A Place of My Own (6 page)

Which is why I took my sweet time about it, spending uncounted hours walking the property, at every time of day, in every weather, by every conceivable route. I planted my chair in two dozen places, cataloging their qualities, cataloging my responses to their qualities, until I found myself beginning to doubt, in the same way saying a word over too many times can make you doubt its sense, whether I could even say what a place was any longer, what it was that made a place a place. Was I really cataloging their qualities—shyness, forthrightness—or was I inventing them? Was a place something made, in other words, or was it something given?

“Wherever I sat, there I might live,” Thoreau had written of his own less-fraught wanderings in search of a house site, “and the landscape radiated from me accordingly.” And it was true that the landscape did seem to reorganize itself around me and my chair as I imagined inhabiting each site in turn. What had one moment seemed an undistinguished corner of second-growth forest, or an indifferent section of meadow grown up in goldenrod, would all of a sudden become the center of the world. My chair reminded me of the jar in the Wallace Stevens poem, an ordinary bit of human artifice that “took dominion everywhere” and ordered the “slovenly wilderness” around it. This seemed to suggest I could build just about anywhere, since anywhere I raised four corners and a roof would perforce
become
a place, almost as if by fiat. What is a place after all but a bit of space that people like me have invested with meaning?

And yet not everywhere felt equally right. Tested against Charlie’s advice, the area within the round meadow, for example, did not feel like a very comfortable place to set up camp. It was too easy to imagine eyes in the encircling trees. Also, a spot like that was always going to feel a little arbitrary. Why not pitch the tent ten feet this way, or twenty that? I might have succeeded in making a good place there, but I would be starting virtually from scratch. Perhaps my landscape, or my sense of landscape, was not as democratic as Thoreau’s, or Stevens’s, because certain spots proclaimed themselves more loudly to me as places
already—
the landscape seemed to radiate out from them, as it were, even before I happened to plant my seat there.

There was, for example, this one particular area—right away I want to call it a place—that seemed almost to exert a kind of gravitational pull whenever I drew near it. It was a small, unexpected clearing on the south side of a boulder easily as big as a sub-compact car. I recognized the rock from one of Judith’s paintings; she’d spent the better part of one summer working in this clearing. I kept returning to this spot in my wanderings, something it occurred to me my predecessor’s cows had probably also once done, for the clearing opened right onto the shady path they trudged from the barn each morning on their march to the upper pasture.

The floor of the clearing, which is hidden from the cow path by the big rock, is pitched, but at a much gentler angle than the path, making it feel almost becalmed, like a small, placid eddy shunted off to the side of a rushing river. I remembered Judith mentioning what a pleasant place it had been to work. It’s not hard to imagine cows stepping off the path to rest here, lying down with their broad sides to the boulder’s south face, which would hold the sun’s warmth when the leaves were off the trees. But they’d pause here in summer too, since the clearing then is shaded and cool. The “placeness” of this spot seemed unmistakable, even to cows.

A half-dozen young trees rise along the base of the rock, white birches and choke cherries mostly, with long flexing trunks that arc out over the clearing and open their thin canopies directly above it. Overhead, they interlace their leaves and branches with another rank of trees that lean over to meet them from the far side of the clearing, joining to form a high, almost Gothic arch. This second group of trees, which contains more cherry and birch as well as some white ash and silver maple, forms a rough hedgerow, strewn with boulders, that divides the clearing from the lower meadow. The farmer probably dug out and dragged these boulders from this field when he first plowed it, and the trees grew up among them, colonizing any spot his tractor couldn’t reach. From the clearing you can peer through their silhouetted trunks into the sun-filled field.

Early one morning at the end of June I brought Judith, who was seven months pregnant, back to look over the spot, since by now it was under serious consideration as my site. As we followed the curving path I’d worn through the rough grass and weeds, I realized the route was in keeping with good picturesque practice: You registered several distinct changes in the mood of the landscape as you moved from the lucid, sun-lit geometries of the house and garden, up around the pond and into the shadowy woodland, where you even passed by a suitably melancholy ruin—a collapsed handyman’s shack. When Judith stepped into the clearing, she pointed out the good light; this is what had drawn her to the place originally. The sunlight here was uncommonly delicate, finely divided by the relatively small leaves of the trees overhead, and made lively by the birch leaves, which the slightest hint of a breeze was enough to flutter.

