Tools

The bag has been sitting on the table in the front room for weeks before I ever carry it out to the bus. It’s canvas. Or a nylon made to look like canvas perhaps. It’s heavy duty though, looks like it will weather some use and abuse. It hasn’t yet. Not much. By the looks of it anyway.

There is a long and complicated story about how it came to be here on the table in the front room. I don’t really understand, but I do know it belongs in the bus now.

There are a few screwdrivers inside, some wrenches, files, and a plastic jar of the sort men my grandfather’s age seemed inordinately fond of keeping things in, their wives having doled out all the Skippy or Jif the container once held on sandwiches, or in cookies baked in ovens surrounded by Formica counters and build atop linoleum floors, surfaces of the golden age of petroleum, surfaces of the postwar three bedroom brick ranches of the West, well stocked with sugary sweet and creamy peanut butter jars destined ultimately not for the recycling bin but the tool shed behind the carport.

My cousins and I might have eaten the contents of this jar at some point, though it looks perhaps too new for that. Our children maybe. My cousin’s children. Mine have never seen a three bedroom brick ranch house in the desert. Never will. Not that one anyway.

Inside the jar is an impressive collection of jeweler’s screwdrivers, tiny files, a loupe, a wire brush and a tool whose use is a mystery to me, labeled simply ATT. Not the Bell Telephone Corporation he worked fifty some odd years for, but ATT. Tools demand brevity.

The rest of the bag is filled with larger equivalents of the same tools in the jar. The red and clear lucite handled Craftsman screwdrivers I remember hanging from the magnetic strip on the front of the shelf. The larger flathead with the wooden handle was always sticking too far out of another Jif jar, precariously leaning against the back wall of the workbench.

The shed was metal, unbearable in the midday Tucson summer. It was a mornings and evenings place to work. The bookends of the day.

It’s late now. Another day. A long day of tools. There’s much to be done on a warm December day. Glue that can’t cure in December cold suddenly can cure on a day like today. Now the bus smells of acetone, Sticky Stuff and old carpet. Low voltage wires hang down from the ceiling, scraps of polyiso insulation board scatter the floor. The light is yellow. That yellow light isn’t as common as it used to be when he would go out to the shed at night after dinner to tinker with radios and television sets. The light from the warmest LED bulbs I can get isn’t nearly as warm as these old incandescents.

Why were they called ranches, those postwar dwellings America scattered across the landscape? They’re nothing like ranches. A house is not the ranch. The land is the ranch.

Most of these tools I recognize. Or imagine that I do. I know I remember the screwdrivers. I don’t know if they were really there, but I believe my memory of them. I know I don’t remember the bag. I can tell by the lack of wear that it’s too new, it came along long after I stopped coming around the tool shed. Or Tucson for that matter.

Alan Watts once said, “every one of us is a whirlpool in the tide of existence.” The context, or his point actually, is that everything passes through us, we are whirlpools, the water moves through us. Take away the water and there’s nothing left. These tools have passed through one whirlpool and into another.

We are not things, Watts was fond of saying, we are happenings. But we are happenings with things. Specifically with tools, many of which help us happen in one way or another. What to make of these tools then?

“The coming and going of things in the world is marvelous,” says Watts. “They go. Where do they go? Don’t answer, because that would spoil the mystery. They vanish into the mystery.”

For now they’re mine, my mystery to hold on to. I don’t work on TVs or radios and don’t have much use for many of them, still, everyone needs screwdrivers. Even the files have come in handy to shaving down the burrs in a few holes I needed to drill in the metal windows channels. Down the road which ones will I need? Don’t answer.

I’ve often wondered what my grandfather would have thought of the bus. It’s not his style really. Too big, too comfortable. When we went camping he always slept in a tent. With a cot. A setup I imagine was something like what he spent WWII living in.

I was always in a camper with my parents. My grandparents were in the tent. A tent was good enough for New Guinea it was good enough for Zion, Arches, Bryce, Canyonlands and the rest of the red rock desert we explored for years. It was always good enough for me too.

The darker it gets the more apparent it is that these LED bulbs will never do. The light in here with them on is too blue. I’d rather lose the energy, lose a day of boondocking than light the world with the harsh blue of police stations.

The funniest thing about the bus is how much disdain I’ve always had for RV dwellers. What’s the point, there’s nothing about living in an RV that’s any “closer to nature” than the average house. Why not just stay at home? Those beliefs were predicated on there being a home. I don’t know that it ever occurred to me as a kid that for some of those RV owners that was home. LED lights and all.

My beliefs were in some respect his. He never had any respect for people who needed comfort or modern convenience. He never said as much, but it wasn’t hard to absorb that lesson being around him. That’s not to say he did not like comfort, he just didn’t need it. He grew up the son of alcoholics, his family owned a wood lot in the desert. It was bad enough that he ran away at fourteen. Not that he told me that, not that I even knew that back then. That came later, like the tool bag.

Every day when we were out camping, no matter the weather or temperature outside, he washed his face every morning in the same silver bowl filled with half boiling water and half cold from the water bottle that had spent the night in the cold desert air of the tent. He used the hot water, but even as he did you couldn’t help suspect that he didn’t need it, that he appreciated it for what it was, but was not at loss without it, that he’d have scrubbed his face with a block of ice if he had to.

Or maybe Freud was right; maybe he was just washing his face. Perhaps it’s all just a case of the imagination projecting the image it wants to recall on the scenes of the past that it has access too. But then does it matter one way or the other? Memory is a construct, built with the tools your imagination has on hand. I have these scenes from camping trips, these screw drivers in plastic jars, this warm yellow light to sit beneath. Does it matter which light we choose to see by? I like this yellow light, the weaker light, the warmer light. I like the way it glows. And I like this bag of tools, even if I don’t need all of them right now.