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

by Michael Pollan

  And so I followed his instructions, moving first this way and then that, hoisting, holding, pivoting, and then climbing on cue, an obedient pyramid ant, not even aspiring to grasp the big picture, and trusting utterly in my carpenter-turned-choreographer. And then, astoundingly, there we were, each of us holding one side of a three-hundred-pound assembly that we’d managed somehow to raise high into the trees without a crane. I wanted to cheer, except that I was still holding my breath as I waited for Joe to brace the gable. So instead I thought about this newspaper article I’d read recently that said that men are more adept than women at mentally rotating an object in space, a skill I’d never had occasion to think about, much less appreciate, before. Women supposedly have the edge in verbal agility, which seemed much the better deal. Not today. Here it was, right in front of me, a full-dress display of the male genius.

  We braced the gable with a pair of two-by-fours, and broke for lunch.

  It was imperative we get the ridge pole up before the day was out; without it, an errant gust was liable to make a sail of our gable assembly, bring the whole thing crashing down. After lunch we raised the second gable without incident and took a field measurement to determine the precise length of the ridge pole: 13’ 9¼”. This turned out to be a couple of inches less than the dimension shown on Charlie’s plan, but then at this point the building had its own reality, of which our mistakes formed a necessary part.

  Don, the six-and-a-half-foot friend I’d recruited for the event, arrived as Joe and I were preparing to mark and cut the gorgeous length of knot-free fir we’d selected for the building’s spine. This timber too had come from Oregon, according to the stencil on its flank. My tentativeness handling such a piece of wood had vanished; I felt well acquainted with fir—if not quite friend, not foe either. I took up the circular saw, found my mark, and worked the blade through the familiar wood flesh, breathing in its sweet fairground scent. Don, who has some of the lassitude you often find in very lanky people, seemed slightly horrified at just how big the beam was.

  “This is what you call a ridge pole? I was picturing something a bit more bamboolike.”

  “We call it a ridge pole to make it feel lighter,” Joe said. “But it’s really a big tree with the bark taken off and a few corners added.”

  As the three of us shouldered the ridge pole from the barn out to the site, I thought back to the arrival of the corner posts on a winter morning six months before. Everything about this day seemed infinitely superior: the soft July air, the auspiciousness of the occasion, and the convenient fact that, this time around, mine was not the tallest shoulder underneath this massive tree. Don complained all the way out to the site.

  Joe had stationed himself midway between Don and me, but as we neared the site he slipped out from under the beam (since he’s five-four, our burden scarcely changed) and trotted out ahead, climbing up into the frame to receive the ridge pole from us. Don, straining, pressed his end up over his head barbell-style while Joe guided it to a spot on the wall plate; then I did the same with my end. Working now nine feet off the ground, we drilled holes at each end of the ridge beam at the spot where it would set down onto the dowels we’d already mounted on the supporting king posts in our gable assemblies. Joe then directed the two of us in a new choreography of lumber that had Don and I manning opposite gables while he flew back and forth across the frame, helping us each in turn to hoist and then align our beam ends over their intended dowels. Don’s end went down first, sinking comfortably into its wooden pocket; I watched his tensed expression suddenly bloom into relief, mixed with a satisfaction he hadn’t been prepared for. My end took some manhandling, first to align the hole above the dowel, and then to force the beam all the way down into its slot, where it didn’t seem to want to go.

  “Time for some physical violence,” Joe advised, and he handed his big framing hammer up to me. Now I pounded mightily on the top of the ridge beam—holding the hammer correctly, I might add—and inch by inch it creaked its way down onto the dowel, the tight-binding wood screeching furiously under the blows, until at last the beam came to rest on its king post, snug and immovable. That was it: the ridge pole set, our frame was topped out.

  I asked Joe to hand me his big carpenter’s level; along with the tool he gave me a look that said, You’re really asking for it, aren’t you? There was nothing we could do, after all, if we discovered that our ridge beam was not true. I laid the level along the spine of the building as close to its midpoint as I could reach. From where he stood Joe had the better view into the level’s little window, and I read the excellent news in his face. “It doesn’t get any better,” Joe said, reaching out his hand for a slap. None of us wanted to come down from the frame, so we stood up there in the trees for a long time, beaming dumbly at one another, weary and relieved, savoring the sweetness of the moment.

  In Colonial days the topping out of a frame was traditionally followed by a ceremony, and though the particulars varied from place to place and over time, certain elements turn up in most accounts. According to historian John Stilgoe, as soon as the ridge beam was set into place, the weary carpenters would begin pounding on the frame, “calling for wood.” Answering the call, the master builder would go off into the woods to cut down a young conifer and carry it back to the assembled helpers. As the tree sacrifice suggests, the flavor of these events was strongly pagan, even in Puritan America, though there was an effort in many places to work in a few Christian elements, such as the Lord’s Prayer. Often there would be some kind of test of divination: in one, the master builder would drive an iron spike into an oak beam, and if the wood didn’t split or bleed (being oak, it hardly ever did), the long life of both frame and owner was assured. Toasts and prayers followed, and then a bottle would be broken over the frame in a kind of christening. Many frames were actually given names; “the Flower of the Plain” was one I especially liked. After a toast to the workers and their creation, writes Stilgoe, “The harmony of builders, frame, and nature was assured, and the men raised the decorated conifer to the highest beam in the structure and temporarily fixed it. Thereafter the frame had the life of a living tree.”

