Of Sisyphus and CFM: The Forest, a Man, and His Leaf Blower
Kicking Mother Nature’s ass is all about having the right equipment, and the right attitude. So go big, and do it proud and do it loud. Recounted here, in “Of Sisyphus and CFM,” are the high-decibel adventures of one very determined man, his trusty leaf blower, and an implacable arboreal foe.
I want to talk to you about power tools…
Some people might immediately dismiss this subject as irrelevant or banal. Others may genuinely find a discussion of these typically utilitarian products to be interesting and instructional. But does anyone actually think that there’s more to the power tool story than its ability to generate either indifference or, at best, practical interest? Is there ever a case that the topic of power tools can be considered evocative? Can the thought of a whining motor toiling furiously within the confines of its handheld housing while it carries out its mission raise questions about the dark and abyssal recesses of the human condition? You better believe it. The most profoundly tragic of existential human truths can be divulged no more clearly and effectively than through an examination of the creation and subsequent wielding of these motorized agents of implementation. Truly, it is through the irresponsible invention, and fatuous use, of one particular type of power tool – the leaf blower – that the folly of human ingenuity, and its tragic, promethean results, are revealed.
For ancient human forbears, tool use was a necessity for survival itself. (“How do I dig those yummy termites out of the ground so I can eat them and not starve to death? I know! I’ll use this stick!”) But as the human race evolved over time, its definition of “necessity” evolved right along with it, and tools were developed and used for an ever-broadening range of purposes.
In the cosmic blink of an eye, power tools, the progeny of a specialized type of human ingenuity, appeared within the landscape of general human consumption. Typically handheld or hand operated machines – equipped with electric or gasoline-powered motors – appeared in an endless array of form and function. The diversity was astounding – there seemed no limit to human inventiveness as it pertained to the proliferation of power tools. At first, power hand tools like saws, drills, and pipe threading machines, utilized by individuals possessing consummate training and infinite skill, were developed to aid mankind in the arduous tasks involved in the construction of homes and other buildings and structures. Endemic and invaluable to the building industry, these power tools collectively represented the fruits of human ingenuity at one of its higher and more practical points.
But the somber twin realities of human cleverness and human rapacity would ultimately direct a distinct vein of power tool technology, and its attendant use by consumers, down its current tragic and terrifying path. The rational minds among us realize, now that it’s already too late, that human ingenuity has indeed turned on us. Welcome to the world of electric nose hair trimmers, 18-volt-rechargeable-battery-powered radios, and, of course, leaf blowers.
It is from the midst of this dystopia that the main antagonist of the ensuing story would emerge to forever alter the fabric of daily autumnal life in my own erstwhile quiet, heavily-wooded, and leaf-strewn part of the world.
A Woodland Paradise
The place that we (my better half Dee Dee, and I) call home is an area at the Indiana/Michigan border, on the southeastern shores of Lake Michigan, known as Michiana Shores. Our street is essentially a tree-lined paved trail winding from a small main road to a series of even smaller, branching paved trails which, in turn, lead directly to the beachfronts of Lake Michigan. Our house, along with all of the others on our street, sits on a very large wooded lot. Essentially, this is the case of a street winding through a forest, dotted with homes surrounded by more of the same forest – it is limited civilization among the limitless woods.
The folks who live in the houses on this paved lane are a quiet bunch. Most, like me, have come here for the beauty, solitude, and quiet of the forest. Many are year-round residents, but some maintain second homes here.
For many years, quiet has predominated in this woodland hamlet. In winter, with the trees bare and snow on the ground, the only sounds in the early mornings and evenings are the breaking of waves over the lake’s beachfronts. In spring, the sound of those waves mixes with the trilling of frogs and the songs of birds. In summer, crickets, cicadas, katydids, and the soughing of the leaves on the trees of the forest join in and round out this symphony. In autumn, always, the only sounds had been the rustle of the fallen leaves as deer wound their way through the woods, or along our street, which was always gloriously blanketed in leaves. One of our greatest pleasures had been to turn down onto our leaf-covered lane, and follow the tracks left in the leaf blanket by cars which had passed through before us. And sitting on our front porch on early fall mornings – whether warm or crisp – with a cup of coffee, looking out at the trees and the leaf-covered street, had always been a positively epicurean experience. Those falling leaves were of never-ending supply, and the atmosphere was sublime.
