F 0 L 0

cv4 'Remance of~stNostalgia, progress, and the meaning of tools

'By '{)onovan Jfohn

Lches above the auctioneer, under the humideaves of an almost empty shed, wasps bounce asif on strings, rending their paper nests. UFolks,I've been doing this for thirty-five years," theauctioneer barks into his wire~

less headset. His voice, am­plified by two portable speak­ers, crackles across theafternoon. "First thing I everauctioned was a birdcage. Itsold for $1.25. Bidding wentup by a quarter back then."He is a short man with a biggut and a scrunched face, theface of a circus clown withouthis makeup on. His denimnewsboy cap matches his den­im suspenders. "God's beengood to us so far," he observes,interrupting his banter to gazeanxiously at the horizon to the west. "But I'dbetter hurry. I want to beat the rain."

After one of the longest winters in recent mem­ory, spring has finally arrived in Lower Michigan,a fitful, moody spring full of sudden changes. Lastnight a thunderstonn scattered hailstones acrossWashtenaw County. Now the sun is out, steam isrising off the fields of timothy and winter wheat,and the air smells pleasantly of mud. [f it doessmrt raining again, Tom Friedlander will likelyhold the auctioneer personally responsible. Allday Tom has been complaining about this clown'slack of professionalism, his fondness for banter, his

ignorance of tools. <lHe has no idea what he's sell­ing," Tom keeps whispering to me. A real profes­sional, he says, would be done by now.

Atop one of three hay wagons, a skinny teenageboy with a crew cut stoopsdown to the rusty junk piledat his feet and hoists a bow sawinto the air. It is an exquisitespecimen, just like the onesI've seen in books. "Lift her upnice and high, Ben," the auc~

tioneer says. Bow saws areshaped like the harps angelsplay in cornie strips. They areboth ingenious and primitive,held together by the tensionin a twisted loop of rope.

"Howaboutabid, twenty,"the auctioneer chants. "I'vegot twenty. Howabourabid,

twenty-five~five-five?Twenty~five. Twenty~seven­and-a-half? Now thirty. Thirty, thirty, thirty?"

People have been using versions of the bowsaw for hundreds of years, but not until the tumof the twentieth century, when motorized jigsawswere rendering them obsolete, did anyone thinkto salvage them from the scrap heap and preservethem for posterity. For decades, this particularsaw was as valuable as it was useful to the farmerwho owned it. Then one day the farmer growstoo old to farm, his children excavate the molder­ing contents of his bam, hire an auctioneer, theauctioneer runs advertisements in local papers

Donovan Hahn teaches English at Friends Seminary in Manhattan. His last essay for Harper's Magazine, "AnawmyLessons: Evan S. Connell and the Documentary School," appeared in the December 2001 issue.

Illustrations by Stan Fellows. Page border photogrnphs by Lisa Sacco. FOLIO 45

:.... ---====1

F 0 L 0

cv4 'Remance of~stNostalgia, progress, and the meaning of tools

'By '{)onovan Jfohn

Lches above the auctioneer, under the humideaves of an almost empty shed, wasps bounce asif on strings, rending their paper nests. UFolks,I've been doing this for thirty-five years," theauctioneer barks into his wire~

less headset. His voice, am­plified by two portable speak­ers, crackles across theafternoon. "First thing I everauctioned was a birdcage. Itsold for $1.25. Bidding wentup by a quarter back then."He is a short man with a biggut and a scrunched face, theface of a circus clown withouthis makeup on. His denimnewsboy cap matches his den­im suspenders. "God's beengood to us so far," he observes,interrupting his banter to gazeanxiously at the horizon to the west. "But I'dbetter hurry. I want to beat the rain."

After one of the longest winters in recent mem­ory, spring has finally arrived in Lower Michigan,a fitful, moody spring full of sudden changes. Lastnight a thunderstonn scattered hailstones acrossWashtenaw County. Now the sun is out, steam isrising off the fields of timothy and winter wheat,and the air smells pleasantly of mud. [f it doessmrt raining again, Tom Friedlander will likelyhold the auctioneer personally responsible. Allday Tom has been complaining about this clown'slack of professionalism, his fondness for banter, his

ignorance of tools. <lHe has no idea what he's sell­ing," Tom keeps whispering to me. A real profes­sional, he says, would be done by now.

Atop one of three hay wagons, a skinny teenageboy with a crew cut stoopsdown to the rusty junk piledat his feet and hoists a bow sawinto the air. It is an exquisitespecimen, just like the onesI've seen in books. "Lift her upnice and high, Ben," the auc~

tioneer says. Bow saws areshaped like the harps angelsplay in cornie strips. They areboth ingenious and primitive,held together by the tensionin a twisted loop of rope.

"Howaboutabid, twenty,"the auctioneer chants. "I'vegot twenty. Howabourabid,

twenty-five~five-five?Twenty~five. Twenty~seven­and-a-half? Now thirty. Thirty, thirty, thirty?"

People have been using versions of the bowsaw for hundreds of years, but not until the tumof the twentieth century, when motorized jigsawswere rendering them obsolete, did anyone thinkto salvage them from the scrap heap and preservethem for posterity. For decades, this particularsaw was as valuable as it was useful to the farmerwho owned it. Then one day the farmer growstoo old to farm, his children excavate the molder­ing contents of his bam, hire an auctioneer, theauctioneer runs advertisements in local papers

Donovan Hahn teaches English at Friends Seminary in Manhattan. His last essay for Harper's Magazine, "AnawmyLessons: Evan S. Connell and the Documentary School," appeared in the December 2001 issue.

Illustrations by Stan Fellows. Page border photogrnphs by Lisa Sacco. FOLIO 45

:.... ---====1

and in Auction Exchange, drags the saw out intothe sunlight along with the test of the fanner's be­longings-rakes with btOken handles, a wall clockmade out of a slab of polished wood, nails fused byruSt into pointy lumps-and the next thing youknow, you could have purchased ten new sawsfor what this useless one is selling for.

Earlier that morning, while we were inspectingthe contents of the hay wagons, an old lady wig­gled what looked to be a miniature iron hoe atTom and asked him what it was.

'!he more complicatedand computerizedour lives become, the more old tools come

to symbolize all that we have lost

"That's an ash rake," he informed her. "Foremptying ashes from a stove."

"I don't have a stove," the old lady replied, sen­sibly, "so I don't need ir."

Like het, most people imagine that the fonn ofa tool is a pure expression of its function andthat its value is a measure of its usefulness. Sawscut. Hammers pound. On the antique~tool mar~

ket, however, value is largely aesthetic and sym~

bolic. Hammers do not only pound, saws do notonly cur. They also mean.

As the bow saw transubstantiates from a pieceof junk into a collectible before our eyes, TomFriedlander listens closely to the ascendant bids,stroking his beard, but stays out of it. Bow sawsaren't his thing. Too pricey. Too desirable. Eversince bidding began several hours ago, he haskept his head down, except when he wants tocatch the auctioneer's eye. To place a bid, he willglance up, nod gravely, and curl his fingers towardhis heart, beckoning. So far today he has pur­chased a hand-forged chopper, a bam-beam auger,two antique motor~oil bottles with cone~shaped

spouts, a box of early automobile starter cranks,a set of speed wrenches, a fence stretcher, some~thing called the Tox-O-Wick cattle oiler, and aplastic bucket full of implement wrenches mari~

nating in melted hail."I've got fifty," calls the auctioneer, "fifty-

fi ve-fi ve~five, fifty ~seven~and~a~~ half."

1 hree years ago if you had asked me what Ithought of tool collecting, I would have told youthat it sounded like the sort of sentimental pastimepursued mainly by men with soft minds, thickwallets, and lonely wives. In Manhattan, where Ilived at the time, one sometimes encounteredwoodworking tools and funning implements on thewalls of pastorally themed restaurants serving ex~

46 HARPER'S MAGAZINE JJANUARY 2005

pensive comfort food, or among handmade quiltsand kerosene lanterns in the windows of WestVillage lx)Utiques. I considered such Americana tobe so much nostalgic gimcrack. The inflated pricesold tools commanded I attributed to an ambientdissatisfaction with modernity. The more ex,pendable we felt in our jobs, the more complicatedand computerized our lives became, the morehardware made of metal and wood seemed to sym­bolize all that we had lost-we Americans, but es­pecially we American men.

Until recently in America, manliness was pro'portionate to handiness. The ancient Greeks hadAchilles and his shield. The British had Arthurand Excalibut. We had John Henry and his ham­mer, Paul Bunyan and his axe, Queequeg and hismanly harpoon. Our national poets sang hymnsto the broad axe and the village blacksmith. Ourprophets didn't merely wander in the wilderness;they built cabins there. The adzes and bow sawswith which anxiety-beset urban professionalsnow equip their apartments originally belongedto self-reliant, self-employed, self-made yeomenand artisans--or so the traffickers in nostalgiawished us to believe.

It was a lie, I knew, this Luddite fantasy of anartisanal golden age. That legendary Yankee in,genuity was born not only out of an ardor forcraftsmanship and independence but also out ofa shortage of skilled labor and an abundance ofcheap, pilfered land. European settlen; had pickedup many of their cricks (hollowing a canoe withfire, fertilizing com with fish) from natives whomthey repaid with alcoholism and infectious disease.

And besides, mowing a field of hay by handwas backbreaking work, nothing romantic aboutit. Homespun textiles required endless, mind,numbing cottage industry. Likewise the chum,ing of butter, the curing of meat, the hewing ofbeams and chiseling of mortises. No wonder somany of our agrarian forebears fled to cities at thenrst chance they got, or else bet the farm on mo,torized combines and harvesters.

