Song of Suburbia: Groundskeepers

Aaand we're back... First I got sick, then I got really busy, then I got sick of being really busy... So let's get right into it, shall we...?

I am a suburbanite. I like a lot of what urban areas have to offer, but dislike living in apartments... not having parking... not having a yard... and a number of other unavoidable facets of urban living. The result is that, having been raised mostly in suburban environments, I am most comfortable living in  suburban environments.

Never mind the songs talking about rows of identical houses, or the stories about neighbors going to war over whose dandelions are seeding whose lawn -- as with any environment, there are positives and there are negatives.

This post is a gripe session about some of those negatives. (Big surprise, right?) In fact, this is just the first of what I intend to be a series of gripe sessions about the sounds that intrude, sometimes rudely, upon the relative calm that is supposedly a hallmark of suburban life.

For this first "Song of Suburbia" post, I give you -- The Groundskeepers.

Groundskeepers, Type 1

One of the main selling points of my home was the fact that it is on the edge of the development, backing up to a private golf course instead of more townhouses & garden apartments[1]. An added bonus was the fact that my block of homes backs up to the "rough," that part of the course that receives only the barest minimum of grooming.

Correction: my block of homes used to back up to the rough. For two weeks late last summer, I was regularly awakened early in the morning by the sound of bulldozers and graders as the golf course was "refreshed" and reconfigured. It was a minor annoyance that did not last a long time, and once the work was done my neighbors and I simply forgot about it.

This season has been a little different; now that a putting green has replaced the rough, I am often awakened two, sometimes three, times a week during the season at 6:30 in the morning when the club's groundskeepers use their industrial-grade lawnmowers and lawn vacuums to ensure the green remains properly groomed. Everyone else is required by law to wait until at least 8:00am (still not great for me, but at least it affords me an extra two hours of sleep)... but somehow a loophole was put into the law when no one was looking allowing special cases[2] to start making noise much, much earlier.

Annoying, noisy, and -- for individuals like me who work late into the night -- exhausting. But mainly annoying.

Groundskeepers, Type 2

Another landscape-based annoyance are the groundskeeping crews hired by the local homeowners' association to keep the common areas groomed. I appreciate what they do, but not how they do it; any day on which they are working is a day surrounded by intrusive noise. The mowers are started at 8:00am and usually are run continuously until 4:00pm or later with only a 30-minute lunch break around Noon. Even when the crew has finished mowing an area, the mowers continue running -- the crew uses them to shuttle back and forth between different areas in the neighborhood like oversized, roaring Segway Transporters[3].

But wait, there's more!  Once the Mowers have completed their work in an area, the Trimmers move in. These gentlemen have gasoline-powered line trimmers, with the engines mounted on frames they wear like backpacks. They work slowly along the sidewalks, neatly trimming the grass (but skipping sidewalks directly in front of houses, leaving the edges looking raggedy as a reminder to homeowners that they have to trim the sidewalks themselves). As they work, the trimmers will randomly rev their engines, applying more or less power based on how much trimming is needed -- while coincidentally varying the pitch and volume of the noise they generate in a particularly annoying random pattern.

And there's a special additional bonus! The cleanup crew -- some of whom were only minutes earlier Trimmers themselves -- are the last group of noisemakers. These gentlemen walk leisurely around the neighborhood in areas where Mowers and Trimmers have finished. Instead of using brooms to clean off the sidewalks, they use gasoline-powered leaf blowers that I and some of my neighbors have come to call "howlers" because of the noise they make. Revving the howlers' engines in random patterns of pitch and volume, these gentlemen (wearing noise-blocking ear protection the rest of us wish we had for ourselves) blast grass clippings, sand and loose gravel off the sidewalks -- usually onto individual homes' front walks & porches and/or into the sides of nearby vehicles. (As an additional annoyance, their ear protection leaves them blissfully unaware of any approaching traffic as they inevitably walk backwards into the street to admire their handiwork.)

The Howlers show up too late in the day to interfere with any sleep (I long ago learned to not bother trying to take a nap when they are anywhere near my block), but they certainly have an effect that belies the relatively small size of the individual blower units. Hearing the show you're tying to watch on television? Difficult. Trying to listen to music without noise-canceling earphones? Futile. Working in one's own yard amidst the flying gravel and dirt? Dangerous. Concentrating on one's work inside, with all windows tightly shut? Right out.

In short... well, you know: annoying. In fact, annoying the way an angry yellowjacket in one's shoe is annoying, at times. But usually just plain noisy, disturbing, and...

...annoying.

Next up: Lover Boy.

[1]  Never mind the fact that I have absolutely no chance of being able to afford a membership at the aforementioned golf course; I never could figure out the attraction of using strangely-shaped sticks to smack a defenseless little ball around in an effort to put it into little holes in the ground while avoiding ponds & sandboxes...

[2] "Special Cases" are those large-scale commercial property owners who feed large sums of tax money into the system and (purely coincidentally, of course!) occasionally feed large sums of donations into political campaigns.

[3] An embodiment of technology that seems slightly frivolous to me, but for which I am desperately trying to find a good excuse to buy one (once I scrape up the money)...