Marv
A couple of summers ago, a home on our street went up for sale. Its owner was a great neighbor who’d always valued and honored the quiet beauty of our wooded street. Needless to say, when the home sold, there was more than a little trepidation among us peace-and-quiet-loving residents over the prospect of a new neighbor. (Quiet? Noisy?) Before the collective trepidation level could fester and reach full-on panic, Marv moved in.
Marv (not his real name) proved to be a very nice, unassuming gentleman. He appeared well-kept and fastidious, and was just as friendly and polite as can be. I, for one, was comfortable with the fact that he was our newest resident, and I was confident that he’d make a great neighbor.
Waaahhh-Waaahhh-WAAAHHH!!!!
A few weeks after Marv moved in, autumn began to hint of its imminent arrival. The mid September days were sunny and beautiful, and some initial signs of color showed in the leaves on the trees in the forest all around us, and some of those leaves had begun to lightly tumble to the ground. Another glorious, leaf-blanketed fall season was on its way.
One particular weekday morning, Dee Dee and I had arisen early as was our custom, and fed the dogs and walked them. The sky was as blue as a baby’s eye, and there was the slightest hint of chill to the morning air. Taking coffee on the front porch on mornings like this had become a ritual for us, and on this particular morning we worked together in the kitchen to ready our mugs and prep for intense caffeination. And it was from this location, in the kitchen, that we first heard the sound.
Waaahhh-Waaahhh-WAAAHHH!!!!
“Jesus! What the hell is that?” We looked first at each other and then, as one, we turned in the direction of our front French doors. The sound, which combined the most lilting elements of a buzzsaw’s whine with the gentle measure of a wide-open-throttled Harley Softail, was coming from the direction of Marv’s new house, which was kitty-corner to ours, and on the other side of the street.
Sure enough, there was Marv. He was walking along one side of his driveway toward the street, and he appeared to be brandishing a Gatling gun. This object, which was clearly the source of the noise, was in fact a leaf blower. Here was an implement mostly alien to the residents on our lane, seen and heard only on those exceptionally rare occasions when a landscape service was retained by someone to quickly clear leaves from an impassable driveway or walk. Marv’s machine appeared enormous, and judging by the sound of its engine, was obviously capable of moving alot of grounded foliage. Although I didn’t know squat about leaf blowers, I imagined that if Ramesses II had owned one, it might have been almost as big and bad as Marv’s.
As we watched in amazement and listened to the gradually increasing decibel level as Marv made his way down his driveway toward the street, I took comfort in the fact that his driveway was small and that the ruckus couldn’t possibly last very long. At any second, he’d turn and make his way back up his driveway toward his house, and away from the street.
Maybe you can imagine my transcendent horror when Marv did not stop at the end of his driveway and make his way back toward his house. What Marv did was continue into the street, carrying his Gatling gun-sized leaf blower. Then he began blowing leaves from the street toward the front borders of his property, all along his property line. I watched, speechless, as he continued along his side of the street, walking along on its paved surface, blowing leaves from the blacktop onto the big wooded lot directly across from our house. He made his way south, to the end of the street, and then crossed to our side. In a few minutes, he was directly in front of our house, blowing the leaves from the street onto the front of our property, his proximity to our house confirmed by the sharp improvement in sound quality. I was flabbergasted. I glanced at Dee Dee, who had also been watching this spectacle. She was staring directly at me now. I must’ve looked like a carp.
Just as I was beginning to wonder what Marv could possibly do to top this impressive display of sound and fury, he turned his attention to our own driveway, and began to clear it of the few leaves that had dropped from the trees and had come to rest on its surface.
