A Place of My Own

by Michael Pollan

  For forms we were using sonotubes, which are nothing more than thick cardboard cylinders—stiffened, oversize toilet paper rolls sunk into the earth. Whenever Joe judged a batch of concrete “good to go,” the two of us would shoulder the wheelbarrow into position, tip it down toward the lip of the sonotube and then, with a shovel, herd the cold gray slurry into the cylinder. It would land four feet down at the bottom of the shaft with a sequence of satisfying plops. The sonotubes were cavernous—fourteen inches in diameter, broad enough to give our boulders a nice, comfortable seat—and it took almost two barrow loads to fill each one. But by the end of the day all six had been filled—more than a ton of concrete mixed and poured by hand. Then with a hacksaw we cut lengths of threaded steel rod and inserted them in the center of each concrete cylinder. We bent the submerged end of each rod to improve its purchase on the concrete and then left about eight inches exposed above the top of the pier; to this pin we would bolt our boulders.

  By now the two of us matched the color of the dimming, overcast sky, each cloaked in a fine gray powder that had infiltrated every layer of our clothing, even our skin. I don’t think my hands have ever been more dry; the insides of my nose and sinuses felt like they were on fire. (Joe said that the limestone in the Portland cement sucked the moisture out of tissue.) I was also exhausted, stiff, and chilled to the bone, wet concrete being not only heavier than any known substance, but colder too. Some part of me that didn’t appreciate these sensations inquired sarcastically if the experience had been sufficiently real. Joe counseled a hot shower, ibuprofen, and a tube of Ben-Gay.

  By the next morning the concrete had cured enough that I could stand on the piers. To do so was to acquire a whole new appreciation of the concept of stability. Maybe it was just the hardness of the concrete, or the width of the piers, which were as big around as the seat of a chair, but I had a powerful sense that I stood upon reliable ground, beyond the reach of frost heaves or flood, beyond, in fact, the reach of almost any vicissitude I could think of. Suddenly I understood the prestige and authority of foundations. Whatever happens to the building erected on top of it, bound as it is to bend under the pressures of weather and time and taste, the foundation below will endure. The woods all around here are littered with them, ancient cellar holes lined in fieldstone. Though the frame houses they once supported have vanished without trace, the foundations remain, crusted with lichens but otherwise unperturbed.

  I could see why so many writers and philosophers would be drawn to the authority of foundations for their metaphors of permanence and transcendence. The classic example is Walden, which is at bottom (to borrow one of the book’s most well-worn metaphors) an extended search for a good foundation—for the ground on which to build a better, truer life. Thoreau’s goal, he tells us in “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” is to reach down “below freshet and frost and fire [to] a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamppost safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time.” Truth is to be found below the frost line.

  Western philosophers have always been attracted to such images of the reliable ground, along with the various other architectural metaphors that arise from it. Descartes depicted philosophy as the building of a structure on a well-grounded foundation; in similar language, Kant described metaphysics as an “edifice” of thought raised up on secure “foundations” that in turn must be placed on stable “ground.” Heidegger, a critic of this tradition (who nevertheless likened thinking to building), defined metaphysics as a search for “that upon which everything rests”—a search for a reliable foundation. By borrowing these kinds of metaphors, philosophers have sought to grant some of the firmness, logic, and objectivity of buildings to systems of thought that might otherwise seem a good deal less manifest or authoritative. Architectural metaphors can also lend an air of immortality to a philosophical idea, perhaps because there are buildings standing in Europe that are older than philosophy itself.

  So it makes good sense that contemporary critics of metaphysics—who, tellingly, lump all of its various schools and practitioners under the rubric of “foundationalism”—would spend as much time and energy as they do attacking its reliance on architectural metaphors. Jacques Derrida has made a brilliant career of illuminating the inconstant “undergrounds” beneath the supposedly firm and final ground of metaphysical truth. It’s for good reason that the most famous critique of metaphysics goes by the name of “deconstruction.” (There is a large irony here in the fact that, after centuries of lending philosophers the authority of their architectural metaphors, architects today should be so eager to borrow the one metaphor from philosophy—deconstruction—whose express purpose is to attack that very authority.)

