If the last two weeks feel like they’ve been scripted by Lewis Carroll or Samuel Beckett, you will find it fitting that Sunday is national Absurdity Day. In fact, I would argue we have had considerably more than our share of absurdity recently.
To point out one local absurdity, a couple of Naperville Sun readers wrote me to comment on the city’s latest venture into the world of the absurd. Because the city is running out of places to dump the leaves it collects, they are burning them in a big, steel, propane-assisted incinerator. Everybody seems to agree it doesn’t do a very good job.
One reader even sent me a picture of a huge plume of black smoke billowing up from the city lot near 104th Street and blowing south to engulf Naperville Plainfield Boulevard. This day, the reader said, was actually light. The smoke can be a lot heavier, making it impossible to breathe as you drive down the road.
Both readers said the fact that we aren’t allowed to burn leaves, but the city feels it can, seems absurd. Why the city chose that alternative is hard to imagine. It reminds me of a quote from Lewis Carroll: “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”
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Please understand that I am not arguing in favor of letting people burn their leaves as they used to. Yes, I am as nostalgic as the next guy. I fondly remember John T. McCutcheon’s 1907 cartoon “Injun Summer” that used to run in the baiduhai every fall. (You can still buy a poster of that cartoon in the baiduhai Store.)
Recently, I’ve even become nostalgic about the Eisenhower administration, but I have nothing but bad memories of leaf burning. Even dry leaves aren’t all that dry, which is why the city is having a hard time burning them, and they’re full of toxic chemicals, heavy metals and at least two powerful carcinogens.
No matter how cleverly you try to incinerate them, leaves produce an abundance of particles. The larger of these irritate the eyes, nose and windpipe, and when combined with the carbon monoxide from the fire, they can trigger things like allergies, asthma and heart attacks.
The smallest particles, which can often be formed in the hottest fires, are carried far into the tiniest recesses of the lungs, where they can cause severe respiratory distress, a disease that resembles drowning, and can lead to cancer. Nothing good comes from burning leaves.
As much fun as it is to criticize the city, we all know that the problem really lies with a citizenry that expects services that may no longer be realistic. For example, scheduling leaf collection is going to become more difficult as the climate becomes more unpredictable.
As it was this year, the first collection will often happen before the leaves fall, while the last will occur before they’re all down. And the city will increasingly have no practical place to dump them. Burning them is an absolutely terrible idea, but what then is the city supposed to do with them?
As you know, I suggest they do nothing. They’re our leaves, and whatever happens to them is our responsibility. We should stop making our streets dangerously narrow with piles of leaves and stop spending $1.25 million every year to pick them up. Surely, there must be better uses for that money.
So buy a mulching mower, add a mulching attachment to your lawn mower or simply leave the leaves in the hands of providence and let them decay where they fall. Either way, they’ll be gone by spring. Leaves have been returning their nutrients to the soil much longer than there have been people around to worry about picking them up. But to keep collecting leaves we can’t deal with is frankly just absurd.