  “Keep all lightning and storms distant from this house,” went one common prayer, “keep it green and blossoming for all posterity.”

  The only part of the traditional topping-out ceremony that has come down to us more or less intact is the nailing of the evergreen to the topmost beam. Even on a balloon-frame split-level in the suburbs, you’ll often see an evergreen bough tacked to the gable or ridge board before the vinyl siding goes on. I’ve seen steelworkers raising whole spruce trees to the top of a skyscraper frame high above midtown Manhattan. Perhaps it’s nothing more than superstition, men in a dangerous line of work playing it safe. Or maybe there’s some residual power left in the old pagan ritual.

  I’ve read many explanations for the evergreen hanging, and all of them are spiritual in one degree or another. The conifer is thought to imbue the frame with the tree spirit, or it’s meant to sanctify the home, or to appease the gods for the taking of the trees that went into the frame. These interpretations sound reasonable enough, and yet they don’t account for the fact that someone as unsuperstitious and spiritually backward as me felt compelled to go out into the woods in search of an evergreen after we’d raised the ridge pole. Joe probably would have done it if I hadn’t, but it was my building, and there was something viscerally appealing about the whole idea, the way it promised to lend a certain symmetry to the whole framing experience, tree to timber to tree, bringing it full circle. But now that I’ve performed the ritual, I’m inclined to think there may be more to it than that. Like many rituals involving a sacrifice, there’s a kind of emotional wrench in the middle of this one. The hanging of the conifer manages all at once to celebrate a joyful rite—the achievement of the frame and the inauguration of a new dwelling—and to force a recognition that there is something slightly shameful in the very same deed.

  People have traditional
ly turned to ritual to help them frame and acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in just such a paradox of being human—in the fact that so much of what we desire for our happiness and need for our survival comes at a heavy cost. We kill to eat, we cut down trees to build our homes, we exploit other people and the earth. Sacrifice—of nature, of the interests of others, even of our earlier selves—appears to be an inescapable part of our condition, the unavoidable price of all our achievements. A successful ritual is one that addresses both aspects of our predicament, recalling us to the shamefulness of our deeds at the same time it celebrates what the poet Frederick Turner calls “the beauty we have paid for with our shame.” Without the double awareness pricked by such rituals, people are liable to find themselves either plundering the earth without restraint or descending into self-loathing and misanthropy. Perhaps it’s not surprising that most of us today bring one of those attitudes or the other to our conduct in nature. For who can hold in his head at the same time a feeling of shame at the cutting down of a great oak, and a sense of pride at the achievement of a good building? It doesn’t seem possible.

  And yet right here may lie the deeper purpose of the topping-out ceremony: to cultivate that impossible dual vision, to help foster what amounts to a tragic sense of what we do in nature. This is something that I suspect the people who used to christen frames understood better than we do. To build, their rituals imply, is in some way to alienate ourselves from the natural order, for good and bad. The cutting down of trees was an important part of it. But even before that came the need for a shelter in the first place—something that Adam had no need for in paradise. Like the clothes Adam and Eve were driven by shame to put on, the house is an indelible mark of our humanity, of our difference from both the animals and the angels. It is a mark of our weakness and power both, for along with the fallibility implied in the need to build a shelter, there is at the same time the audacity of it all—reaching up into the sky, altering the face of the land. After Babel, building risked giving offense to God, for it was a usurpation of His creative powers, an act of hubris. That, but this too: Look at what our hands have made!

  I don’t think it is an accident that the ceremonies came at the point they did in the building process, since it is the setting of the ridge beam that completes the shape of this symbol of our humanity: the gable crowning the square, the very idea of house written out in big timbers for all the world to see. The topping-out rituals performed by the early builders, with their peculiar mix of solemnity and celebration, must have offered them a way to reconcile the simultaneous shame and nobility of this great and dangerous accomplishment.

  I’m more than a little embarrassed to utter any such words in connection with my own endeavor, so distant from my world do they sound. But along with the remnants of the old rituals, might there also be at least some residue of the old emotions? I remember, on that January morning when I took delivery of my fir timbers, how the sight of those fallen, forlorn timbers on the floor of my barn had unnerved me—“abashed” was the word I’d used. In the battle between the loggers and the northern spotted owl, I’d always counted myself firmly on the side of the owls. But now that I wanted to build, here I was, quite prepared to sacrifice not only a couple of venerable fir trees in Oregon, but a political conviction as well. I was also prepared to make a permanent mark on the land.

