This is more a musing than a blog post, but I was sitting on the bow the other day, realizing that all I could hear was a cacophony of small motors. In our insistence that nature, if we see it at all, must be controlled, groomed, trimmed, and otherwise held at bay, we surround ourselves at all times with a plethora of weed wackers, lawn mowers, string trimmers, grass gougers, chain saws, hedge trimmers, leaf blowers and suchwhat.
"I only do that once a week." you say? True. So do your neighbors, and their neighbors, and the business next to them, just none of you on the same day at the same time. The result being that there isn't a waking daylight moment that you can't hear a freaking twostroke engine rattling away somewhere. Add to that, boat motors, the grinding of the travel lift engines, and the usual human automotive detritus, and even the quietest marina becomes anything but quiet.
So here's my idea: We all agree on a day: one day a week where we will run all our grass gobblers and weed grinders and tarmac tornados. The rest of the time, we get to have quiet, the sounds of birds and wind and insects and the sounds of our own thoughts......
....how bout that?
By the way, the top picture of the 5 guys with leafblowers is from :
http://weblog.timoregan.com/archive/2011/03/leaf-blower-culture-a-sickness-with-no-cure/ which you can read by clicking :
Here
an article which I heartily recommend.
There used to be such a day. In many places it used to be illegal to do yard or shop work on Sunday. Even grocery stores were closed. The anti-religious put an end to that... though I have yet to find anyone who is not religious in some manner.
ReplyDeleteI suspect it was more the commercial interests that did away with the blue laws and not the Anti-religious. It's America, and money, for all our blather about piety, is king.
ReplyDelete