I also had personal reasons to be suspicious oftool collecting. Although I come from a familyof insufferably handy men-men able to wire ahouse, rebuild a transmission, or frame a wallwithout calling an expert or consulting a book­I am profoundly unhandy. By the traditionalmeasures of American manhood, I am, essen­tially, a Frenchwoman. When my brother and Iwere teenagers, he and our father would adjournto the garage after dinner, hook a cage light tothe underside of an elevated hood, and spendhours passing tools back and folth like shinythoughts. while upstairs I lay on the couch read­ing mildly pornographic fantasy novels. To thisday, when I do it myself, I can never be surewhether I am improving my home or conduct­ing experiments upon it.

One might, therefore, hnd it strange or worri~

some that for the last year and a half I've devot­ed every waking hour I could spare to the studyof old tools. I've read books with titles likeWrenches: Antique and Unusual and The Ham­mer: The King of Tools. I've stayed up all nighrbrowsing the searchable archives of the U.S.Patent and Trademark Office, encountering theresuch exotic utensils as the Clamp Fur-Knife,which, when "Edward Flint, of the city, county,and State of New York," invented it in 1837, was"a new and useful Instrument for Extracting Hairsfrom Fur~Skins," and I have met a vice pFesidentof innovation and design in the cafeteria of theStanley Works corporate headquarters in NewBritain, Connecticut. I've lurked in chat roomswith discussion threads devoted to such subjectsas "A previously unknown Alberr Goodell bracefound in the wild." One sweltering summer mom~ing, on the Jay County fairgrounds in the farm~

ing village of Portland, In­diana, I walked amongfabulous machines as smallas schnauzers and as hugeas elephants, all gleamingin the August sun. Drivebelts whirred, flywheels re­volved, pistons fired, anda forest of smokestackspiped foul smoke and rudemusic into the otherwisecloudless sky. Mostly, Ihave ridden a Midwesterncircuit of flea markets andfarm auctions in the pas~

senger seat of an emeraldgreen Toyota pickup truckpiloted by a fifty-five-year­old botanist with a ponytail, spectacles like

windowpanes, and a beard verging on~ the Whitmanesque.

10m Friedlander is a tall, faintly melancholyman, prone to long silences and outbursts ofgoofi~ness, whom I have always known as Uncle Tom.In 1976, after the borany department of the Uni­versity of Michigan declined to approve his doc~

toral dissertation, a taxonomical study of the graydogwood, for which he had spent the better partof three years scouring the continent for speci­mens, Tom joined his wife, Martha, my father'ssister, on the faculty of a privare high school inAnn Arbor. The two have taught biology rhereever since. Childless and frugal, by the late 1980sthey had saved enough to purchase a ranch housein the rural exurbs, along with the thirty~seven

acres of marshy, unprofitable farmland adjoiningit, which they subsequently let run wild. For years,tyfartha had been inviting me to spend time onthis nature sanctuary of theirs, and for years I'd

been too busy to accept. Finally, in March of2002, feeling a bit dissatisfied with modernityourselves, my wife and I drove to Michigan in an~

ticipation of moving there.Upon entering the Friedlanders' house, I'

stopped short. Strung on wires and dependingfrom nails hung thousands, or maybe even tens ofthousands, of keys. Some strands drooped in el~

liptical wreaths. Others contorted themselvesinto asymmetrical Mobius strips and figure eights.The longest strands described arcs across the t10~

ral wallpaper, like bunting. The shortest bristledin shiny bouquets. Later I asked Tom about thesepeculiar wall hangings. At auctions and flea mar~

kets, he explained, dealers sold old tools by thebox, and when he returned from his weekendtool hunts, he often found keys buried at the bot­tom, "like prizes." So he saved them. "People justgive them away." Holding a lengrh of keys out formy inspection, he thumbed its tarnished con-

tents. Didn't I see how dif­ferent they all were? Theirlengths and shapes? Thewords and numbersstamped onto their varie~

gated surfaces?Tom led me down half a

flight of stairs to the tele­vision den, where a mob ofbrass hose nozzles hadstormed the mantelpieceand platoons of stove-platehandles flanked the wood­burning stove. Other ob~

jects had been mounted ac~

cording to kind on grayingscraps of plywood, whichleaned about the room~

against bookshelves, in comers~like canvasesabout a painter's studio. There was a board con~

taining sillcocks, those spigot handles shapedlike cross sections of bell pepper, some of them red,some blue, some green, some rusty and bare. Oth~er boards contained screwdrivers, locks, shower~heads. A few contained rusty things I failed to rec­ognize. A bandolier of belt buckles dangled homa hook originally intended for a houseplant. Onan end table beside a row of matching conchshells lay a pair of eggs-fluted, geometric ob­longs of speckled glass. Electrical insulators, Tomexplained, from telephone lines.

He referred to these taxonomical arrays of hisas "experiments." When he retired from teach~

ing, he would make more of them, he said,many, many more of them, so he could hangthem on walls where visitors could see themand "old~timers" could come and talk to himabout his tools, maybe even identify some of the"whatsits," those objects whose original purposehad become mysterious.

FOLlO 47

•

•

As is true of many people who spend theirdays working with kids, there is somethingperennially youthful about Tom. At familyreunions when I was a child, he would tell mybrother and me that he kept things in hisbeard--coins, bluebird eggs-and then he'dbend down so that, halfbelieving him, wecould investigate its scratchy depths. He'dcatch insects with his bare hands and rell ustheir names, both Latin and common, as wellas their secrets-why fireflies lit up or whycicadas left their exoskeletons on the trunks ofmy grandmother's trees. He'd seemed omni~

scient to me then, wizard~like. He could recite~ntire Monty Python routines by heart, as wellas long portions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to theGalaxy, and he sometimes spoke in peculiarvoices, impersonating robots or masters ofKung Fu. He said things like, "Take this marblefrom my hand, Grasshopper, and your trainingwill be complete."

That afternoon in his television den, I askedTom how large his tool collection was, and he ledme to his study, which contained a library ofbotanical texts with titles like Trees, Shrubs, and\Voody Vines of the Southwest, or Botanical Mi­crmechnique, or World Without Trees. On the oth~

er side of the room, home~made bookshelves teeteredunder the weight of oldhardware catalogues andreference books abouttools, such as P. T. Rath­bone's History ofOld TimeFarm Implement Companiesand the Wrenches The)' Is­sued and Eric Sloane's clas­sic A Museum of EarlyAmerican Too~. From a nailin the doorway hung a clip,board, to which wasclipped a stack of sheets.This was Tom's inventory.Whenever he returnedfrom a tool hunt, he addedhis new quarry to the running tally. He'd ac­quired his fmt old tool by mistake while shoppingfor a hole punch at the local Kiwanis thrift store.The box lot that contained the punch he want­ed also happened to contain a foot~long engi~

neer's wrench. A few months later, discovering anidentical wrench at an antiques store, he experi~

enced what he describes as "an instant vision ofsymmetry." 'TI,at was 1988. By March 2002, whenI first visited his home, he had accumulated, andrudimentarily classified, approximately 25,000formerly useful things, not counting the keys.Almost 18,(){)() were wrenches (Tom's specialty),a few thousand were screwdrivers, and severalhundred were soldering irons. The exhibit in the

48 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2005

television den represented only a small sample.«The rest," Tom told me, "are in

Sthe bam."

outheast Michigan can be beautiful in leaf orunder snow, but that winter it had hardly snowedat all, and the Friedlanders' nature sanctuary wasa desiccated, khaki-colored wasteland. The silverblimp of a septic tank glowed between the barebranches of bushes planted to obscure it. Behindthe house, where corn once grew, an ocean ofgoldenrod-still brown and dormant-stretchedto the woodlot on the horizon. On the way to thetool bam, we passed the greenhouse Tom andMartha had built out of corrugated fiberglass.Two plastic barrels full of frozen rain stood sen,try beside the entrance. Inside I could discernthe shadowy forms of succulents (one of Tom'sprevious taxonomical obsessions) weathering thehostile biome in balmy serenity.

Although there was a barn-sized bam on theproperty-a dilapidated cavern full of owl shit,darkness, and mildewy hay where Tom kept theantique tractor he used to mow paths through thegoldenrod in the summer and plow the drivewayin winter-the prefabricated steel structure inwhich he stored his tools was scarcely bigger

than a two~car garage. Weentered through a sidedoor, stepping awkwardlyover three metal sphereshuge as medicine ballswhile fluorescent tubesflickered on overhead.

My first impression wasan abstraction: I did notsee the hundreds of hand­saws hanging from pegs likekeys in a locksmith's shop,or the iron shoe lastsarranged in pigeonholes ac,cording to size, or the tow,ering steel file cabinets withhandwritten tags tapedabove their handles, or the

railroad jacks congregating on a shelf, or the flockof meat scales and wooden pulleys suspendedfrom the ceiling by hooks; what 1saw was the ideaof multitude, Be fruirful and multiply, the Lordhad commanded, and we had, we Americans;here all ar9und us was our labor's rusty fruit.

"There are over five hundred drawers full ofstuff in here," Tom told me. "That's the sort ofscale. Plus the walls. Plus the floor. Plus con­tainers. It's all organized. For instance, this is theoverflow hammer drawer." He yanked open thedrawer in question. Wooden hafts lay atop one an­other like matches in a matchbox. Tom selecteda mallet with a head like a half-melted marsh­mallow and held it up for my inspection. The

beaten surface of its polls was fissured with tinycracks like the hide of an elephant. "Lead ham­mer," Tom said. He returned it with a claner to

the drawer and selected another. "Compositionhammer." And another. "Farrier's horseshoe nail~

driving hammer."Here and there, weighted down beneath what­

ever tOol was most proximate, were pages tomfrom spiral notebooks on which Tom had cata~

logued the contents of his five hundred drawers,all of which he seemed to have memorized. If anitern caught my eye and I asked him about it, hecould almost always identify it by name and pur­pose, and when he couldnlt, his eyes shone withexcitement. UThat," he would pronounce, "is awhatsit." The steel balls we'd climbed over uponentering were whatsits, though Tom did have atheory about themo they might be ball bearingsfrom the gun turret of a battleship.