  So maybe it was shame as much as exultation that brought me down off the frame that early summer evening, sent me out into the woods in quest of an evergreen to kill. Joe had forgotten which you were supposed to use, pine or hemlock or spruce. I decided any conifer would do. It was spruce I came upon first, and after I cut the little tree down and turned to start back to the site, holding the doomed sapling before me like a flag, I saw something I hadn’t really seen before: the shape of my building in the landscape. The simple, classical arrangement of posts and beams, their unweathered grain glowing in the last of the day’s light, stood in sharp relief against the general leafiness, like some sort of geometrical proof, chalked on a blackboard of forest. I stopped for a moment to admire it, and I filled with pride. The proof, of course, was of us: of the powers—of mind, of body, of civilization—that could achieve such a transubstantiation of trees. Look at this thing we’ve made! And yet nothing happens without the gift of the firs, those green spires sinking slowly to earth in an Oregon forest, and it was this that the spruce recalled me to. Joe had left a ladder leaning against the front gable. I climbed back up into the canopy of leaves, the sapling tucked under my arm, and when I got to the top I drove a nail through its slender trunk and fixed it to the ridge beam, thinking: Trees!

  CHAPTER 6

  The Roof

  Building a roof is by its very nature conducive to speculation, if only because one spends so much of the day so high up in the trees, taking in the big picture. In fact, the process of shingling a roof in wood is the sort of repetitive operation that actually benefits from a certain distractedness on the part of the shingler. Focus too closely on the work at hand and your shingles are apt to fall into a rigid, mechanical pattern, when it’s a more organic regularity, something just this side of casual, that you’re looking for. This I managed to achieve (shingling obviously played to my strength, such as it is), and perhaps the following reflections on roofs, and other elevated matters, deserve part of the credit.

  To think about roofs is to think about architecture at its most fundamental. From the beginning, “the roof” has been architecture’s great synecdoche; to have “a roof over one’s head” has been to have a home. The climax of every primitive but narrative I’ve read arrives with the invention of the roof, the big moment when the tree limbs are angled against one another to form a gable, and then covered with thatch or mud to shut out the rain and the heat of the sun. If the first purpose of architecture is to offer a shelter against the elements, it then stands to reason that the roof is in some sense its primary creation. It’s the place where the dreams of architecture meet the facts of nature.

  The roof also seems to be the place where, in this century, architecture and nature parted company, where the ancient idea that there are rules for the art of building that are given with the world—an idea first expressed by Vitruvius, and embodied in the myth of the primitive hut—went, well, out the window. At first the notorious leaking roofs of contemporary architecture seemed too cheap and obvious a metaphor for this development. But my time up in the rafters roofing and dwelling on roofs eventually got me to thinking that the leaky roof, taken seriously, might in fact have something to tell us about the architecture of our time.

  But before I could think too hard about roofs as metaphor, I needed to learn something about them as structure, if I hoped to get mine framed and shingled and weather-tight that summer before the cold weather returned. Frank Lloyd Wright, who made much of roofs in his work (and who designed more than his share of leaky ones), wrote in his account of mankind’s earliest builders that “The lid was troublesome to him then and has always been so to subsequent builders.” Roofs have always been the focus of a considerable amount of technological effort, since, as Wright noted, “more pains had to be taken with these spans than with anything else about the building.” We tend to forget that, for much of its history, architecture stood at the leading edge of technology, not unlike semiconductors or gene splicing today. The architect saw himself less as an artist than a scientist or engineer, as he pushed to span ever-bigger spaces, to build higher and higher, and to realize such marvels of engineering as towers and domes. Historically, the roof has been the place where architecture confronted the challenge not only of the elements, but of nature’s laws.*

  Perhaps this accounts for a certain anxiety that seems to hover over a roof, even one as seemingly straightforward as mine. It had never occurred to either Joe or me that our simple forty-five-degree gable roof was in any way pushing the technological envelope, but, unbeknownst to us, Charlie had been sufficiently concerned about its structural integrity to have an engine
er look over his design and run a few calculations.

  The July afternoon Joe and I first heard about the engineer—Charlie having accepted Joe’s dare-you invitation to help us cut and nail rafters—the architect came in for a lot of kidding. The day was very much Joe’s. Cutting rafters is a complicated and unforgiving procedure, and Joe had shown up on time and armed with a detailed sketch indicating the precise location and angle of each of the four cuts each rafter needed: the ridge and tail cuts at each end—parallel to one another at a forty-five-degree angle to the rafter’s edge—and the heel and seat cuts that form the “bird’s mouth” where the rafter engages the top of the wall—a rectangular notch that in our case had to have a slightly different depth, or heel cut, on each rafter to account for the fact that our two side walls were not precisely parallel.

  Joe had clearly done his homework, could even spout the formula for determining the length of a rafter: , in which the rise is the height of the gable and the run is the horizontal distance covered by each rafter, or one half the width of the building. For his part, Charlie was feeling somewhat deflated after a punishing meeting with a client, and seemed in no shape to mix it up with a cocky carpenter who’d come equipped with enough geometry to frame a roof single-handed and who didn’t see much point in architects to begin with.