path: root/tools.txt

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 reasonably solid though, strong enough to hold fifteen pounds or so of tools without straining. It looks like it will weather some abuse. It hasn't yet. Not much, by the looks of it anyway. I don't really understand how it came to be here on the table in the front room. But it belongs in the bus now.

There are a few screw drivers 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, the postwar three bedroom brick ranches of the west, well stocked with sugary sweet and creamy peanut butter whose jars were destined 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 screw drivers, 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 tool in the jar. The red and clear lucite handled craftsman screwdriver I remember hanging from the magnetic strip on the front of the shelf. The larger flathead with the wooden handle that always stuck too far out of another Jif jar, precarious 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 book ends 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. Clue 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 hand down for 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, came along long after I stopped coming around the toolshed. 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. On one level that's all of existence, but right here, right now, these tools have passed through a whirlpool and into another.

we are not things he was fond of saying, we are happenings. 

I've often wondered what he 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 the years of 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. 

The 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 spotlights.

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 their being a home. I don't know that it ever occurred to me 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 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 them right now.