As we made our way slowly down the crowd­ed aisles, what struck me most was how zoologi~

cal Tom's tools seemed, especially the moreexotic ones. Divorced from usefulness and sub­jected to morphological classification, theylooked like the fossils_of Cenozoic mollusks orthe wristbones of tyrannosaurs. Certain pliersbore striking resemblances to the beaks of birds,certain wrenches to the jaws of lizards. Thepoints of chisels and awls looked like talons andclaws. Even the names of tools suggested zoolog~

ical comparisons; there was a goosewing axe, analligator wrench, a mortising twivil called a beed'ane, French for "nose of a donkey." Loggetshad once assembled their raftS with oversizedstaples known as "dogs.'l It is, in fact, impossibleto talk about tools withom resorting to biologi­cal metaphors. We refer to the "head" and"claw" of a hammer, the "frog" and "throat" of aplane, the "jaws" of a vice, the "eye" of an adze.

This had to be what motivated Tom's maniccollecting. He wasn't merely a collector of tools;he was a taxonomist of tools, a nararalisr of rools.He'd progressed from gray dogwoods to succulentsto wrenches, as if the age~old distinction be~

tween nature and culture were the folly ofphilosophers. I could feel my mind begin to fizzwith grandiose, half-baked notions. Everythingevolves, 1 thought. Even hammers. Even keys. Imentioned the zoological analogy, and Tom be­gan rummaging through drawers until he foundwhat he was looking for, an adjustable wrenchwith a distinctly avian silhouette. "The Puffin!"he exclaimed.

Nothing in the bam illustrated this theory oftechnological Darwinism more dramatically thanTom's wrenches. He'd organized them first bymethod of manufacture, separating the hand~

forged from the drop-forged, then by type, sep­arating crescent from box, socket from imple­ment, ratchet from alligator, monkey from dog

bone. Each of these species he'd subdivided fur­ther according ro the number of their openings,or the material from which they were made, orthe specialized purpose they'd served. Some of hisspecimens represented transitional designs inthe evolution of the wrench. Some were tech­nological chimeras that hybridized wrencheswith other implements.

Why wrenches? Why tools?Tom fell quiet, stroking his beard. "I don't

know," he said finally. "I guess 1 just find thembeautiful." Although he could extemporize ani­

. matedly about the history of the valve seat grinder,or the art of ropemaking, or how long it rook to

I couldfeel my mindbegin to jizz withgrandiose notions. Everything evolves, I thought_Even hammers. Even keys

manually drill blast holes into a deposit of coal,aesthetics were another matter. The unlikelybeauty of his rusty treasures defied elaboration. Hiscritical vocabulary consisted mainly of the words"neat," "cool," and "fun." Tools he disliked weresimply Hjunk," a term he usually reserved for thecheaply mass-produced, or for a specimen dam­aged beyond tescue.

His favorite tools dated from the turn of thecentury, before the consolidation of the hard­ware industry, when thousands of new mechan­ical species appeared every year. "1880 to 1920,TOughly the same time that Michigan was loggedover, that was the heyday of tractors," Tom in~

formed me. Because nut and bolt sizes had yet tobe thoroughly standardized, every new piece offarm machinery came with its own wrenches,creating the technological equivalent of biodi­versity. "After the twenties, mass~produced steeltOols came in, and virtually no specialty, plow ortracror wrenches were made after that. It all JUStvanished." As extinctions went, this one seemedhardly worth getting upset over. Who cared aboutthe lost golden age of implement wrenches?

Many collecrors and dealers restore their tools,scraping away the rust, polishing the finish. Somewill even apply a coat of paint, white for the em~

bossed patent information and brand names,black for the rest. Such adulterations dismayTom, who prefers used tools to the expensiveones described in auction catalogues as "mint" or"like new." He will clean his finds, but delicate­ly, forensically almost, careful to preserve any"use marks"-the particularizing derails that mightdisclose a rooFs secret life. He spoke of his spec~

imens as if they were alive, or had been once."I loved finding this," he said of a particularly

FOLIO 49

rusty implement wrench. "No serious fine-toolcollector would want this, but I want it. Got it fora dollar. What a beautiful wrench. It was underwater-a wet place-and it died." The wrenchwas beautiful, though I couldn't have told youwhy, any more than he could.

That spring, I was teaching high school Eng­lish and had recently assigned excerpts ftom LetUs Now Praise Famous Men, the literary docu~

mentary in which writer James Agee and pho~

tographer Walker Evans illuminate the materiallives of tenant farmers in Alabama during theGreat Depression. Examining Tom's tools, someof which bore the signatures of blacksmiths, oth­ers the stamped initials of extinct railroad com~

panies, still others the tarnished trace of somedead laborer's sweaty palm, I was reminded ofthe passage in which Agee describes a pair ofoveralls. "They have begun with the massive yetdelicate beauty of most things which are turnedout most cheaply in great tribes by machines,uAgee writes, "and on this basis of structure theyare changed into images and marvels of nature."And yet Agee's had been a scavenger hunt for thepresent, nor for the past. He and Walker Evanshad sought "to perceive simply the cruel radi­ance of what is"-not the quaint glimmer of what

Where lies the boundary between meaningandsentiment? I wondered. 'Between memory

and nostalgia? What is and what was?

was. Where lies the boundary between meaningand sentiment? I wondered. Between memoryand nostalgia? America and Americana? What isand what was? Does it move?

Martha appeared in the doorway of the toolbam, summoning us to dinner. Tom turned off thefluorescent lights and padlocked the door. Nighthad fallen. A ciry boy since birth, I was used tolight-polluted skies. Here, only an hour southwestof Detroit, the stars were as bright and plentifulas in a planetarium show. The Friedlanders' ranchhouse, lamplight streaming from its windows,looked like a ship adrift upon black swells.

That night on my way to bed, I stopped inthe carpeted hallway where an entire wall hadbeen papered in cartography. From a pushpin inthe comer of a particularly enormous map dan­gled a shoestring. This was, I saw upon inspec~

tion, the radius of a vast, Midwestern galaxy thenucleus of which was the Friedlanders' fatm. Redhash marks divided the string into increments,counting off miles. Towns throughout Michi~

gan, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and Ontario hadbeen circled in felt pen, and dates and distances

50 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2005

scrawled beside them. Newspaper advertisementsfor estate auctions fluttered under pins. "Retiredfrom fatming," they typically began, "1 will sellthe following list ..." If the owner of an estate haddied, as was often the case, the auctioneers re~

sotted to participles: "Selling personal ptopettyof the late Hazel Shiba at public auction ..." Iunpinned one. The personal property it inven~

toried-walnut dressers and whipple trees, oldmagazines and hay forks and Depression glass--

read like a kind of material obitu~"1 ary, a portrait of a life in things.

've got fifty," calls the auctioneer. uFifty~fi.ve~

five~five, fifty~seven-and~a~half."

Ben, the teenage sideman, revolves atop the haywagon, patading the bow saw like a trophy highabove the tipped bills of a hundred baseball capsemblazoned with logos and slogans: RIFKIN SCRAPIRON & METAL CD., I'D RATHER BE HUNTING, WEST­

PHALIA AlJID SALVAGE, PURINA, GOD BLESS AMER­ICA, MR. ASPHALT. Across Tom Friedlandet's blueball cap a galleon embtoidered trom gold threadsails above the legend H.M.S. Victory. Most of theauctiongoers are e1de"y farmers; with his ponytailand great Victorian beard, Tom seems as out ofplace among them as Darwin among the Patago~

nians. Save for his blue cap, his brown hikingsneakers, and the turquoise decorations on hisleather belt, he is dressed entirely in green~reen

work pants, green work shirt-and vaguely re­sembles an anthropomorphized plant.

The bow saw finally sells for $87.50, and Benthe teenage sideman next lifts an ink~jet printerinto the air. "Something for your computer," theauctioneer says doubtfully. He starts the biddingat fifty dollars but, gefting no takers, lowers it:forry dollars, thirty-five dollars, twenty-five, fif­teen, ten, seven-and-a-half. Finally, he gives up andbanishes it to lithe dog pond," a corner of theshed reserved for items no one wants. Only a fewyears old and still in its original box, the ink~jet

ptinter has already passed into that limbo ofworth­lessness that exists between novelty and nostalgia.

"Nowadays things are almost obsolete beforethey leave the drawing board," Eric Sloane, theseminal romancer of antique tools, observed fortyyears ago. "How lucky we ate that so many of theold tools and the things that were made withthem wete dated and touched with the crafrs­man's art." Sloane believed that the value of athing should be a measure of its quality, much asreputation was once regarded as the measure ofone's soul. My generation, more narcissistic butalso more jaded than his, seems to treasure mostthe consumerist dross we remember from child~

hood, irrespective of its inherent worth. In ourcollecting we are autobiographers, not connois­seurs. I find myself wondering how long it willtake before this ink~jet printer escapes the dog

pond and ascends to the ranks of the collectible.When he published A Museum of Early Amer­

ican Tools in 1964, Sloane almost single-handedlytransformed old tools into Americana. There hadbeen collectors before him, but they were most~

Iy antiquarians and archaeologists who regardedmols as artifacts or aesthetic objects, not sacredrelics. At first glance, Sloane's book appears to benothing more than a pictorial dictionary or fieldguide. In truth it is a political tract, an illustrat~

ed manifesto of romantic, Yankee conservatism.The "ancient implements" it depicts, Sloane's

dedication informs us, are not only tools but"symbols of a sincerity, an integrity, and an ex­cellency that the unionizedcraftsman of today mighr dowell to emulate." His story ofdecline has no room for ten­ant farmers, migrant workers,sweatshops, displaced natives,slaves, nor for early Ameri;cans who did shoddy work.'The harmony rhat the "finecraftsman" once felt with hismaterial and tools is, .asSloane describes it, not un~

like that which once existedbetween Adam and thebeasts. "An extraordinaryawareness of life and timepermeated our early days'" hewrites. Again and again inthe commentary that accompanies his old-timeypen-and-ink drawings of apple barrows and hayforks, he praises the craftsmen of yore at the ex~

pense of"modem workers," whose "constant aimis more to make the most money from their pro~

fession instead of producing the most honest andbeautiful and lasting things."