Together we examined the views. Two of them were very fine. Looking back toward the house, the landscape sloped down in the middle distance to the pond, which was neatly framed by the big oak and ash and provided a welcome still point in the rolling scene. Beyond the pond stood the rose arbor, now clothed in deep purple clematis, and the path back to the house. It wasn’t what you’d call a picturesque view, since so much in the picture looked cultivated rather than natural—“gardenesque” seemed more like it. But there was something appealing about gazing down from this shady, unseen lair onto such a sunny, well-tended scene, with its enterprising geometries of house and garden. Here was all our familiar handiwork—the clipped apple trees and the right-angled beds, the tidy stone walls and the rose climbing up the trellis on the back porch—but the new perspective, which was angled obliquely to the property’s layout and elevated several degrees above it, rendered everything slightly unfamiliar.

One hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction offered a less tended but equally appealing view. Here was a dark funnel of foliage—the cow path—conducting your eye through the woods toward the upper pasture, where all of a sudden the green field detonated in the sun. The view reminded me of the moment at the baseball stadium when you first catch sight of the blazoned green playing field at the end of the dark alley burrowing beneath the stands.

Not all the views were quite this good, however. To the north, above the rock, it was only fifty or so yards as the crow flies to the neighbor’s raised ranch, and though right now, in high summer, I couldn’t see it for the trees, during the seven months of the year when the leaves are down the house’s canary yellow vinyl siding would be on display. The dilapidated green cape house of another neighbor, a cranky old guy who lived alone, was also visible to the southeast, on the far side of the small meadow. His frequent tumultuous efforts to raise a wad of phlegm, the report of which rolled like thunder across the intervening meadow, offered regular reminders that this place wasn’t paradise.

I stayed behind while Judith walked back toward the house; when she reached the door, I stood up on my chair waving my arms so she could get some idea of what the building might look like from the house. I shouted to her to have a look from the bedroom. She reappeared in the second-floor window, giving me the thumbs up. I sat down in my chair to take stock.

The spot certainly had a good aura about it. Whether it was the rock or the light or the clearing, you felt right away that this was somehow a privileged place. I thought of Charlie’s campsite test. Except for the fact that the ground sloped a few degrees, the site seemed to meet its requirements. A tent pitched in this clearing would have the boulder to its north, providing protection from the wind and maybe even a bit of residual warmth during the night. Tucked under these trees with the big rock at your back, this did not seem like it would be a scary place to spend the night. You could see a lot from here without being easily seen yourself.

This last seemed like a particularly fitting quality for the building I had in mind. The hut was going to be my study, after all, a place in which to think and read and write—to observe the world in solitude. The site seemed to chime with my dream for the place, especially the obliqueness of its angle on things, the company of the boulder, the delicate shade—too thin for melancholy, but shadowy enough that you didn’t feel exposed and not so cheerful that you couldn’t think. The betweenness of the site seemed auspicious too; its sense of standing on the hedgey margin of things, between field and wood, sun and shadow. The place stood apart, and I knew it was that part of me—the self that stood a little apart—that I intended this building to house.

I moved my chair this way and that, trying to decide which direction I’d want my desk to face. The untended landscape that Thoreau would no doubt have opted for—the one looking up through the woods to the field of overgrown grasses—didn’t appeal to me nearly as much as it should have. (When Charlie first saw the site, he automatically assumed the building would face the field.) It was a beautiful view, especially when the meadow’s grasses burst into light at the end of the shadowy corridor. But to face that way meant turning my back on the house and garden, on that whole middle landscape Judith and I had worked so hard to make, and which I liked to write and think about. So I turned my chair 180 degrees around, positioning it so that the two big trees framed the gardens and the house, and then I took my seat there in the cool of the shade. There it was, my life, flooded in summer light, clear as day. There was the childhood home of my child-to-be, the house I was about to be the dad of. There in the open window was my wife, moving pregnantly across our bedroom. And I realized then that though I may have wanted a hut in the woods, it was definitely not Thoreau’s cabin in the wilderness that I was after. It might be that I wished for a place that stood a little apart from this life of mine, but only to get a better view.