When we had first heard the roar of Marv’s leaf blower, we were in our kitchen, toward the rear of the house, and he was at the back of his own driveway, probably a hundred yards away. It was loud then. Now he was within several feet of our front doors and windows, and the walls and glass were vibrating. At least our dogs tried to mitigate the situation by barking their asses off and running frantically from the back of the house to the front, and back again. And again. And again.
Evidently satisfied that he had sufficiently purged our driveway of the nineteen or twenty nasty pre-autumn leaves that had fallen there, Marv began his methodical return to the street. This time, he and his machine remained on our side, and together, they worked their way north, toward the lake. I waited until the windows and walls stopped vibrating (an indication that he was approximately a hundred yards north of our front yard) and I walked outside, to the street. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Marv was continuing his efforts along our side of the street, walking and blowing, ever northward, ever onward. I watched him until I could barely see him, and the din that his machine was making was someone else’s waking nightmare.
Once back inside, I looked at my watch and performed a rough estimate of the man-hours Marv had expended on his mission to this point (I had already begun to think of Marv’s leaf-blowing antics as “missions”). Just as I was calculating a total, the leaf blower’s roar became decidedly louder. Dee Dee and I looked out our front windows to see Marv making his way south, back from the direction of the lake, on his own side of our street. This was, by now expected. Since he’d blown the entire west side of the street (evidently along its entire length) free of leaves, it followed that he’d make his way southward, along his side (the east side), back to his house.
But Marv’s bag of air displacement tricks wasn’t empty yet. Once back in front of his own house, Marv evidently released the throttle on his leaf blower (I wondered if he’d developed a blister on his trigger finger – since he was decked out in full, official leaf blowing regalia, including work gloves, I couldn’t be sure) because the now familiar ululating roar subsided to a throaty, rumbling snarl. He carried the machine, in its evidently submissive state, westward, to the end of the street closest to our house. Once there, Marv moved to the dead center of the pavement. And at this point, the leaf blower, which moments ago looked almost docile in his grasp, resumed its erstwhile malevolent profile and began once again to roar at an incalculable decibel level. Waaahhh-Waaahhh-Waaahhh-WAAAHHH!!!! Marv began to sweep it from side to side before him as he walked, driving the few fallen leaves from the center of the street toward its sides. He looked like a little kid with a metal detector on the beach. Except he wasn’t a little kid, and his device wasn’t an innocuous machine designed for the peaceful pastime of beachfront treasure hunting. And he wasn’t on any beach. Here was a grown man, not fifty feet from our own front door, armed with a fulminating weapon designed expressly to rid the Earth’s surface of the pestilence that was fallen leaves. Remaining this time in the middle of the street, he once more walked northward toward the lake, always sweeping the leaf blower from side to side. For the second time, I went outside to watch as his form shrunk in the increasing distance, and the mechanized roar diminished to a remote buzzing.
When I went back into the house, Dee Dee was waiting for me. We sat silently at the dining room table and looked at each other. It was going to take time to digest this spectacle, and to sort through its implications.
Of Sisyphus and CFM
An important thing to remember about leaf blowers is (aside from the fact that they represent all that is wrong with rampant, irresponsible power tool technology), their operators require no special training in order to successfully torment their neighbors. A leaf-blowing practitioner’s apprenticeship comes in the form of the thirty-second sales pitch from the guy at Home Depot. I suspect that leaf blower ownership and operation bestows a certain sense of confidence upon those who enthusiastically engage in the practice of motorized leaf removal. In Marv’s case, I have a hunch that he might experience feelings of collegiality with the folks who vocationally operate serious machines like drills, saws, augers, industrial planers, and the like. To the best of my knowledge, Marv possesses no experience operating such equipment. His turbocharged leaf blower, I would presume, exists as a proxy. When Marv, who is by no means a physically large man, swings the barrel of his mighty cannon in the direction of his multitudinous, overmatched enemies, he all at once becomes robust of carriage and stout of heart, and he is suffused with the light of triumphant glory. The sublimity of his rapture – with the measure of his yowling counterpart as its backdrop – becomes palpable.