To this day on the antique-tool market, EricSloane's romantic biases pertain. Wood sells

* In fact, the early Americans Sloane glorifies were onaverage versatile but mediocre craftsmen compared withthe members of European guilds. "Al'hough the rural andsmaU~town economy of the eighteenth century supporteda number of specialized artisans," explains Paul B.Kebabian, author of American Woodworking Tools,",he majority of ,he population farmed. And each farmerhod w be something of a jack-of-aU-trade" he waswagon-maker; house- and bam-builder; maker of hots,cloth, tools, furniture, nails and handspikes, staves andheading and hoops frYr barre~, potash, maple sugar, rYr

any of a host of other products frYr use a' home and frYrtrade and sale." The abundance and variety of Americantools, in fact, testifies to a shortage, not a preponderance,of skill. The carpenteron the Pequod, whom Melvilledescribes as "omnirooled," is "to a certain ofrhanded,practical extent, alike experienced in numerous tradesand callings collateral to his own." In addition to main;raining the seaworthiness of the ship, he perfarms dentalsurgery, repairs Ahab's prosthetic leg, and decorates thesecond mate's favorite oar with a constellation of stars.

better than metal, metal better than plastic.Carpentry tools sell better than those of othercrafts and trades. The plane, certain rare spec~

imens of which have been known to fetch$20,000 or more, is probably rhe most collecribletool there is. The wrench, Tom Friedlander'sspecialty, is among the leasr collectible.

Devised by carpenters of rhe Roman Empire, rheplane could hypothetically have been used by Je­sus Christ himself, before he gave up woodwork­ing for fishing. A hundred years ago a carpenter'stool chest typically would have contained dozensof varieties of planes, and a typical hardware cat;alogue would list hundreds of varieties (astragals,

fillisters, snipe bills, ogees,Grecian ovolos), each oneadapted to a highly special­ized purpose. Shipwrightssmoothed the decks of shipswirh planes resembling horse­shoe crabs, and violinmakerscarved fiddle heads withplanes, made from lignum vi~

tae, that were smaller than arhumb. Then, ar rhe end ofthe nineteenth century, whatthe jigsaw did to rhe bow sawplaning machines did toplanes. According ro EricSloane, in New England inrhe mid-l900s obsolete planeswere being sold as firewood

for as little as five dollars a barrel, including thebarrel. Only when planes became less plentifuland more mysterious did collectors take interest,suggesting that dearh may be the mother of nos­talgia as well as of beaury.

The twilight of the plane was the heyday ofthe wrench. Leonardo da Vinci is said to havedoodled designs for an adjustable wrench in hisnotebooks; but it was with the invention of bolt;rhreading machines in the early 1800s that thewrench became as useful and as common as thehammer. In 1869 a writer for Scientific American,marveling at how "rude and uncouth" old toolswere compared with the machine~lathed won;ders of his day, described antebellum wrenchesas being mostly of "the pot hook variety." Thehistory of the wrench is the history of indusrrial­ism writ smalL No matter how many farmers usethem, no matter how mechanized agriculturebecomes, on the antique;tool market wrenchessymbolize pastoralism's antithesis_ Of metal formetal, they are the emblem of mechanics andmachinists, the standard raised in the fists of fac;tory workers in revolutionary murals. They arethe tool of the unionized masses, not the self­reliant yeoman or artisan. Wrenches assembleand adjust; they do not make. There are nowrenches in Eric Sloane's Museum.

FOLlO 51

Time, it seems, is an ironist. That spring, thespring of 2003, factory workers were being laid offin record numbers-Michigan alone lost 171,000manufacturing jobs between 1999 and 2003­and the riveters and machine operators Sloane de~

rided seemed like skilled artisans compared withthe technicians and sales associates replacingthem. The era of the wrench, like the era of theplane before it, is ending. Predictably, the ranksof wrench collectors recently have begun to swell.Although still worth far less than a desirableplane, a rare and pristine John Deere tractorwrench can now fetch hundreds ofdollars at auc~tion. Partly this reflects the enthusiasm in ruralAmerica for the antique uactors with which suchwrenches were originally sold. Bur the populari~

ty of other wrench varieties-pipe wrenches, au~tomobile wrenches, buggy wrenches, batterycable~pulling wrenches~is also growing. Thedecline of American manufacturing has given

rise to pastoralism's postindustrial ana­logue: a romance of rust.

I leave Tom beside the hay wagon, a heap oftreasures accumulating in the grass at his feet,and survey the premises. Parked in the rutteddrive that runs between the houseand the barn, a white campingtrailer radiates patriotism and thesmell of boiling kielbasa. NAN'S

SNACK WAGON, a sign reads. Plas­tic American flags suction~cuppedto the trailer's roof scroll and un­scroll themselves listlessly in thehumid air. Across the trailer's sidesomeone has airbrushed this poem:

Le, the Eagle FlyLand of the FreeHome of the BroveLove Your CormO)'Thank GodAnd the Veterans

Through a small concession win­dow at the rear of the trailer awoman, presumably 1 an herself,hands a hot dog to an old manwhose suspenders spell AU,SICA invertical letters. Protruding from the purse of an~other customer is a leather-bound. gilt,edged vol~

ume titled Armageddon.I hear people speculating abour what will hap­

pen to this farm now that the owners have growntoo old for it. I· hear rumors of rest homes and fu­neral parlors, and notice among the larger itemsup for auction a motorized wheelchair, an elec~

tric hospital bed, a walker, a chamber pot. An es~

tate auction, 1 realize, is part festival, part fu~

oeral. It's not jlist the owners of this fann who aredying but the farm itself. Splotches of lichen the

54 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2005

color of toothpaste bloom everywhere, on thestone foundation of the barn, on the rusty farmequipment~cultipackers, harrows, plows~spread out like modernist sculpture across thesodden lawn.

Even in the too~insistent imperatives of thesnack wagon's patriotic hymn, I think I can dis~

cern an undertone of foreboding and grief. It'sthere, too, along with happy chatter about lastnight's hailstorm, in the conversations of theauctiongoers. They walk among old furniture andcollectibles as if through lost time. They spin thedial of the Lone Ranger radio and say to theirspouses, look at this, check this out, remember these.They fondle the porcelain doll with the crackedskull and the jaundiced nightgown, then punchthe keys of the old Remington cash register, smil­ing when the different prices-all charming-

ly low-spring up behind rhe little~ pane of glass.

1 hat summer Tom and I drive to auctions allover Michigan, leaving sometimes as early as_sun~

rise, when fog still eddies berween the hills and theshadow of Tom's emerald pickup ripples on thegrassy margin beside us. When we return at the end

of the day, buckets and boxes ofjunk bungeed down in the bed ofthe truck, the shadows are just aslong but stretch in the other di­rection. During fourteen years ofcollecting, Tom has memorizedthe state highways. He has his ownpersonal landmarks-a yellowfarmhouse that glows "like a bea­con" from atop a ridge, a pair ofboulders that he says are glacialeccentrics, an ice~cream standcalled King Kane in the shape ofan enonnous soft~serve whose newowners no longer offer Tom's fa­vorite flavor, orange-vanilla swirl.Everywhere we go, I see used carsfor sale, parked in front lawns atoprectangles of uncropped grass.

Tom likes to get to auctions atleast an hour or two early so thathe can appraise the day's offerings

and search for the treasures that unscrupulousbidders sometimes bury under scrap. This is his fa­vorite part, and watching him rummage throughthe contents of a table or hay wagon, I think Iknow why. Here he is most like a naturalist in thefield or an archaeologist on a dig. When he findssomething that interests him, he holds it to hiseyes, inspects it, rubs its finish, tests its movingparts. It wouldn't surpri~e me ifhe started tastingthings. As he rummages he provides a runningcommentary for my benefit: uThis is a seed~corn

planter. Everybody had one. The American Stan-

•

r

dacd. You put your seed com in there. You jab itin the ground, and this spring pops open the dooras it sinks in and releases one seed at a time."

Other collectors and some auctioneers greetTom with nods. Regulars on the local auctioncircuit seem to regard him as a harmless eccen~

tric, a wildman cum nutty~professor figure.Acquaintances and strangers alike bring toolsfor him to identify. JUSt as often, though, Tom isthe one asking questions. This is how he haslearned so much. The intensity with which helistens elicits uncharacteristically volubleexplanations from farmers accustomed tosilence. His inquisitiveness dignifies the obso~

lete knowledge they possess, and they proffer itgladly. At the same time, I am surprised by howmany of Tom's questions leave his interlocutorsdumbfounded. Even recognizable tools baffle:Sure it's a hammer, but what was it used for? Tobreak peanut brittle? To tenderize meat? Toadjust the inner workings of a watch? See howit's gOt a little cutter on it?

Just past sunrise on a June morning, we drivenorth on M-5Z, a highway that runs verticallyup the mitten of Michigan, farming towns strungalong its length like beads. Somewhere betweenSaginaw and Hemlock, the arrow on a hand~

lettered PARKING sign directs us into a pasturewhere a small contingent of other trucks-upto their wheel hubs in winter wheat, fins of driedmud sprayed across their doors-have alreadyconvened. The recently deceased owner of thispasture, a farmer named Dale Krause, was him~

self an obsessive collector of agro-industrial relics.The list of items up for sale tOday is varied andlong. Bidding will begin at 9:00 A.M., an hour ortwo earlier than usual, and may go on past dark.IlThis is·a all day large auction," reads the ad inAuction Exchange. "Many of the outbuildings arefull with oldies too numerous to mention! Bringyour trailers. Be there!!!"

