For some peace and quiet, give me back the smoke
by Jack Cashill
Autumn ain't what it used to be. It strikes me as a bit less social, much less aromatic, and infinitely louder than just a generation ago.
On the plus side, however, this unwilled cultural erosion offers a teachable moment in the rule of law and the limits of government.
In the way of background, people in metros like ours used to rake their leaves to the gutter and burn them. This had several salutary side effects, most notably the wonderfully resonant aroma that permeated whole neighborhoods and the lure of the fire that pulled neighbors together.
Each autumn, to be sure, some goofball kid somewhere in America would fail in his attempt to jump the leaf pile and get toasted along with the leaves. And, of course, there was the smoke, to which not everyone cottoned.
Still, for most Americans of a certain age, the past that the smell of burning leaves evokes is a more harmonious and wholesome place than the noisy, unlovely present.
We lost something along the way, and I am not sure I know where or how. We cannot even blame this one on Washington. At least until the White House appoints a leaf-burning czar—always a possibility—the feds have left regulation to states and cities.
To be sure, the EPA has lectured the locals that leaf burning “pollutes the air” and “can make breathing difficult,” but the real lure for the states and cities was the media stroke that follows the exercise of arbitrary power in any arguably green cause.
Missouri preempted its communities and banned routine burning for those in metro areas, including our own. Kansas, which permits ranchers to burn whole ranges of pasture, seems to have left the decision to the municipalities, and the prissier ones that hug the state line responded as one would expect.
I do not recall there being a referendum on any ban anywhere. Had I been consulted, I would have voted to keep the home fires burning, but I wasn’t, and they aren’t.
The bans, however, had unintended consequences. The abrupt end of the leaf-burning era ushered in the age of mechanized leaf blowing, proof—as if such proof were needed—that not all progress is positive.
The sound of autumn today in Kansas City is the unholy sound of a leaf blower. On a descending scale of neighborhood noises—the eerie whistle of a distant train, the puttering of a lawn mower, even the rolling rumble of a rap-mobile—the leaf blower is at rock bottom, and the only one that inspires me to put pen to paper.
As I write, the shrill lament of a blower permeates my house. It is 8:13 a.m. When I take walks in the fall, I almost never leave a blower’s toxic sphere of influence. The whine carries a good two blocks in every direction.
I am particularly intrigued/irritated by the weekend warriors, the amateurs, the ones with ear protectors and gas-powered, 135-mph, 355 cubic feet per minute, Echo PB-265L blowers strapped to their backs Ghostbuster-style. These guys—and they are inevitably that—will leave no leaf un-blown. I see them blasting under decks, prodding recalcitrant leaves out of bushes where they have nestled for centuries, shooing each and every leaf off the street as though they were dollar bills.
These guys love an audience. Have some friends over for a little front porch lemonade on an Indian summer day, and the leaf-busters will appear on cue.
I want them banned, banished even, maybe imprisoned.
The reader might now be musing: OK, Jack, so much for your vaunted libertarianism. Not so fast, I respond. As the essential libertarian maxim posits, your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose.
I would adapt that to say that your right to blow leaves ends at the drum of my ear. If you choose to blow leaves—or whatever—in the privacy of your own bedroom, I would be the last one to object, but when your noise invades the commons, it seems to me, you subject yourself to the rule of law.
How we arrive at that law, however, is where today’s civics lesson lies. For starters, as I read my constitution, I see no “shall not be infringed” clause for leaf blowing. Likewise, I see no constitutional protection against leaf blowing. The ACLU will get no call from me.
So I fall back on the 10th Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Let us start with the people. When anyone can grasp an issue, and the outcome affects every citizen, a referendum makes perfect sense.
There is no need to pass the responsibility on to elected representatives—especially in the logic-free zone of the KC City Council.
In that leaf blowing has no repercussions beyond the immediate area, the tighter the voting community, the better. In this case, one sees the wisdom in having Johnson County divvied into 500 or so little jurisdictions.
I understand also that not everyone agrees with me. My wife, for instance, is an inveterate blower of leaves, though, happily, not of the Ghostbuster level of intensity. In a referendum, I know I could not carry my own house, and I doubt that I could carry the community.
Were I more progressive in my thinking, I could get a paper peer-reviewed by the obliging chaps at the Climate Research Unit, proving that leaf blowing causes climate change. This would at least get The Star’s support.
Or I could concoct some equally dubious science around second-hand leaf-blowing stress syndrome. A comparable strategy worked in Kansas City to ban cigarettes even in private establishments.
Or maybe I could just argue that leaf blowing has a disparate impact on women and minorities and enlist the various watchdog groups to my cause.
But believing as I do in limited constitutional government, carried out as close to home as possible, argued as honestly as the data will permit, I will simply restrict my argument to this: Leaf blowing can be annoying.
Needing 51 percent of my fellows to agree that leaf blowing annoys them enough to pass leaf-blowing restrictions, I will likely have to leave the imprisonment clause out of the referendum.
My wife might have trouble with that clause, in any case.
To get over the majority hump, I suspect I will have to make additional concessions, maybe just limiting hours and days of the blowing.
And if all else fails, as it might a working democracy, there are always those Bose QuietComfort 2 Acoustic Noise-Canceling Headphones. 
Return to Ingram's December 2009
Jack Cashill is Ingram's Executive Editor and has been affiliated with the magazine for 28 years. He can be reached at jackcashill@yahoo.com. The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's Magazine.