Jason Walsh: Best thing about leaf blower results is that I can stop writing about it

Best thing about Measure V results is that I can stop ?writing about it|

For those gas-leaf-blower enthusiasts bummed out by Measure V’s 19 vote margin of victory, confirmed yesterday by the Sonoma County Registrar of Voters, take heart: yours isn’t the most bitter razor-thin electoral defeat in recent years – not by a long shot.

That title surely goes to a 2013 Austrian state legislature election that earned the Green Party a seat in the Carinthia region by a single vote. What made that ballot result particularly seething for the losing candidate of the right-wing Alliance for the Future of Austria party was that the deciding ballot was marked for the Green candidate with a hand-drawn doodle of an erect penis – an irony not lost on many of the AFA’s critics who’d said their particular brand of nationalist conservatism had always rendered them a little cocky.

Still, that’s hardly solace for landscapers who, under the ordinance upheld by Measure V, can no longer blast gas-powered leaf blowers all over town and will instead blast electric-powered ones. It’s a victory for leaf blower opponents, no doubt – but a far cry from where they were two short years ago when it appeared the City Council would ban all leaf blowers, but fell short of the majority needed to pass such a resolution. Instead, what has been won here is bragging rights – “we won, you lost” is the real prize in the 19 vote differential. Leaf blowers will continue to roar and scatter debris, only with the greenhouse gases for the atmosphere being replaced by lithium batteries for the landfill.

At the risk of seeming self-serving, the culmination of the leaf-blower controversy will in the real sense benefit only one person: me.

Well, me and the readers of the I-T who, over the past two years, have had to suffer through the approximately three dozen leaf-blower stories the paper has produced in that time frame. That’s out of 208 issues, folks, and doesn’t include the dozens more letters to the editor we’ve run about the wonders of the leaf blower, the plights of the leaf blown or the nostalgic quaintness of the leaf raked.

Truth be told, we all got a little carried away in the zeitgeist of power-tool politics, no one more so than myself. And while my leaf-blower transgressions were no worse than those committed by climate-change-denying gas-blower apologists or holier-than-thou rake enthusiasts, they were an affront to the sensibilities nonetheless.

No, I didn’t blow a leaf blower in someone’s face, nor did scatter leaves in my neighbor’s yard. But I did write analogies like this:

“It was clearer than a flagstone patio after a Toro 51618 Super Blower got through with it.”

And this: “At this point, the Echo PB 250 has had a more career comebacks than Jackie Earl Haley.”

And this: “The issue has stirred more bluster than a Twindstorm Dooly at a Toastmasters International convention.”

It all started in late 2014, when I took on the coverage of the City Council’s decision to revisit possible new leaf-blower restrictions – deliberations I’d envisioned lasting, like typical community issues, a couple of months and having to write a small handful of stories/editorials about it. But, as we all well know two years later, it didn’t exactly play out like that.

By mid 2015, I’d gotten a few leaf-blower bylines under my belt, but it was clear these stories weren’t going to end anytime soon and I was beginning to feel like I was writing the same story over and over again.

So in my genuinely well-intentioned efforts to keep the content fresh, I found myself seeking new and original ways to describe the issue in readable terms. For good or bad, I imagine the results produced several literary firsts in the growing field of leaf-blower journalism.

Many were descriptive: “blow-ciferous leaf herders,” “ne’er-do-well landscaping tools,” “foliage-flushing forum.”

Others employed the cultural personification I’d studied as an English lit major: “auditory Beelzebubs,” “ecological Dick Dastardlys,” “environmental Voldemorts.”

There were even times I lapsed into ominous leaf blower warnings: “Hurricane Hydro Blower … your days are numbered” and “leaf blowers are about to suck the wind out of council chambers once again.”

Hyperbolic leaf-blower analogies have been frequent: “the quicker picker-upper of lawn-tidying systems,” “the ShamWow of leaf shufflers,” “like a Ginsu knife for landscape ninjas.”

And, of course, my personal favorite: “a Guttenbergian advancement in the foliage-corralling arts.”

But with the election now behind us, so too should be the I-T’s frequency of leaf-blower coverage and, hence, my fixation on finding new ways to describe the propelling of petiolated projectiles (I’d been saving that one).

Unlike those landscapers who may soon find themselves tackling Armstrong Estate lawns with a wooden rake – my work here is done.

Email Jason at jason.walsh@sonomanews.com.

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