Along with the usual rust-laden hay wagons,the numerous oldies arrayed across the trampledclover this morning include the remains of anold handloom, a buggy with a bearskin blanketdisintegrating on the upholstered seat, and adozen antique tractors, some of which are as shinyand colorful as brand-new toys and scme of whichlook like partially dissected mechanical cadavers.Amid them towers an elephantine monstrosity ofgalvanized sheet metal, like something out ofJules Verne or the notebooks of Leonardo da Vin­ci. This, I learn upon investigation, is a Mc~

Connick Deering 38" grain thrasher. Its wheels aremade of bare iron. Its drive belt is part metal,part wood. Its bolt heads are not hexagonal butsquare. Across one side someone has performedmysterious calculations in chalk. "That," Tomsays, Ilshould be in the Smithsonian."

By the time the auction begins, three hundred

or more vehicles have arrived, nearly all of thempickup trucks. Th~ crowd is so large, two spottersstand in irs midst. When they spy a bidder, theyshout, "Hep!" and point. The auctioneers-thereare two of them as well-wear matching whitecowboy hats and travel from item to item in afour-wheel John Deere all-terrain vehicle outfit­ted with loudspeakers and a pulpit, above which,like the drooping head of a dying flower, a yellow,pyramid-shaped parasol dangles from a hook. InTom's opinion, these guys are "real pros." Theyknow what they're seUing and sell it well, which'is to say, speedily and honestly.

Sure it's a hammer; but what was it usedfor? TO

break peanut brittle? TO tenderize meat? See

how it's got a little cutter on it?

A farm auction has a discernible shape, aheliotropic arc. Early in the morning, when thedew is still on the grass, there is somethingalmost worshipful in the way the scavengersencircle the hay wagons. Rusty things scrapeand clink. Parked in pastures and rilted alongthe shoulders of the road, the trucks multiply.Expectation grows. Small talk crescendos tohubbub. The auctioneer does his sound check.The bidding begins. By noon, the atmospherefeels carnivalesque. Then, by mid-afternoon, apost-prandial drowsiness sets in. Sun-drugged,their acquisitiveness and inquisitiveness slaked,the bidders look for places to sit-in tractorsears, on pallers of lumber, on the edges of haywagons-and wait for the auctioneer to getaround to whatever special items he is saving forlast. One by one, the trucks depart.

Tom buys more tools at the Krause auctionthan he has at any auction so far this summer, andwhen it's over, after heaving several hundredpounds of junk into the back of his truck, in­cluding an enormous grinding wheel and a com­plete set of blacksmith's tools, we are both ex­hausted. Driving home, we stop at King Kone.Tom orders blackberry-not as good as orange­vanilla swirl, but good enough. While we sit atpicnic tables licking melted soft~serve from ourknuckles, white tufts blizzard all around us, gath­ering at the edges of the parking lot in drifts. I ask

Tom what they are. "Cottonwoodseeds," he tells me.

l is a commonplace that in the era of con­sumerism we are what we possess. Usually this isnoted as a cause for worry, another symptom ofcultural decline, and perhaps it is. Still, whenyou visit auctions, it is hard not to be moved to

FOLIO 55

pity and awe. Gathered on lawns and hay wagons,items explain one another, like words in a lan~

guage. However miscellaneous they seem, thesebelongings share a kind of logic-the orderingprinciple of human personality. One can traceamong them the lineaments of an inner life. Po~litical affiliations, religious beliefs, memories,vanities, even dreams, are spread out for strangers[Q browse through. Here is a man's hairpiece, .here his wooden crutches, here his numismaticmap of the world festooned with faded stamps.Here is the Carter-Mondale button he once wore.At another auction on another farm in anothermaterial universe, the items on offer include theOctober 1959 issue ofMan-;age: The Magazine of

Gathered on lawm andhay wagons, itemsexplain one another; like words in alanguage. 'I'hey share a kind oflogic

Ca,holic Family Living, a USDA bulletin calledMaking Cellars Or)t, a miniature souvenir tool kitcommemorating the Catholic Shrine at IndianRiver, Michigan ("largesr crucifix in the world"),and three framed jigsaw puzzles of pastoralscenes-sheep, glades, brooks.

Walter Benjamin blamed mechanical repro~

duction for diminishing the auras of uniqueworks of art, but mass~produced artifacts alsoexude auras-auras created through ownershipand use. They become, as Agee wrote, "imagesand marvels of nature." Even separated fromtheir owners, even incoherently grouped,objects remain faintly numinous, like the relicsdiscovered in ancient tombs. This is especiallytrue of tools, which perhaps retain the traces oftheir owners more strongly than do mosthuman artifacts.

Today we refer to anything useful, from com~

puter programs to ideas, as tools. This was not.always the case. According to Eric Sloane, inantebellum America the word "tool" denoted animplement that could make one thing at a time.Reconstruction~era industrialization broadenedthe meaning of the word to include any imple­ment involved in the manufacture of a product,necessitating the coining of the renn "handtool" to distinguish traditional implements fromwhat came to be knQ\\Tl as "machines."

The difference between these twO mechani~

cal species, it seems to me, may be more a mat­ter of culture than of engineering. Machines areborh rhe rival and the antithesis of humaniry.In rheir complexity, they resemble us. In theirsimplicity (all those parts, and yet no Oedipuscomplex, no withdrawal symptoms, no fear of

56 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2005

death, no ecstasy), they are monstrous---or asBlake put it, "Satanic." Machines are largelyautonomous and threaten us with obsolescence,whereas a tool is nothing without us.

"Considered functionally," British paleontol­ogist Kenneth P. Oakley wrote in his influential1949 monograph, Man ,he Thol-Maker, rools"are detachable extensions of the forelimb"-adefinition that any potter, toeing his wheel,might reasonably protest. Perhaps it would bemore accurate to say that tools are detachableextensions not of our forelimbs but of ourselves.

"Like the nails on a beast's paws," Eric Sloanewrites, "the old tools were so much an exten~

sion of a man's hand or an added appendage tohis arm, that the resulting workmanship seemedto flow directly from the body of the maker andto carry something of himself into the work."

Although Sloane was an anti~unionist liber~

tarian, on the meaning of tools he and theauthor of the Communise Manifesto agree."Estranged from labor," writes Marx, "the labor~

er is self-estranged) alien to himself."For the most serious tool aficionados, or Uga~

loots," as they sometimes call themselves, thehegemony of mind and machine over hand andmatter entails an estrangement more profoundeven than the one Marx imagined, an estrange~

ment not only from self but from time. Old toolsimply an entire way of being, an artisanal cos~

mology. One night, lurking on a newsgroup for ga~

loots, I come upon the following credo:

I refuse to be in such a hurry that I squeeze the aes~

thetic value our of everything to gain a few min~

utes of time-time which will then just be filledwith morc rushing and more mass~prod.uced, soul­less junk. In the drive ro achieve instant gratifica­tion, we haye spent a century trying to shorten thelearning curw and eliminate the cha,!ce of error inevery human activity. There is much good in this,but something has been almost lost in the process.The Galoots are the guardians of that which wasalmost lost: the challenge of trying to master a skillthat can never be fully mastered, the creative free~

dom that comes from intimacy with a medium ascomplex as wood, the sense of self,sufficiency thatcomes from knowing that you can make a usefulobject with tools so simple that you can make thetools too, and the peaceful meditation of trying tobring eye, hand and wood together into harmonythrough finesse and understanding rather thanbrute force.

Here, old tools are relics of a mythic past, butthey are also antidotes to automation, standard­ization, acceleration, infantilization, and to thedocile brand of utopianism rhar holds allchange to be progress.

Many of the galoots I have encountered inchat rooms and at auctions fulfill my worstexpectations. Unlike other collectors, galoots

can at times resemble the members of a fraternalorder or a medieval guild, imagining themselvesto be latter-day Knights Templar, keepers of thecode, "guardians of that which was almost lost."The Mid-West Tool Collectors Associationinsists upon the traditional divisions of labor,consigning women and the artifacts of women'swork to a special "ladies auxiliary." And theassociation's aging members wonder why so fewmen of my generation care to learn about theold tools and the old ways.

Still, uncomfortable as I am in their company,wary as I am of their nostalgia, I have begun to

wonder whether they are at least partly right;maybe handiness does matter. Once upon a time,we referred to all {onus of manufacturing (a Lati~

nate word for "making by hand") as "the arts," andonce upon a time all artists, manual as well as

. fine-masons, blacksmiths, and mechanics as wellas-sculptors, musicians, andpoers-eould find mean~

ing in their work."There is something

missing in our definition,vision, of a human being:the need to make," thepoet Frank Bidart observedin a recent sequence of po~ems devoted to the topic ofmaking. "The culture inwhich we live honors spe;cific kinds of making(shaping or mis-shaping abusiness, a family) but doesnot understand how cen­tral making itself is as man~ifestation and mirror of theself, fundamental as eatingor sleeping." The worship of old tools arises,

I have begun to suspect, from the epi;f{) demic frustration of this need.

V f course, Americans still use hand tools.Although the professional crafts and trades havedwindled, the do-it-yourself market that emergedin the 1940s is large and growing. Proportional­ly few of us use tools skillfully anymore, but hordesof us love to play with them. We love doing it our­selves so much, in fact, that in 2003 the StanleyWorks, arguably the most successful tool manu­facturer in U.S. history and certainly the mosticonic, sold $2.7 billion worth of tools.

In July, after two months on the Michigan auc­tion circuit, I head east to Stanley's corporateheadquarters, in New Britain, Connecticut, oncea capital of industry, now little more than a stag~

nant exurb of Hartford. Gary van Deursen, cor­porate vice president of innovation and design, andCarl Stoutenberg, the former company histori­an, now retired, have agreed to meet with me.

