Rite of rural life drifts away with backyard burning ban

Oh, the bad old days when every Saturday morning indulgent plans for sleeping in would be ruined by acrid clouds of smoke billowing from the neighbor’s relentless burning of mango leaves. Oh, the loads of clean laundry tainted on the clothesline by that ashy smell.

Thank goodness that’s not allowed anymore. Uncle’s bad backyard burning is banned!

On Monday, the Department of Health Clean Air Branch announced that backyard burning is now illegal for every island. Violations are subject to fines of up to $10,000 per incident.

"Open burning creates an unnecessary nuisance and possible health risk due to the smoke and air pollution it produces. The practice also creates a significant fire hazard," the news release said.

Now, you can breathe easy in your own home while you heat frosted fruit-flavored breakfast pastries in the microwave for the kids, serve them on degenerating plastic plates and pat their precious heads with your spray-tanned hands and toluene-polished acrylic fingernails.

Today, we have other options, like composting and recycling and gathering all that stuff along with milk cartons and baby wipes and used paper towels to be trucked off and burned in the huge HPOWER plant.

Things are definitely healthier now.

For all those who despise backyard burning there are others who are quite attached to it, who see it almost as a meditative practice.

There is definitely a cultural aspect to backyard burning, but not cultural in terms of any particular ethnic group, I would think. Culture in this case has more to do with a rural way of life in neighborhoods where slick one-armed trash trucks don’t go down dirt roads and where all the leaves raked up in a yard would fill several Costco-sized boxes of plastic bags if they had to be contained that way.

Backyard burning has been illegal on Oahu since 1973, but as any neighbor island resident will assure you, Oahu is not like the other islands. Setting fire to a pile of leaves in a tiny Kaimuki backyard will have all of Kahala calling the fire department. Setting fire to a pile of leaves in the back of a rural neighbor island six-acre homestead isn’t likely to bother hundreds of people.

The whole "rake leaves, make fire" process is for some, a blessed routine, a Zen-like weekend rite of gathering dead leaves, leaning on a rake and staring into the fire like watching troubles float away in the gray smoke.

Like one person said on Facebook, "I feel sorry for the little old … man who loves to burn in his metal trash can to get away from his wife for a little while."

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Reach Lee Cataluna at lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.