Leaves, begone! Reluctantly, I play my part in this annual ritual

“And so begins the task I have dreaded the coming of for so long.”
— From “Johnny’s Garden,” 1972, by Stephen Stills (with the band Manassas)

Today is the day, my great lament. The city of Eugene’s brigade of trucks, front-end loaders and giant leaf-sucking vacuum cleaners will deploy to 16 zones to begin its annual leaf pickup.

It is the public works equivalent of staging “Les Misérables,” a complicated choreographing of man and machine to rid the community of what Wikipedia refers to as the “principal appendage(s) of the stem of a vascular plant, usually borne laterally above ground and specialized for photosynthesis.”

I prefer simply “leaves.”

I don’t begrudge the effort; it is, when you think about it, herculean, scooping up nearly 4,000 tons of leaves on more than 500 miles of streets. I even understand the necessity; leaves can clog storm drains, compromise water quality and make bike-riding unsafe.

My resistance is purely emotional, the idea that after the glorious transition to fall we must de-leaf the community. Must vanquish these beautiful harbingers of winter. Must scoop and brush and dump them as if to suggest we could not survive if they were to just, say, decompose on their own.

The “civic de-leafing” is fortified by individual zealots who defend their homesteads with the resolve of Kevin in “Home Alone” when threatened by burglars. (“This is my home. I must defend it.”)

In “Ode to the West Wind,” the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley writes:

“O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being.
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing …”

I surmise the English Romantic was saying something profound about guys and their gas-powered leaf blowers.

This is a hard time of year for me. I love leaves. Love looking at them. Hiking through them. Seeing one of our cats watch them fall, her head gyrating left, right, up and down as if she might miss one. But just as the Willamette Valley comes ablaze in a collage of color, The Leaf Brigade hits the yards and streets to snuff that “breath of Autumn’s being.”

Whether the vanquishers are individuals or the city of Eugene’s 1^st Infantry Division, the all-out assault, I’m convinced, is borne of climatological guilt. We live in such a benign state, weather-wise, that, in the absence of flooding and hurricanes other parts of the country are experiencing, we overswing. We imbue leaves with a sense of the sinister — guilt-assisted compensation for knowing, deep down, that we have it easy.

The evening news tracks hurricanes off the coast of Florida, flooding in the south, twisters in the Midwest. And so, like the kids in “Monsters, Inc.” who exaggerate the threat of what’s under their beds, we do the same.

In our minds, the local headlines scream:

“CITY PLANS ALL-OUT ASSAULT ON FREE-OF-TREES INTERLOPERS”

“DREADED LEAVES THREATEN STORM DRAINS”

“MAYOR VOWS TO RID CITY OF SLIPPERY GROUND TROOPS”

It’s nothing new. I still remember, in the late 1990s, a landscaping-service guy aiming his leaf-blower tube at leaves affixed to a downtown tree so he could blow them off. Doesn’t that sort of defeat the purpose of trees? It’s like a man shaving his head because he figures he’ll go bald someday anyway.

I say all this despite this not being a particularly vibrant fall for Willamette Valley foliage because of a wetter-than-normal October. Eugene got 5.31 inches of rain, 67 percent more than our usual 3.17 inches. Among the factors that cause spectacular colors are dry, warm days and cool, but not freezing, nights.

Between golf and my grandsons’ football games, I traveled frequently this fall — north to Salem, south to Medford, west to Yachats and east to Blue River and Sisters. Such trips gave me plenty of views of the foliage, and the colors were nice.

Particularly up the McKenzie River, where perhaps the only blessing from the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire — and burned trees — was that it afforded more views of deciduous trees tucked in the forest. But in terms of vibrancy, well, we’ve had better years.

Now that the “cleanup” has officially begun, I will go through my usual fall ritual — raking my small backyard of leaves onto a 20-by-20-foot tarp and dragging them out into the street. It’s already on my calendar for Nov. 22: “Leaves to street.” And Nov. 23: “Leaf pickup.”

I will do so grudgingly. The city encourages mulching, mowing and composting, which I do with a small portion of my leaves. Most of the leaves the city picks up will be recycled back into the community in the form of mulch, fertilizer or garden cover. (You can request leaves to be dumped at your place by clicking here.) But our garden isn’t much larger than a coffin and so out to the street most of our leaves will go.

In a perfect world, I would let them be. But that kills the grass, which keeps the backyard cooler during summer’s heat. And so, if even with a wisp of guilt, I play my part in this annual ritual.

Meanwhile, for the next 12 days, I’ll enjoy the riot of red, brown and yellow leaves I’m seeing, then cast to the curb these “ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.”