My route to New Britain takes me tantalizing~

Iy close to the Sloane;Stanley Museum on thebanks of the Housatonic, where, atop the pic~

turesque ruins of an iron mill, Eric Sloane's col­lection of edifying implements now resides. I de;cide to make time for the detour. According to theposted hours, the museum is open for business, butwhen I try the front door to the main building, Ifind it locked. I snoop among the deserted grounds,silent but for the crunch of my footsteps on thegravel drive. There's a flagpole with a limpid flag,a few picnic tables splattered with bird droppings,an enormous tractor wheel planted like a mono~

lith in the grass, a miniature green;and-yellowsteam engine arrested in the act of pulling a minia;ture ooxcar down a miniature section of track.Finally, a man emerges from a shed. He informs methat the tool museum is indefinitely closed due tocuts in the scate budget and suggests I return when

the economy improves.Onward to New Britain.

Of the dozens of manufac­turers that once operatedhere, Stanley is the onlyone left. A year before myvisit, CEO John Tranimade national news by rec;ommending that the tool­maker reincorporate inBermuda. Lawmakers, la;bar leaders, shareholders,and New Britain residentsbegan impugning Trani'spatriotism. In the end,Stanley decided to stay put,at least on paper, at leastfor now. Already the com­pany has sent most of its

manufacturing jobs elsewhere (nearly 50 percentof Stanley employees work overseas), and has re;duced its New Britain workforce from 5,000 fiftyyears ago to 1,000 today. American do-it­yourselfers are buying iconic American toolsmade in China in order to do amateur manualla;bar while workers laid off by the manufacturer ofthose tools seek employment in the service sec;tor. There is irony in this.

A tall man with a grizzled mustache and a cellphone clipped to the waist of his pleated chinOS,Gary van Deursen is not a galoot. He has stud­ied and admired the tools made by his predeces­sors, but he thinks his are better. His greatenthusiasm is industrial design-the practice ofit, the idea of it, exquisite examples of it. Whathe designs almost doesn't seem to matter. Beforejoining Stanley, he worked at Black & Decker.A large poster of a DustBuster hangs on one wallof his office. He drives a blue POTSche 996 andmentions it frequently, even when he is talkingaoout tools, as an example, a paragon, of good

FOLIO 57

desi~~ Van Deurs~n is goofy for Progress: g~nzofor Change. Everything is getting better. Andthis is very exciting.

Over lunch in 'the corporate cafeteria, I askvan Deursen and Stoutenberg if they are famil~

iar with Sloane's museum. "VerY,1l Stoutenbergsays, rolling his eyes.

I concede that Sloane was "a cr~nky guy".\vim strong opinions and a romantic view of thepast. Still, many of the tools l've seen at toolauctions look superior-sturdier, prettier, morefinely wrought-than those on sale at HomeDepot. I sound like a regular galoot. I'm speak-ing the gaspe!. I

"I would use the analogy of the cars," vanDeursen says. "It's easier to say that the old carswere better because they were thicker steel, butyet if you were going to have even a forry,mile,an~hour collision, what car do you want to bein? Give me any new car. And that's becf-use ofthe technology that's involved."

Van Deurscn begins tol

get excit~cd. "Look at the measuring tape,"he says, in a way that reminds me ofTom Friedlander. "From the 1922Farrand tape to the tape we made afew years ago, the end would breakoff after multiple retractions. In thepast three years, looking at thar, ad~dressing that problem, we figuredout how to solve it with technolo~

gy that was invented for helicopterblades in Desert Storm. We appliedclear armor made by 3M to the lastsix inches of me tape and increasedits strength ten or twenty times."

Aftet lunch we head to the designdepartment, where van DeuTSen givesme one of these high-tech, battle­tested measuring tapes to keep as asouvenir. PowerLock REINFORCED

WITH BladeArmor 2X BLADE LIFE, thepackage say'S. This is an extreme mea­suring tape. This is a tape you couldmeasure warheads and spider holesWith. Packaging, I learn that after­noon, is where much of Stanley's in­novation and design now occurs.Even the tools themselves have beenpackaged, decorated, and brandedwith superfluous design elements­ribbed black blobs of rubber, accentsofStanley yellow-all in order to outperfonn thecompetition not in the workshop or at the con­struction site but at Home Depot and Wal~Mart.

Functional refinements, like BladeArmor, are mi~

nor compared with the cosmetic changes thetools neverendingly undergo.

Van Deursen's job would be easier if this weren'tthe case-if he could simply design the best tool

58 HARPER'S MAGAZINE,! JANUARY 2005

possible, and "best" today means safe and user­friendly as well as functional. But his customersoften shop irrationally, nostalgically. In.Califor­nia, Stanley's framing hammer comes with ablack, wooden axe-handle because in Californiathat's what house framers have traditionally used.No one at Stanley knows why. When van Deursenset out to turn Stanley's rop-of-the-line chiselinto an ergonomic marvel, he learned that bothamateur and professional carpenters prefer chis~

els with translucent yellow handles, even thoughtranslucent plastic was itself a novel materialonly Hty years ago. As a group, tool users are lateadopters. U\Ve wanted to add rubber," van Deursensays. "We add too much rubber, and the guy isn'tgoing to buy this, because he doesn't see his tra­ditional material." The result is a quintessen[ia}~

ly twenty,first,century tool, ergonomic, user,friendly, accompanied by safety precautions, madefrom a combination ofspace'age metals and poly~

mers, including translucent yellowplastic, and exhibiting, in vanDeursen's words, "all the cues, on aglobal basis, of a chise!."

Just before I leave, van Deursenlets me have a sneak peek at the hotnew hand tool Stanley will be rollingout in time for Christmas, the fe,designed SporrUtility™ Outdoors,man™ Knife, the name of whichcame [Q him, like inspiration fromon high, while listening to a newsreport about SUVs. Invented to curroofing tile and drywall, the tradi­tional Stanley utility knife, market re­search showed, had become popularwith hunters 'and fishermen. So vanDeursen and his team added a 3Y2,inch "folding sport blade," somesporty styling, thought up a snazzyname, and doubled the suggested re,tail price. This is what tools in Lhe

twenty,first century have

Hbecome: not hardware, gear.

istory tends to memorializegreat changes, which, technologi'cally speaking, means great inven­tions. Tools are inherently conserv­ative and humble artifacts. Theirhistory is largely accidental, writ~

ten in the margins-of warfare,architecture, economics, religion. In the historyof technology, inventions are the generals, thegeniuses, the monarchs; tools are the common­ers, the craftsmen, the serfs. This is one reasonold tools have become Americana. At oncedemocratic and utilitarian, individualistic andtraditional, they resemble us. They are techno,logical leaves of grass.

"Democratic nations," wrote Alexis deTocqueville in 1831, "will habitually prefer theuseful to the beautiful and they will want thebeautiful to be useful." And tool-collecting liter­ature is replete with evidence of this Americanpreference for the useful. Eric Sloane's epigraphfor A Museum of Early Amencan Tools, takenfrom a utool pamphlet" written in 1719, declaresthat "the Carpenter who builds a good House todefend us from Wind and Weather, is far moreserviceable than the curious Carver whoemploys his art to please his Fancy."

Tools are to American civilization whatamphorae and urns were to the ancient Greeks,common artifacts the ubiquity and durability ofwhich anest to their cultural importance andensure that they will last. Like the Grecian urnin Keats's famous ode, they are the foster chil­dren of silence and slow time. Long after themills crumble into the millponds and the corn­fields sprout s~bdivisions, long after the sweat­shops are condemned and the machines sold offas scrap, tools remain.

"Tools outlast the worker and the work andthe products," David H. Shayt, the SmithsonianInstitution's specialist in crafts and trades, toldme. uWe can't collect people here-we even doworker's clothing very poorly-but the tool wecan study and honor."

Although the history of tools is longer thanthat of any other human artifact, tool historianssuch as Shayt are comparatively novel. The firstscholars to take tool collecting seriously wereVicrorian archaeologists, and, like Victoriannaturalists, the specimens they studied first werethose from distant places and distant times.Most hoped ro do for civilization what Darwinhad done for life. In 1898, David Shayt's prede­cessors at the Smithsonian prepared a taxono­my of inventions, including musical instru­ments, weapons, and eating utensils as well astools, for exhibition at the Trans-MississippiExposition held in Omaha, Nebraska. The firstitem in the exhibit's genealogy of the hammerwas a quartzite pounding stone; the last, asteam-powered hammer as huge and terrible asan iron god. The published caption offers thismoral: "The triumphs of human effort and inge­nuity may be realized by comparing the stonehammer, still in use by half the race, with themachine hammer of today." This is also the les­son of the exhibit as a whole: Behold, the tri­umphs of progress. Pity your ancestors. Envyyour descendants.

Many of the tools then considered highest onthe evolutionary ladder-the mechanical drill,the cutter head of a planing machine, crosscutsaws-are ones I've seen at auctions. Nowantique and collectible, only a century ago theseartifacts of the age of mechanical reproduction

betokened the future, much as the quaint waterwheels that omament calendars and the bucolicsuburbs of New England were in their day thevery engines of change.