Any discussion of leaf blower efficacy (I know this – I did three minutes of internet research) includes the use of monograms like CFM (cubic feet per minute), MPH (miles per hour), and RPM (revolutions per minute), and words like “decibels,” “displacement,” and “horsepower.” Evidently, higher levels of each of these items translate to higher levels of leaf blower performance and effectiveness. There is nothing in the literature to even remotely suggest subtlety. By design, leaf blowers are intrinsically powerful and noisy. When such sonic magnitude and vortical capacity is combined with the unbridled fervor of a leaf-blowing enthusiast, the impact on both neighborhood serenity and nature’s equanimity is disastrous. I can only characterize the marriage of rampant, addictive leaf blower technology and obsessive user zeal as a case of the genie truly having escaped the bottle.
Once Marv had wrapped up his debut performance, he turned off his machine and disappeared (evidently into the recesses of his garage). The sudden silence was nearly as shattering as the leaf blower’s din. Dee Dee and I sat in the midst of this pulsating quietude and waited for the return of complete auditory normalcy. After awhile, it returned. And with its return, came two salient questions.
The first question was one of frequency (the temporal variety rather than the auditory): How often was this going to happen? The second question was as relevant as the first: Does this guy realize that this neighborhood – this street, these homes, our driveways – is located in the middle of a fucking forest? It turns out that the answers to both of these questions are inextricably linked.
The simple answer to the first question was “Every chance he got.” (Fortunately, as a second home owner, Marv was only around a few days out of the week. So the majority of our autumn days passed in blessed silence.) Marv embarked on his leaf-blowing missions almost every day that he was around, employing virtually the exact methodology I’ve described, every time.
Early in his first autumn in our neighborhood, although there were only a few leaves on the ground, the missions continued. As that autumn season unfolded, the quantity of fallen leaves became increasingly copious. But Marv’s diligence never wavered, and his machine’s resonance never flagged. The disturbance was annoying, to say the least. But at least it was consistently annoying.
The answer to this first question, at this point, dovetails into the answer of the second, where it becomes permanently lodged and hopelessly entangled (and begs even more questions).
Does Marv realize that his second home is located in the middle of a forest? I’m assuming that his organs of sight were functioning normally at the time he first checked the place out. So yeah, he knew what he was getting into. (All the little questions that arise as a result of this question are comparatively unimportant. Does Marv think that we residents want our entire street cleaned of beautiful fallen autumn leaves? Or our driveways? Does he think we want to listen to the sustained, soul-shattering shrieking of his leaf blower? The answers to these questions are unimportant, as they’re not central to the thrust of my hypothesis.) As the title of this feature suggests, Marv’s actions, for me, elicit thoughts of Sisyphus, the character in Greek mythology who, punished by Hades in the underworld, is forced to roll a massive boulder up a steep hill, only to have it roll back down once it reaches the top. He is doomed to perform this labor for all of eternity. Marv lives with us in a forest. The leaves don’t stop. Neither does Marv.
To this day, Marv continues on his fool’s errand. The forest all around us does indeed generate an endless supply of leaves. The leaf blower continues to sing its mournful song, and Marv, the lonely warrior, fights on until snow falls and ice forms, and the intransigence of the persisting, ubiquitous leaves, by this time frozen to the ground’s surface, finally prevails.
Is there a metaphysical, or even a paranormal component to Marv’s leaf-blowing? Something like possession? Is he insane? No, no, and no. What I believe is that this noisome technology, and the ease of obtaining and actuating it, combine to form an intoxicating, irresistable, and addictive lure to which certain personality types are susceptible, and ultimately powerless to resist. I think of Marv, swelling physically and glowing with an internal fire fueled by the sound – the vibrating power – of his Gatling gun/leaf blower, and I am convinced that I’m right.
So, we neighbors bear witness to what has become an autumnal ritual here in our forest. The noise is awful, and its repetitive presentation is mindnumbing. But Marv’s a nice guy, and not one of us here has the heart to try to convince him to stop. I think I understand how Sancho Panza must have felt. And I’m certain, that in more parts of the world than I’d care to imagine, there are other Marvs. There are those poor souls who’ve fallen prey to this insidious, irresponsible technology. They’re all out there, never yielding, blasting fallen autumn leaves from the surface of the Earth, pissing off their neighbors.
