galoot

For the most serious tool aficionados, or "galoots," as they sometimes call themselves, the hegemony of mind and machine over hand and matter entails an estrangement more profound even than the one Marx imagined, an estrangement not only from self but from time.

The Galoots are the guardians of that which was almost lost: the challenge of trying to master a skill that can never be fully mastered, the creative freedom that comes from intimacy with a medium as complex as wood, the sense of self-sufficiency that comes from knowing that you can make a useful object with tools so simple that you can make the tools too, and the peaceful meditation of trying to bring eye, hand and wood together into harmony through finesse and understanding rather than brute force.

Many of the galoots I have encountered in chat rooms and at auctions fulfill my worst expectations.

At the recommendation of David Shayt, Carl Stoutenberg, and numerous galoots, before returning to Michigan, I decide to make what is for any serious student of American tools a necessary pilgrimage.