Nostalgia, Progress, and Michigan

Headed to Ann Arbor tomorrow to spend three days at the University of Michigan, where I spent two unusually fruitful years almost a decade ago. During those two years I wrote my first long piece of narrative nonfiction, an essay about traveling around the rust belt with a botanist turned tool collector named Tom Friedlander, whom I hope to see later this week. An adapted and abridged version of that essay appeared last spring in the Work issue of Lapham's Quarterly. Because I'm in a Michigan state of mind, here's an excerpt from the long version, "A Romance of Rust: Nostalgia, Progress, and the Meaning of Tools," which originally appeared in Harper's:

Southeast Michigan can be beautiful in leaf or under snow, but that winter it had hardly snowed at all, and the Friedlanders' nature sanctuary was a desiccated, khaki-colored wasteland. The silver blimp of a propane tank glowed between the bare branches of bushes planted to obscure it. Behind the house, where corn once grew, an ocean of goldenrod—still brown and dormant—stretched to the woodlot on the horizon. On the way to the tool barn, we passed the greenhouse Tom and Martha had built out of corrugated fiberglass. Two plastic barrels full of frozen rain stood sentry beside the entrance. Inside I could discern the shadowy forms of succulents (one of Tom's previous taxonomical obsessions) weathering the hostile biome in balmy serenity.

Although there was a barn-sized barn on the property—a dilapidated cavern full of owl shit, darkness, and mildewy hay where Tom kept the antique tractor he used to mow paths through the goldenrod in the summer and plow the driveway in winter—the prefabricated steel structure in which he stored his tools was scarcely bigger than a two-car garage. We entered through a side door, stepping awkwardly over three metal spheres huge as medicine balls while fluorescent tubes flickered on overhead.
My first impression was an abstraction: I did not see the hundreds of hand-saws hanging from pegs like keys in a locksmith's shop, or the iron shoe lasts arranged in pigeonholes ac- cording to size, or the towering steel file cabinets with handwritten tags taped above their handles, or the railroad jacks congregating on a shelf, or the flock of meat scales and wooden pulleys suspended from the ceiling by hooks; what I saw was the idea of multitude. Be fruitful and multiply, the Lord had commanded, and we had, we Americans; here all around us was our labor's rusty fruit.

"There are over five hundred drawers full of stuff in here," Tom told me. "That's the sort of scale. Plus the walls. Plus the floor. Plus containers. It's all organized. For instance, this is the overflow hammer drawer." He yanked open the drawer in question. Wooden hafts lay atop one another like matches in a matchbox. Tom selected a 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 tiny cracks like the hide of an elephant. "Lead hammer," Tom said. He returned it with a clatter to the drawer and selected another. "Composition hammer." And another. "Farrier's horseshoe nail-driving hammer."

Here and there, weighted down beneath whatever tool was most proximate, were pages torn from spiral notebooks on which Tom had catalogued the contents of his five hundred drawers, all of which he seemed to have memorized. If an item caught my eye and I asked him about it, he could almost always identify it by name and purpose, and when he couldn't, his eyes shone with excitement. "That," he would pronounce, "is a whatsit." The steel balls we'd climbed over upon entering were whatsits, though Tom did have a theory about them: they might be ball bearings from the gun turret of a battleship. 

As we made our way slowly down the crowded aisles, what struck me most was how zoological Tom's tools seemed, especially the more exotic ones. Divorced from usefulness and subjected to morphological classification, they looked like the fossils of Cenozoic mollusks or the wristbones of tyrannosaurs. Certain pliers bore striking resemblances to the beaks of birds, certain wrenches to the jaws of lizards. The points of chisels and awls looked like talons and claws. Even the names of tools suggested zoological comparisons; there was a goosewing axe, an alligator wrench, a mortising twivil called a bec d'ane, French for "nose of a donkey." Loggers had once assembled their rafts with oversized staples known as "dogs." It is, in fact, impossible to talk about tools without resorting to biological metaphors. We refer to the "head" and "claw" of a hammer, the "frog" and "throat" of a plane, the "jaws" of a vice, the "eye" of an adze. This had to be what motivated Tom's manic collecting. He wasn't merely a collector of tools; he was a taxonomist of tools, a naturalist of tools. He'd progressed from gray dogwoods to succulents to wrenches, as if the age-old distinction between nature and culture were the folly of philosophers. I could feel my mind begin to fizz with grandiose, half-baked notions. Everything evolves, I thought. Even hammers. Even keys. I mentioned the zoological analogy, and Tom began rummaging through drawers until he found what he was looking for, an adjustable wrench with a distinctly avian silhouette. "The Puffin!" he exclaimed. . . .