Satan's leaf rake

There seems to be some confusion about exactly who to send to hell for inventing the leaf-blower. Apparently one Dom Quinto invented the thing, but a certain Gustav Doragrip got the patent in 1980, the patent that changed suburbia.

Let me put my biases on the table right up front. In the first place, fallen leaves are an integral part of the changing of the seasons. They require neither raking nor blowing. They decompose in short order. When they decompose, they provide a nurturing mulch for your gardens and lawns. My advice would be to leave well enough alone.

If you cannot leave well enough alone, running over them with the lawnmower greatly speeds up the decomposition process. This will ensure that there is virtually no leaf detritus visible on your lawn by late spring, and the grass will grow long and green.

Unfortunately, there are those among us who dread those brief months when the leaves are decomposing. These are the folks who insist, or at least pre-1980, insisted on raking their yards. Now, even though I've argued against leaf management, I'll admit that there have been times when I've been as guilty as the next- door neighbours. This is because there are several pleasant aspects to leaf-raking.

In the first place, it lends itself to being a family activity. Get the kids away from the X-box for a few hours, get the Missus off the on-line gambling site, and you can spend a few glorious hours in the crisp autumn air doing something together. How often does your family have the opportunity to spend quality time together? And aside from the initial outlay for two or three rakes and a wheelbarrow, it's free.

And there is an undeniably wholesome asthetic around leaf-raking. While it may be unecessary work, it is work that you can see you did. Nothing at all like teaching math or analyzing foreign policy. Leaf-raking gives you that good old-fashioned sense of accomplishment that only comes with manual labor, and how often do we get to experience that these days? For the vast majority of us, not nearly often enough.

As manual labor, leaf-raking is remarkably gender and age neutral. It is neither manly nor unmanly work. You can have your six-year old out in the yard with a rake and nobody drives by muttering oh my God who is letting that child operate a rake?

So you're doing something completely unecessary, but it's pleasing to all the senses and can even lead to bonding opportunities with other family members. The fly in the formula is that an awful lot of folks needed to convince themselves that this was important work, an instumental purpose-driven undertaking. That's what opened the window of opportunity to the likes of Quinto and Doragrip.

The promoters of the idea of progress want us to believe that there's such a thing as "efficiency", and that efficiency is the ultimate virtue. If you think, even in some dark recess of your mind, that when you are raking leaves you are doing some essential chore, you are vulnerable to the siren call of the progress-pushers. Ergo, the leaf-blower.

Right away, you irretrievably befoul the asthetic aspects of leaf raking. Instead of crisp autumn air you're breathing gas fumes. Instead of a quiet morning listening to the sweep of the rake and the crunch of leaves under your feet, you've got 120 decibels of go-kart motor on your back. The experience is ruined.

Family bonding goes down the toilet too. I've never ever seen a family unit out blowing leaves together, Ma and Pa and the kids all with Husqvarna back-packs on, doing leaf management. That's the entire lure of the efficiency angle, of course. Instead of having four people out there for half the day, you, the man of the house, can do the job in half an hour. By yourself. The kids would rather play X-box anyway.

Once one domino in the neighborhood falls, the magic of leaf-raking is instantly destroyed for everyone else. Your asthetic appreciation for leaf-raking evaporates the instant your neighbor fires up the leaf blower. Sure, you can still rake your leaves, but you won't be hearing that crunch underfoot, and you'll be breathing the Husqvarna fumes instead of the crisp autumn air. It takes just one idiot to ruin it for everybody.

So thanks Doragrip. Thanks Quinto. Thank you, you peddlers of progress. May you spend eternity in a purgatory of endless Saturday mornings, in a quiet subdivision in the sky, surrounded by neighbors who have bought your invention.