  But while the prestige of foundations may have been unfairly exploited over the years in the selling of various philosophical and literary bills of goods, it’s hard to see why this borrowing should make anyone doubt the credibility of unmetaphorical foundations—the kind made out of real concrete and steel. Whether or not Thoreau can fairly lay claim to it, whether or not I can actually sense it standing on top of my concrete piers, a certain kind of truth does reside forty-two inches beneath the ground, down there beneath freshet and frost. A foundation rooted this deeply can be counted on in a way that, say, some philosopher’s idea of the truth cannot, no matter how “grounded” he claims it to be. For one thing, I don’t have to subscribe to its meaning in order for it to work. It doesn’t mean; it just is—something hard and real and unambiguous that Joe and I have added to the world. Step down on the footing, hard, and you will not think: Hmmm…ambiguous.

  But what about the building that doesn’t have such a good foundation to stand on? What happens when builders dispense with their notions of frost-line truth in the way that some contemporary philosophers have? While Joe and I were humping progressively more obstinate sacks of concrete from his truck out to the site, I’d speculated out loud about whether it was absolutely essential for a footing to go the full forty-two inches. I knew all about frost heaves, but I was starting to wonder just how big a difference it would really make, aside from the inconvenience of sticking doors and windows, if my building did move a few inches this way or that each winter—if it went along with the natural slipping and sliding of earth, rather than trying to resist it absolutely. Exhaustion can sometimes encourage one’s thoughts in a romantic or even relativistic direction, and with each sack of mud mix I hoisted to my shoulder, the notion of building directly on boulders, of letting the ground have its way with the building, seemed a little less crazy, and even sort of poetic. If things got too far out of kilter, I could always resort to the house jack.

  Joe, who can carry two bags of ready-mix at a time, one on each shoulder, had offered me a quick refresher from high school geometry about the instability of four-sided forms as compared to, say, three-sided ones. It’s a fairly easy matter to collapse a cube by applying pressure to its surfaces unevenly, which accounts for the ubiquity of tripods, the endurance of pyramids. But long before our cube would collapse, the shifting of its foundation would set in motion an incremental process that would doom the building just as surely. The slightest movement of the footings would ramify throughout the structure, gradually eroding one after another of its right angles; “trueness,” in the carpenter’s sense, is the first casualty of a poor foundation. First the door frame falls out of square, since it is braced on only three sides. Then the windows. A building is a brittle thing, and eventually its seal against the weather will be broken—through a crack in the roof, perhaps, or in the slight discrepancy that arises between a ninety-degree window sash and what has become an eighty-nine-degree window frame. Now, a drip at a time, water enters the building and the process of its decomposition begins. As Joe put it, “Pretty soon, it’s termite food.”

  As it happened, the dismal end result of precisely this process could be observed
only a few steps from the sturdy pier on which I stood. In the woods on the far side of the path to the site stood, or I should say lay, a pair of decrepit outbuildings that had recently collapsed. Today these structures are nothing more than a sandwich of boards, but ten years ago, when we bought the place, a wall or two still stood—they were still recognizable as buildings. I remember thinking that they looked like capsized boats arrested in the process of sinking, in slow motion, back into the land. One of the structures appeared to have been a handyman’s shack, the other a chicken coop. The ridge beam of the shack had collapsed on one side, submerging one end of the house in underbrush. The floor by now was earth, the floorboards having rotted away, and a maple tree was growing out through the window at the gable end still standing. Inside, if that word still meant anything, staghorn sumacs were ganged around a rusted stove.

