A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder

by Michael Pollan

  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 n
atural 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.

  My brain crammed with these elementary principles, I paid a visit to the site, aiming to see it now with the eye of the geomancer, or fêng shui doctor. It appeared I had a good balance of yin and yang, since the site stood at the meeting place of forest and field. Also, the big rock seemed to offer a suitable yang to the yin of the clearing. The land rises precipitously to the east of the site, so I had what seemed like a nice-size dragon exactly where I wanted it. But try as I might, I could not find a tiger anywhere, which was discouraging, at least until I read in one of the books that wherever you find a dragon, there will automatically be a tiger too. I had no idea how they could be so sure, but decided not to worry about it for the time being. Because right now I had chi flows to worry about.

  As far as I could tell, chi has a lot in common with water. At least it helps to think of it that way, especially if your spiritual development is as retarded as mine. Like water (which also animates life), chi flows down from high ground through rills and swales in the land and then accumulates in lakes and rivers or, less propitiously, in swamps (where, hemmed in, it’s apt to turn into sha, the negative energy that is chi’s evil twin). And in fact several authorities state explicitly that water is a “conductor” of chi.

  As soon as I’d begun to think of chi as flowing water, I could visualize its movement over my land, as it searched out grooves in the earth and openings in the forest on its course down the hillside. To map a landscape’s dragon lines, a fêng shui doctor will sometimes travel to the top of a ridge and then run down it several times as heedlessly as possible, noting the various paths he naturally inclines toward, the points at which they intersect, and the places where his momentum is checked by hollows or inclines. The practitioner is said to be “riding the dragon,” something animals do as a matter of course. (And in fact animal paths are considered reliable conduits of chi.) Though I wasn’t quite prepared to ride the dragon, I thought I could picture where it would take me more or less, and it looked as though there was a positively torrential flow of chi coming down the hillside, most of it streaming down the cow path toward the pond.

  This seemed auspicious. At least until I delved deeper into the literature of fêng shui and learned that the quantity of chi isn’t everything—speed is just as important. And when a dragon line is particularly straight or steep, the chi is apt to travel too swiftly through the site to confer its benefits. Ideally, chi should meander through a site; torrents were no good. I felt proficient enough at visualizing the flow of chi to see that it was moving at a very rapid clip through the property, and probably whizzing right by my site in a feckless blur.

  I don’t mean to make fêng shui sound like a lot of hocus-pocus, because the more I learned about it, the more its images of energy flow and velocity began to square with my own more secular experience of landscape. Don’t we also think of landscapes in terms of speed and energy? We commonly describe a hill as rising “slowly” or “rapidly,” and we conceive of curves and straightaways in terms of their velocity. Once I began to think of fêng shui as a set of time-tested metaphors to describe a landscape, rather than as spiritual dogma, it became a lot less strange, and potentially even useful.

  I realized, for example, that everything that had been done to improve our property in the last century or so—the scooping out of plateaus for the house and barn, the opening of fields on the gentler hillside slopes, the repair of the drainage around the house, and, most recently, my digging of a pond—had the unintended effect of improving the fêng shui. My predecessors here and I have been unconsciously engaged in the work of moderating what had been (and to some extent still is) a tumultuous flow of chi through the property, creating fields and ponds, plateaus and gardens where it might slow and linger, and rerouting one main artery so that it would circle around the house.

  I started to see how a fêng shui doctor analyzing a given landscape’s chi and the picturesque designer studying its genius loci would end up recommending much the same improvements. Both would advise that straight paths be made to curve, that flat land (where chi is thought to stagnate) be rendered more hilly and rugged ground made to slope more gently. It seemed to me that the “eye” whose attention Humphry Repton or Capability Brown spoke of attracting and directing with their clearings and paths and follies isn’t so very different from the chi that fêng shui seeks to attract and direct. Likewise, the picturesque sensibility’s preference for variety in the landscape—its emphasis on the transitions between field and wood, hill and dale, light and shade—might just be another way of expressing the geomancer’s preference for those places in the landscape where yin and yang land forms meet. I don’t know if it’s ever been checked out, but I would bet that the fêng shui of English landscape gardens is exemplary.

  Over the years my own landscape had come a long way, in fêng shui as well as picturesque terms, though clearly there were still problems. But I figured I was better off with an oversupply of chi close by my site than a shortage of it. The question was whether it could be encouraged to stick around long enough to be of some value. And there seemed to be only one way to find out. What I attempted now was so alien to my constitution, so ridiculous to my accustomed way of thinking, that I still can’t fully believe I actually did it. I told no one, not even Judith. But I decided to ride the dragon.

  On the appointed afternoon I walked all the way to the top of the hillside, keeping an eye on the road to make sure I wouldn’t be observed. Then I started walking fairly rapidly in the direction of my site, quickly picking up speed until I was just about flying down the hillside. I tried as best I could not to steer, emptying my mind of any specific destination. I found my feet were quickly drawn to the cow path—obviously a dragon line. And if I stayed on this course, a powerful sensation of momentum promised to propel me straight past the big rock and smack into the middle of the pond. Had I kept to that trajectory I’m not at all sure it would have been possible to
stop. But when instead I leaned my weight just slightly to the left immediately before reaching the rock, something that the lay of the land seemed to encourage, I moved into the site itself and immediately felt the gentler slope of the terrain slowing my velocity, welcoming me. My body still registered some forward momentum, but now it was an easy matter to slow and pause and rest. I felt the truth of a metaphor I’d earlier used to describe the site, that of an eddy shunted off to the side of a rushing river; there was definitely an eddying of chi taking place here.

  As I stood in the clearing catching my breath, it occurred to me that this episode represented the first physical effort I’d applied to the project, and it had yielded more than I would have guessed. By riding the dragon, and temporarily shelving my usual cerebrations, I’d managed to elicit the testimony of my senses, acquired a kind of bodily knowledge of my site. For though my well-read eye had prepared me to see that the clearing’s fêng shui probably had a lot going for it, it was my legs that had confirmed me in this, given me a vivid, physical sense of its hospitableness. Now I knew I had—because I’d felt it—an ample, if still slightly obstreperous, supply of chi. Knew it, in fact, in my bones.

  But was I prepared to credit that bodily knowledge? Of course not. Reverting to type, I decided to subject my site to one last, impeccably Western test—a scientific analysis. I read up on human habitat selection, a relatively new discipline that seeks to combine the insights of sociobiology, geography, and what is called environmental psychology. I figured that if I could now justify my choice of site on scientific grounds, I’d be set.

  The theory of human habitation selection was first proposed in 1975 by an English geographer named Jay Appleton and seconded, more or less, by sociobiologist E. O. Wilson in his 1984 book, Biophilia. The premise of this Darwinian theory seems reasonable enough: Human beings, like other animals, have a genetic predisposition to seek out for their habitats those landscapes that are most conducive to their well-being and survival. Having spent 99 percent of our time on earth as hunter-gatherers, Homo sapiens should have acquired a predilection for landscapes that offer a high degree of what Appleton calls “prospect” and “refuge”: places that offer good views—of potential supplies of food as well as sources of danger—without compromising a sense of shelter. For the hunter-gatherer, those places that allow one to see without being seen have an obvious survival value.