I also realized, sitting there before my imaginary desk, that the image of my hut was growing steadily more concrete. What had originally been conceived in two dimensions, a feature in a landscape as seen from a window, was now acquiring a third: I had begun to see the building from the inside out. The hut dream had a setting now; looking out at the world through its imaginary windows, I felt reasonably sure this was it.

By now there should have been no question that this was indeed the place. All the picturesque angles checked out, it’d passed Charlie’s campsite test, I thought I’d felt its gravitational pull. I’ve never been a great one for trusting my instincts, however. And though I liked the view quite a lot, surely there were a dozen other potential sites with a similar orientation. What did it really mean, anyway, to say a “place felt right,” or that it had a “good aura”? It all was starting to sound a little New Age-y to me.

You see, I was having another instinct, which was to find an intellectual theory to second my first instinct. That’s why I’d looked up the picturesque landscape designers in the first place. But now I wondered if I couldn’t find an entirely different theory to confirm me in my choice or, failing that, point me toward another.

The time had come to read a few books about fêng shui. This was a chore I’d been putting off since a couple of years before when I’d picked up a treatise on the subject in a bookstore and came upon the following sentence: “The greatest generation of chi occurs at the point where the loins of the dragon and the tiger are locked together in intercourse.” What exactly do you do with a tip like that? A line drawing sought to clarify the point: It showed a dragon superimposed over one ridge of mountains confronting a tiger superimposed on a second ridge; in between them, down where their midsections met, an X marked the optimal site for your house or tomb. (There it was again!) I really couldn’t see how such an approach could possibly help me, but I decided to try.

The first fêng shui primer I consulted
—The Living Earth Manual of Feng-Shui
by Stephen Skinner—said that “the amount of chi flowing, and whether it accumulates or is rapidly dispersed at any particular point, is the crux of fêng shui.” “Chi” is the Chinese word for the earth spirit, or cosmic breath, which flows in invisible (but predictable) currents over the face of the earth, following both the natural and manmade contours of the landscape. This earth spirit animates all living things, and the more of it that enters and lingers in your building, the better. Though matters soon get more complicated, the basic objective seemed to be to find a site well supplied with chi.

I found it helpful to think of fêng shui as the terrestrial counterpart of astrology. It is concerned with the influence of the earth spirit on human life in much the same way that astrology is concerned with the influence of the heavenly bodies. But while there’s nothing we can do to influence the planets’ paths, there is apparently a great deal we can do to influence the path of chi through a landscape, first through proper site selection and then through site improvement. In this respect fêng shui is a form of gardening. Like picturesque garden theory, it tells you how to improve a landscape, but to spiritual rather than aesthetic ends.

So where do the dragons and tigers come in? Evidently the Chinese visualize the tallest forms in a landscape as a writhing dragon, and this high ground is the wellspring of chi. “The ridges and lines in the landscape form the body, veins, and pulse of the dragon,” Skinner writes, and the dragon’s “veins and watercourses [known as dragon lines] both carry the chi” down from the highest elevations. (You might assume that maximum quantities of chi will be found at the top of a hill, which is true, but because exposure to the four winds disperses chi so quickly, hilltops are generally considered poor sites.) The tiger is a similar though less prominent land form. A good site will have a dragon to its east and a tiger to its west, and face south, which the Chinese regard as the most beneficent of the cardinal points. Stripped of animal metaphors, the practical import of this principle is that people should build among hills, on ground neither too high nor too low, on a site that is open to the south and has higher ground to its north—advice, by the way, that Vitruvius would enthusiastically endorse. A more general rule of fêng shui holds that the topography of a site should strike a balance between yang land forms (the “male” ones, which tend to be upright) and flatter yin, or female, ones, such as plains or bodies of water.