In 1897, a year before the Trans-MississippiExposition, Henry Chapman Mercer, a forry­one~year-old archaeologist from Doylestown,Pennsylvania, visited the premises of a neigh­bor "who had been in the habit of going tocountry sales and buying what they called'penny lots.''' There, Mercer experienced a rev,elation of near-Pauline proportions. "When I[saw the] disordered pile of old wagons, gum­tree salt boxes, flax brakes, straw beehives, tindinner horns, rope machines and spinning

cv4.1though the history of tools is longer thanthat ofany other human artifact, tool historians

are comparatively novel

wheels, things I had heard of but never collec­tively saw before, the idea occurred to me thatthe history of Pennsylvania was here profuselyillustrated." Mercer subsequently abandonedhis studies of prehistory and starred obsessivelybuying penny lots, hoping to salvage "all thingsillustrating the life of a people at a given time,"by which he mainly meant tools, but also theobjects wrought with them. In 1929 he pub­lished Anciem Carpemers' Tools, a novel-sizedstudy whose encyclopedic, esoteric detailmakes it only slightly less impressive than themuseum Mercer constructed in Doylestown tohouse his 15,000 illustrious things. SinceMercer's death, with the addition of posthu­mous acquisitions, the collection has morethan tripled.

At the recommendation of David Shayt,Carl Stoutenberg, and numerous galoots,before returning to Michigan, I decide to makewhat is for any serious student of Americantools a necessary pilgrimage. Mercer, a practi­tioner as well as a historian of traditional artsand crafts, earned a fortune manufacturingMoravian tiles. Terrified of losing his collectionto fire, his museum, an inflammable fortressbuilt entirely from reinforced concrete (6,000tons of it) and illuminated entirely by naturallight (the windows comprise 5,000 panes), isintended ro endure until the end of time.Witold Rybczynski, who made the pilgrimagein the late 1990s while researching One GoodTum: A Natural His,ary of ,he Screwdriver andthe Screw, aptly compares the building tou a baronial castle transplanted from theTtansylvanian Alps."

FOLIO 59

Like Rybczynski, \ find the experience of tour­ing the museum dizzying. The central galleryvaults six stories to the roof, and standing at themiddle of it is like standing ar rhe bortom of atwister that has sucked the entire nineteenthcentury into its windy coils. Buggies. wagons,and sleighs float in midair, one above the other.A thirty- by six-foor whaleboar hangs from rheceiling on chains. Every surface is encrusted withthe antiquated remains of America's material cul~rure. Across one wall, a trio of ox yokes fly likestrange pelicans.

A walkway ar the periphery of rhe cenrralgallery spirals me upward past dozens ofalcoves, each devoted to a different craft or

~ favorite ofthe tools I encounter ateM/?rcers Museum is the hatters bow,

which looks like a cellists bow, only larger

rrade, from wheelwrighring ro glassblowing,nearly every single one of which industrialismhas rendered obsolere. My favorite of the manytools I encounter on my ascent is the hatter'sbow, a yard-long implemenr thar looks just likea cellist's bow, only larger. Haberdashers wouldpluck the bow's taught, catgut string above amass of loose fur, causing it, the curator's cap~

tion explains, "co interlace and produce a semi~

compact, oval sheer of fibers called a 'barr.'"On rhe third floor, inside a glass display

case, I come upon a diagram of Mercer's tax~

onomy, his uClassification of Historic HumanTools," an elegant scheme that is to theByzantine classification system devised by theu.s. Parenr and Trademark Office wharLinnaean taxonomy is to genetic sequencing.The USPTO organizes tools firsr according rothe action they perform, and further accordingto highly particularized nuances of engineeringand design. The wrench, for instance, belongsto Class 8\ {tools}, Subclass 52 (wrench,screwdriver, or driver therefor), which con~

tains tools ufor engaging a work part and exert~

ing or transmitting a twisting strain thereto, ormeans for imparting or transmitting an actuat~

ing force to such a tool." Subclass 52 is in turndivided into sub~subclasses,sub~sub~subclasses,

and so on. A particular kind of Allen wrenchbelongs to sub-subclass 436 (having work­engaging and force~exerting portion insertedinto cavity, e.g., Allen wrench, screwdriver),sub-sub-subclass 442 (inserred portion havingrelatively movable components), sub~sub~sub~

subclass 443 {having camming or wedging ele­ment for moving components}, sub~sub~sub~

60 HARPER'S MAGAZINE JJANUARY 2005

sub-subclass 444 (axially shiftable elementlocated between and wedging against compo~

nenrs) , and, finally, sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub­class 445 (with threaded surface for cooperat­ing with mating~tool structure).

Mercer, on the orher hand, divides all humanartifacts into two kingdoms, primary and sec~

ondary, which he subsequently organizes not for~

mally or funcrionally but culturally, relativisti­cally, according to how the tool was used. Primarytools are those used to make or procure necessi~

ties-Food, Clothing, Shelter, Transportation,and, of course, other Tools. Secondary tools arethose used in human activities less rudimentaryto survival, which Mercer groups into seven cat~

egories: Language, Religion, Commerce, Gov~ernment, Art, Amusement~ and Science. Foreach class, primary and secondary, he offers a sin~

gle exemplary object. A tuning fork falls underArt, a pair of spurs under Transport. A multi~

purpose device might belong to several differentcaregories, depending on who used it and how. Anapothecary's mortar and pestle is an arrifucr of Ap­plied Science, but a baker's mortar and pestlewould be an artifact of Food. The museum itselfis a kind of three~dimensional,seven~storymag~nification of this scheme, a taxonomical honey~comb of dioramas.

It is a beautiful thing, this taxonomy, like agood, old tool, elegant and useful even today,despire its simpliciry. I can think of objects tharmight blur Mercer's lines but none that wouldfall outside of them. Unlike Eric Sloane, Mercerregards objects as artifacts, not symools. Heinsists that his tools not be treated as romantic,nationalistic icons, for ancient antecedents toearly American tools carl be found worldwide.Not only does his book include primitive exam~

pies of the wrench; he expresses disbelief rhararchaeologists have paid so little attention tothis implement, given its importance in the his~

tory of machines."This singular collection is the child of an

opportunity which will certainly never occuragain," Mercer is quoted as saying in a displaynear the museum's entrance. "Let my wordsinspire you one and all to refrain from destroy~

ing historical specimens of this kind which hap­pen to be in your possession." There is some~

thing poignant about this wish, poignantbecause the idea rhar one could possibly pre­serve the material world, make time pause,arresr "all things illustrating the life of a peopleat a given time," is itself antique. Mercer's ele~

gant classification system, the vestige of a farmore knowable world, contains a fatal flaw: itcannot accommodate whatsits. To classify atool, he must first know how it was used.

For practical reasons, Mercer limited his col~

lection to pre-industrial rools. Had he included

•

tools of the age of mechanical reproduction, hewould have needed a concrete, fireproof Libraryof Babel to house them. Not even the Smith­sonian has room for hand tools anymore. Most ofthe collection David Shayt curates has beenmoved to a warehouse in Maryland. During thelast two centuries, depending on how you mea~

sure it, the manufactured world may have be~

come even more various than the natural onc, asinfinite in its variety, to paraphrase Freud, as thedaydreams of mankind.

Since 1790, when the U.S. Patent and Trade­mark Office was established, 6.7 million inven~

tions have been patented in this country alone­more than three times the number of life~fonns

identified to date by biologists. Of these, morethan 33,000 are hand tools u not structurally llm~

ited to any classified aft," a number that is itselffairly staggering when you consider that from theIron Age to the dawn of the age of mechanical re­production the tools of most trades remained es~

sentially the same. The claw~headed hammer,the plane, the brace, the saw, the drill-nearly allthe tools in a woodwork~

er's toolbox predate~ thebirth of Christ. There weregood reasons for theirlongevity: namely, humananatomy, raw materials,and the laws of physics. Ahammer swung by a Ro~

man carpenter in 286 B.C.differed only superficiallyfrom that swung by anAmerican in 1786 A.D.,because in both cases thetool turned the carpenter'shand into a fulcrum; inboth cases, the hammer'shead would likely havebeen made of iron, and itshaft from a wood such as oak, strong enough towithstand repeated shock but soft enough to con~

form ergonomically to the body of the man swing­ing it; in both cases, a well~aimed blow wouldhave delivered comparable force and an errantone comparable harm.

With the emergence of machine lathes andmodem metallurgy at the tum of the nineteenthcenwry, it suddenly became possible to mass­produce tools so specialized they could substitutefor skills. "The productivity of labour dependsnot only on the proficiency of the worker, butalso on the quality of his tools," Karl Marx wrotein a section of Das Kapical, "The SpecializedWorket and His Tools." By 1867, Marx reportswith a hint of surprise and dismay, 500 differentvarieties of hammer were being manufactured inBirmingham, England. Flip through TheHammer: The King of Tools, a collector's field

guide; behold the fabulous, many-headed throngpictured therein-snow knockers and hoof­picks, thrifts and mauls, stonecutting hammerswith polls like picket fences, commanders withmassive heads of burl, fencing hammers with"wire twisting cheeks"-and you can appreciateMarx's astonishment.

The same year Marx published Das Kapical, thenumber of U.S. patents totaled 60,658, an in­Ctease in three decades of more than 5,000 percent.In 1928, the year Mercer completed Ancient Car­pemers' Tools, Americans patented 42,376 in~

ventions, and in 1930, at the beginning of theGreat Depression, they patented not fewer butmore--45,243 in aIL This is because patents ex~

ist in the realm of fantasy, not in the realm ofmarket economics. They represent the Ameri~

can dream in its purest, most lottery~like fon.n. Ofcourse, many if not most patented inventionsnever earn a dime, and a majority of those that doquickly become extinct. Proof of this technolog~

ical mass extinction is all around us. In fields andbams, foreclosed factories and abandoned mines,

in plastic buckets of melt­ed hail, the Bessemer ageof mechanical reproduc~

tion is vanishing into mst.For this reasoo, the data~

base of the U.S. Patent andTrademark Office, likeTom Friedlander's bam, re­sembles both a cabinet ofwonders and a catacomboffollies.