And changing the batteries in their nose hair trimmers.
This story was inspired by true events. I had written the piece in my head last year, but was hesitant to publish it. Even though leaf blowers are loud and pretty obnoxious, I honestly harbor no true ill will toward them, or their operators. What emboldened me to transfer this piece from my head to written form was a Tweet from Russ Smith (retweeted by Steven Giardini) on Twitter. Mr. Smith wrote the MUGGER column for New York Press, is a publisher of a number of well-known newspapers (including NYP), and is the founder of the website, Splice Today. Russ’ tweet, and Steven’s retweet, was a share of Mark Ellis’ brilliant piece, “Ban All Leaf Blowers,” (in Splice Today,). That excellent read provided the growth spurt which my balls experienced, which in turn led to the jotting down and sharing of my own piece, which had been lying fallow in prefrontal cortex limbo for the past year. Finally, I highly recommend that you follow Russ Smith and Steven Giardini on Twitter. You’ll be glad you did. Needless to say, their content is brilliant, diverse, fascinating, and entertaining.
In the meantime, dear readers and subscribers, I hope you’ve enjoyed “Of Sisyphus and CFM.” Thanks for sticking it out to the end. As always, your very kind interest and readership is truly appreciated.
Cheers, and Happy Gardening!
John G. Stamos (2022)
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When I lived on Wisconsin Avenue in DC it was quite common to hear leaf blowers. I suppose it was much less of a disturbance since our house faced a major thoroughfare with quite a bit of car and bus traffic. Even my old roommate got in on it (fortunately with an electric leaf blower instead of gasoline)
Nothing says “I love you” like a gasoline-powered leaf blower. Its gentle voice warms one’s heart on quiet, lonely mornings. At least the traffic sounds diluted the obnoxious potency of the leaf blowers on Wisconsin Ave. Thanks for having a read, Drew.
A brilliant read to wake up with, over hot, steaming coffee as the sounds of a power motor carries over the otheriwse silent morning, throughout my Northern California, forested neighborhood 👏 Thanks!
Oh my gosh, Ms. Tamara, you’ve captured the essence of this debacle perfectly – thanks for giving it a read!
What an amazing, enjoyable story, actually put a big smile on my face 😊 you are such a creative writer, you make every story so enjoyable to read 🙏🙏🙏💖🌺thank you for this creativity you share with us ❤️🌺
Bless your heart, Roxxy – I’m so glad you liked it – I had alot of fun cooking it up! Thank you so much for giving it a read, and for your truly kind words. Your kindness, thoughtfulness, and interest are dearly appreciated.
Hilarious and BRILLIANT!
Wow, thank you – I’m really glad you liked it! It was alot of fun thinking it up and writing it!
Leaf blowers should be against the law to use in a neighborhood. Loud noisy pollution is all they are. God will move those leaves where he wants them. I am going to find a house out in the country where people are not cranking those things up at 8am and lawn mowers either. Tired of all the noise pollution and inconsidiration of neighbors and the people they hire. There are neighborhoods where leaf blowers are not allowed. That would be great!
I understand exactly how you feel, Frankie. Those things are definitely loud and disruptive. Thank you for reading the piece, and thank you for your thoughts and for leaving your comments. I really do know exactly how you feel. Thanks again!
It sounds like Marv is having a midlife crisis. Instead of a new sports car, he has turned to his leaf blower. When he realizes he is facing a never ending, uphill battle, he will give up.The forest will win and quiet will return!
I sure hope you’re right, Kevin!
Great reading. Creative and entertaining
Thank you, Rick. I’m glad you enjoyed it. All in good fun!
What a great (!?@?#) story, so well spun that my enjoyment of morning tea was enhanced while feeling guilty that you and Dee Dee are experiencing this change to your calm. I can only hope that Marv doesn’t also have a snow blower!
Glad you liked it, Katha – thank you! At least we can live our mornings vicariously through you and Finnegan, and your peaceful tea time!