db lower than the advanced leaf blower technology offers up. Then these children of Marx will try and scare us with their advanced math, that this is 1000 times too loud. Duh, we’d all be deaf by now, if that was true, rather than having to live with only a little hearing loss.
Then there’s the, what I like to call, the heavy handed get-the-crooks-in-the-government-involved crowd. They talk about an enterprising gardener-for-hire who quickly grasps that for a small investment in two leaf blowers she can be rid of three rakes and one raker, bringing her extra treasure. And why should she not do so? After all, the technophobes exaggerate, we – you, me and everyone else within earshot of these incredibly noisy machines – have no other choice but to bear the burden of their deafening, controlled explosions. If they could, without facing arrest and incarceration for misdeeds, I’m sure they would smash to smithereens every leaf blower they came across. They may also consider taking over the government, preferably through the electoral process, and oblige all law abiding leaf blower users on their territory to install noise abatement equipment so as to keep their sound emissions at comfortable levels. However, to do so would not only make these devices prohibitively expensive but, also, most likely too heavy to use without some costly wagons in which to move them around. In the end, the cost would be borne by the one reaping the financial benefit. However, as you may have guessed, the enterprising gardener would, at that point, probably find it more profitable to take from storage the three rakes and call back the one laid off raker. And, what they conveniently forget to point out, progress would be stymied. Those same laid off workers could have gone back to school and, perhaps, learned a new skill like medicine or engineering.
The arguments of these sorry anti-leaf blowers hinge on a tenuous proposition: impairing other people’s hearing because of a tiny bit of extra noise, somehow constitutes a real cost to society. Humbug, I say. Can’t we just get all get along and be a little more tolerant of others? What’s a little hearing loss, a little extra stress, the bit of extra danger posed by hurricane level winds to children and small animals and, for the climate ninnies, a piddling amount of CO2, compared to the endless joy of blasting a pile of leaves with a Makita ® BBX7600N, 75.6 cc Gas Backpack Leaf Blower?