What Mercer's museummost reminds me of is Ox­ford University's natural­history museum, a cathe~

dral-like building crowdedwith display cases I visit~

ed once during a yearabroad. American museums of natural history,with their animarronic dinosaurs, IMAX screens,and laserized planetarium shows, increasinglyresemble amusement parks. The Oxford museum,by comparison, has the feel of a postcolonial cu­riosity shop, as if the curators had wandered amidthe wreckage of the British Empire, scavenginghaphazardly whatever marvels and oddities theycould find. Walking from display case to displaycase, one skips across continents and centuries.Here is the foot of a dodo bird, here the shriveledhead of a pygmy, here the plaster-of-paris likenessof an iguanodon.

There is something funereal about all natural~

history museums. They are zoos of the dead, notonly because they exhibit herds of skeletons andflocks of stuffed birds but because so many oftheir specimens are extinct. On one of my scav­enger hums with Tom, I picked up a battered

FOLIO 61

.,

copy of Darwin's Journal of Researches and, read­ing it, was struck by how anachronistic-howinnocent, even-his exuberant curiosityseemed. His entries are rhapsodies of descriptiveprose. Forms of the words "interesting" and "sur~

prising" toll among his sentences like a refrain ofwonderment. "I was much surprised to find par~

tides of smne above the thousandth of an inchsquare, mixed with finer matter," he writes of ahandful of dust. It is as if no one in the history ofthe world had ever paid attention before, as ifDarwin and other Victorians had been born atthe dawn of creation, rather than at the twilightof an empire.

For Melville, [QO, the seas were a sublimechaos of Leviathan mysteries-mysteries that,in a famously dense chapter on l<Cetology," Ish~

mael endeavors to solve, wielding taxonomy asdeftly as Queequeg does a harpoon. Although he"swam through libraries and sailed throughoceans," a systematic classification of the whale,he concedes, would take generations to com~

plete. Never could Melville have predicted thatwithin seventy-five years of Moby,Dick's publi~

cation, when the last American whaling bark,Wanderer, sank off Cuttyhunk, nOt only would allthe species of the once unfathomable cetaceanorder have been fathomedbut many would be nearlyextinct and the whale fish~

eries nearly exhausted.One wonders to what de~

gree Darwin, Melville, andother taxonomical Victori­ans realized that their

travelogues wereeulogies.

Uon my return toMichigan, [ decide to takeone last field trip into theAmerican junkyard. Forfive days in late August,the thirty~eighth annualTri-State Gas Engine &Tractor Show will be held at the Jay Countyfairgrounds in Portland, Indiana, a town 200miles from Ann Arbor. Hundreds of tool deal­ers will be in attendance. To get a jump onother collectors, Tom drives down ahead oftime and spends the eve of the show in a motel.I arrive the following morning a little beforenoon. The dirt parking lots reserved for theshow are nearly full. Throughout the surround­ing neighborhood, people are renting out park­ing Spots on their front lawns. The cars, hailingfrom across the Midwest, may very well numberin the thousands.

Imagining that Tom's blue cap and long beardwi II make him easy to spot, I procure a map and

62 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2005

head to the section of the grounds labeled AN­

TIQUES. Among the tables of John Deere mem­orabilia and hand-painted weather vanes I finda few tool dealers, but Tom is nowhere to beseen. I wander the grounds, past concessionstands peddling corn dogs and fried dough, andsepmagenarian blacksmiths demonstrating theirlost art. On and on I search, up and down theseemingly endless rows of gas engines and trac­tors, whose proud owners sit beside them in fold­ing chairs, drinking beer and playing cards. Ahundred years ago, these antique machines, near~Iy all of them now lovingly restored, brought in­dustry to the farm. They are, in effect, factorieson wheels. Passover is thought to have begunas a shepherds' feast, the rituals and symbols ofwhich outlasted the way of life that gave rise tothem. Something similar, it seems to me, is hap­pening here, at this celebration of obsolete tech~

nology. Caravaning multitudes have made thepilgrimage in order to sacrifice a few gallons of fos­sil fuel to the Gods of Industry. Out of the smoke­stack of a Leviathan diesel mill with a flywheelweighing three tons, perfect rings of smoke chuffone by one at rhythmic intervals, expanding asthey rise.

The day is well past its meridian when I real­i,e that the Jay County fair­grounds are far larger thanI had thought. In one cor­ner of my map, north of thespark-plug exhibit and eastof the tractors, the word"parts" appears twice, adriftin a terra incognita of whitesp~ce. Here, in a vast andshadeless field, I discover apostindustrial bazaar. Theplace feels like a makeshiftvillage or the camp of a

.- bivouacking army. Boothsand tables, overspread with

....:~.. mechanical organs and im­plements, form thorough­fares several acres long.

There are dealers who specialize in antique sparkplugs, antique railroad jacks, antique woodenpulleys, antique hog oilers, antique tractor-seatcushions. There is even a magazine srand peddlingsuch periodicals as Green, a John Deere fanzine,and Farm Collecwr ("Dedicated to the Preserva­tion of Vintage Farm Equipment").

When I finally locate Tom, he is standingalone at a Coca-Cola kiosk, tinted shadesclipped to his glasses, two duffle bags at his feet,both bulging with loot. Since not long aftersunrise, he has been working his way from deal~

er to dealer, filling his bags and returning to histruck to empty them. He has already acquiredmore wrenches on this hunt than on any other

in all his years of collecting, and he still has afew more dealers he means to hit

()-' before we go.

1he next day, back in Ann Atbot, I dtive outto the Friedlanders' farm to help Tom unload,tally, and classify this bounteous haul.Spreading his treasures out on the lowered tail~

gate of his pickup, he is boyishly giddy. "Whee'"he sings. "Chtistmas in August!" Today thewotld delights him with surprises. A waspswoops down from the eaves of the tool bam,snatches a grasshopper from the dirt, and carriesit away. "Grasshopper killed" Tom exclaims. Itis a perfect late-summer afternoon. The cattailshave grown as tall as trees. Martha's vegetablegarden is in fruit. The light is golden. The gold­enrod is a yellow sea. The grass beside the toolbarn is long and spangled with dandelions.Among them, I notice first one little Day-Gloorange flag, then another, then another. Thereare four in all.

"That's where the new bam will go," Tom ex­plains when I ask about the flags. The new barnhas been a fantasy of his fot years. At last, he isready to build it. As we sort yesterday's quarryinto piles-wrenches here, non-wrenches there,hand-forged wrenches there, drop-forged wrench­es here-Tom describes his plans. The new barnwill be bigger than the last barn, he says, andmore brightly lit-an exhibition space worthyof his collection. He will mount his tools on ply­w.ood and hang them from walls. I wonder whoit is he imagines his museum will attract, or if iteven matters. As much as he enjoys my interestin his tools, I doubt that his excitement would di­minish if I weren't there. lfhe were his museum'sonly patron, I am certain that he would keep res­cuing tOols, keep classifying them, keep puttingthem on display. Identification is, for him, akinro benediction, and salvage is akin to salvation.His cosmology, I have come ro learn, is essentiallyelegiac. The universe he inhabits is at once won­drous and endangered. He is not a religious man.He does not believe that The End is nigh. Trainedas a botanist, he does not believe in The End atall but in evolution, change without end. And yet,unlike some neo-Darwinists, Tom knows that

change entails loss, and he dqes not()-' confuse evolution with progress.

1hat afternoon, when we have finished archiv­ing Tom's new acquisitions, I linger in the barn,alone. Outside, the world is hot and bright, butinside it is cool and datk. It smells of grease, dirt,concrete, rust. There are no windows. One mightas well be lll1derground, in a cave--or in a dream.The shapes of the tools are fubulous, as is theitmultiplicity, and their glimmering is faintly sen­tient, like the eyes of dolls.

I choose an item at random and take notes.Copper-headed hammer, nine-inch handlemade of tapered iron. No maker's mark, nopatent number. One poll cracked, the other pollscurfy with blue-green oxides that come off, likebutterfly scales, when you touch them. Coppermines riddle northern Michigan and southernOntario, on land stolen from natives for its ore.Now many of the mines are depleted, and thecopper, at least a small part of it, is dissolvingonto my fingertips.

In the first chapter of Democracy in America,de Tocqueville characterized the European set­tlers of the American Midwest as "the greatpeople to whom the future of the continentdoubtless belongs." No longer. The future lieselsewhere now, in suburban business parks, inthe coastal metropolises, or perhaps on anoth­er continent altogether. Perhaps the futurebelongs to the employees of Stanley's facroryin China.

Today the residents of "that inexhaustible Mis­sissippi Valley" resemble those other peoples deTocqueville describes in his first chapter, a mys­teri.ous, vanished, and-as history would laterprove-wholly imaginary tribe who allegedly pre­ceded the Indians. "Along the banks of the Ohioand in all of the central valley," de Tocquevillewrote, "every day one still finds mounds raised bythe hand of man. When one digs to the center ofthese monuments, they say, one can scarcely failto encounter human remains, strange instru­ments, arms, utensils of all kinds-made of met­al, or recalling usages unknown to current races."

Like a rusty, obsolete machine that was onceas silvery and marvelous as the future itself, theNew World, that European pipe dream, hasgrown old. This is one of the meanings I havescavenged from the junkyard.

"Democratic peoples scarcely worry aboutwhat has been," de Tocqueville also wrote, "butthey willingly dream of what will be, and inthis direction their imagination has no limits;here it stretches and enlarges itself beyondmeasure." To the degree that this was evertrue-and the suicidal immigrants in WillaCather's novels present at least one caveat-Idoubt it is any longer. At some point in the 175years that have elapsed since the French aristo~

crat came to have a look at the Americanexperiment in democracy-perhaps when thefrontier closed, or perhaps when men became,in Thoreau's words, "the tools of their tools," orperhaps when Henry C. Mercer acquired hisfirst penny lor-the future loosened its pur­chase upon our dreams. This is not to say thatAmericans have collectively lost faith inprogress, only that our imaginations face in twodirections. Newer is still better, but now we arenostalgic for almost everything. •

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