OUR NEIGHBORHOOD welcomed the good news that the bells in the Rotunda's tower on 40th Street are working again.
If we open our kitchen window we could probably hear their song floating over Stony Run Park, enhancing the gentle melancholy of the late autumn. But that specific pleasure is denied us. When I open up, what comes in, blotting all else out, is the pandemonium of Arnold's war against the fall's final wave of leaves, sent down by the huge trees that encircle our apartment complex.
Arnold is our caretaker.
He works hard, maybe even deserves a raise. But he has this thing with leaves. The "thing" has nothing to do with fixation, obsession or any of the other familiar syndromes described in the psychologist's argot. It is a true thing, a solid object, loud and unsettling; you might even say, shattering to the nerves.
This thing is a leaf blower. Not only is it reverberating against our white stucco walls, rattling our window panes and blasting away our pensive moments, it is deployed everywhere else, disturbing the peace all over Baltimore and beyond.
I wonder why no one objects to its intrusion into what used to be the second-quietest season in the year. Autumn was a gift to the senses; it seems now an assault on them. I remember it as an invigorating passage. It felt so good to be walking through the silent cascade, as all the deciduous citizens of our parks and neighborhoods unburdened themselves. I grew up anticipating the sight and smell of leaves burning in small, smoky fires in the streets.
Their aroma was evocative of pleasant memories. Since leaf burning is against the law now, the aroma itself is what is recalled, not the piquant thoughts the aroma instigated in the mind. Has no one asked the solons of City Hall what effect the roaring leaf blower might have on the public's faculty for hearing? Somebody ought to. Surely there are votes to be had.
Recently I went walking my son's dog through a red and gold drizzle of leaves descending upon Roland Park. Making our way up a hill, we were suddenly assailed by the worst cacophony I have experienced since I was caught on the tarmac of a military airfield when a jet fired up its engines 30 yards away and rattled my bones.
All at once, four men in green were upon us, like a phalanx of native beaters in a tiger hunt, but making far more of a din. Since these men were uniformed, I assume they were hired by the community to expel every dead leaf from the district and in the process drive every inhabitant of it into the isolation of utter deafness. They didn't seem to mind it themselves. Their ears were comfortably shielded by thick pads, as Arnold's are, but I was certain they could hear the motor's roar, subdued to a tolerable level, and feel its vibration as they watched the retreat of the leaf armies before them. Their faces shone with a mysterious satisfaction.
Kimba barked boldly, then whined pitifully, then tried to flee, which, I thought, proved the rational nature of her canine mind. When they passed we continued on until my hearing returned and Kimba's head stopped twitching, the way it does when she has a fly in her ear.
No doubt the leaf blower is judged by many people an improvement over the bamboo tines of a leaf rake, the same people, I suspect, who think the cigarette boat is an advance over the canoe. It is understandable that those with spacious lawns, and the laborers of professional landscape companies, might feel this way. But I would bet the rest of us, who find pleasure in something so simple as silence, outnumber them. Because of that, we should have our way.
For reasons I have never understood, the act of taking some useful thing, a tool or vehicle, and putting a motor on it, is always regarded as progress.
We used to have saws and drills and lawnmowers; now we have saws and drills and lawnmowers that are offensively loud.
We used to have manual toothbrushes, too; now we have electric toothbrushes that buzz. We had this and that, items that required a little salubrious physical effort to operate but did not spoil the universe for those not involved in the work at hand.
Does anyone have an explanation as to why we have made this unhealthy exchange? Or is this a question only a Luddite might ask?
Richard O'Mara is a former foreign editor of The Sun.