Beauties of the common tool

Living on three acres in rural Louisiana, there is always something to tend to. Which means I use tools. These tools are about as simple as you can get: shovel, rake, ax, hammer, hoe, saw.

Simple doesn’t mean incapable, or frivolous. The opposite. These tools are works of genius. None of them have changed that much over the centuries, because their basic designs are nearly flawless. They’ve been used by people for thousands of years, and are still used, will always be used.

If they are well-made, tools have virtues that I, as a human, strive for: efficiency, steadfastness, endurance, reliability, simplicity and capability. Simplicity as exemplified in these tools is elegance. A cleanness of design, where there is nothing that doesn’t contribute to the tool’s purpose and success. A purity. What can you add to an ax? To a rake? A hoe?

People admire skillfully-made Japanese swords. They’re considered paragons. We see them in museums. Why not skillfully-made shovels, rakes and hammers in museums, the best of their kind? Their purpose is beneficial, not murderous. Their genius has contributed incalculably to humankind. Unlike those rarified swords, they’re accessible to most people. They can last a lifetime, completing untold tasks.

“Man Digging” by Van Gogh

A few artists have understood their basic beauty. Walker Evans, the great photographer who collaborated with James Agee, published a piece in Fortune Magazine in 1955, “Beauties of the Common Tool.” Evans would be someone to do that. Like Van Gogh, he even turned shoes into a work of art

“Three Shovels” by Walker Evans

I don’t know what tool is used by more people than any other, but my guess would be the hoe. In any case, these tools connect me to the task in the most direct way possible, short of using my own hands. They provide a sense of communion. When I dig with a shovel, I know that somewhere a farmer in Kenya is digging with a shovel or a gardener in Finland or a well-digger in New Zealand. We all use it in more or less the same way, thrusting the shovel into the ground with one foot, dislodging the earth, then lifting the earth and tossing that earth aside or into a wheelbarrow or into a hole that needs filling.

I wrote a chapter about tools in my first book, about a garden I had in the South of France. I said, “Using these tools every day was very satisfying to me. I loved taking them from their resting place in the cave, loading them in the car, hearing the sounds they made jostling together as I drove along. I loved carrying the tools from the car to the garden under my arm.”

I still feel that way.

These tools represent struggle. They represent work. And we must work. Work is what saves us. Not mindless work. Work that has a purpose. The work can be hard, certainly. We sweat. Our muscles ache. Our hands can become blistered. We want to quit. Or at least to pause. So we do, leaning on our shovel, to regain our strength. We resume, take up the tool again.

I think of Colette’s extraordinary book, Break of Day. She wrote it in the 1920s. It’s about her house and garden in the South of France and the visitors who come and go. She writes about digging in her garden:

“To lift and penetrate and tear apart the soil is a labor—a pleasure—always accompanied by an exaltation that no unprofitable exercise can ever provide.”

The work with tools is hard, it’s clean, it’s satisfying.

Shovel, hoe, rake, saw, hammer. Ready, willing and able.