  It was a forlorn, slightly spooky place. Fewer than twenty years had passed since someone had lived here, and already the signs of habitation had grown faint, as the forest went methodically about the business of erasing the shack from the landscape. Lumber was reverting to trees, geometry to rank growth, and inside to outside, in a swift reversal of human work. Today, all that remains is a roughly shuffled deck of boards sprawled amid the second growth, something you might not notice if it wasn’t pointed out.

  I don’t know for a fact that a shallow footing is responsible for the shack’s ruin. It could as easily have started with a leak in the roof. But however it found its way in, the culprit, the chief means by which the forest reclaims any human construction, is the same: water. Lumber may not be alive exactly, but it is still part of the nutrient cycle of the forest and will return to it sooner or later. With our foundations and shingles, our paint and caulk and weather strip, we can stave off that time, postpone wood’s fate, sometimes for hundreds of years. But, like everything else once alive, lumber is on loan from the land and in thrall to water, which, in concert with the conspiracy of insects and microorganisms we call rot, eventually will reduce it to compost. In the end it was this tug of life that pulled down the shack.

  It occurred to me that, on my little chart, the ruined shack definitely came under the heading of “Here,” and now even more than during its inhabited days. Indeed, the shack was in the process of succumbing utterly to the Here of this place; it was precisely those elements that had come from There—the geometry of its rafters; the manufactured goods on its shelves; the electrical wiring that, by linking the shack to the national grid, had made it possible to read a book or write a letter in it after dark—that nature was erasing. It is Here, I realized, that abhors all those things and has as its purpose their obliteration. In its ultimate form, Here consisted not only of the local boulders we planned to enlist in the new building’s footings, but also the local termites and bacteria and the dark sift of compost forming on the forest floor beneath the old building, all the cycles of growth and decay at work in this ground, its powerful tug of life—and also death. (Which is one unromantic fact about the ground that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial does not overlook.) No, Here wasn’t necessarily something you wanted to embrace too tightly.

  It was in fact something you wanted to thwart, to defy, even as you flattered it with romantic architectural details such as rock footings. “Nature is hard to overcome,” we read in Walden, of all places, “but she must be overcome.” This, according to Le Corbusier, is architecture’s first principle and purpose: to defy time and decay. That, and to wrest a space from nature to house all those things we value—books, conversation, marriage—that nature has no place or use for. A good foundation, these three and a half feet of concrete interposed between me and the damp, hungry ground, is how we start.

  Yet it is only a start. For even with the three and a half feet of concrete, Joe and Jenks were both convinced my foundation would fail my building unless something was done about the joining of its wood frame to its rock feet. When I first brought this problem to Charlie’s attention, soon after Joe raised it, he had suggested we could simply soak the end grain of the fir in a bucket of Cuprinol, no big deal. Later, when I told him Jenks was insisting on pressure-treated posts, Charlie seemed taken aback, and somewhat resistant. Charlie knew perfectly well that code prohibited untreated wood to come within eight inches of the ground; he had just figured the boulders themselves would provide that margin. It was a question of perspective: To Charlie the boulders were part of the foundation; to Jenks they were part of the ground.

  Charlie hated the idea of going to pressure-treated. The corner posts figured prominently in his design, and pressure-treated lumber is ugly stuff. Most of the wood used in the process is inferior to start with, typically an unlovely species like Southern yellow pine, which has a tendency to “check,” or crack, along its loose, uneven grain. The chemical bath in which the wood is soaked also tinges it an artificial shade of green that is virtually impossible to remove or hide. I asked him about switching to redwood or cedar, as Joe had suggested. He guessed the cost would be prohibitive (and he was right: six-by-ten redwood posts would have cost $280 each, cedar not a whole lot less), and anyway, those species seemed too exotic for my hut. Fir might come from the Northwest, Charlie said, but it was used so commonly in New England as to be a vernacular building material. Another Here/There deal, in other words. I didn’t think I wanted to mention this line of logic to Joe.

  Charlie said he needed a few days to come up with an alternative. In the meantime, Joe and I moved ahead with the footings. We spent part of one Sunday collecting eligible boulders from around the property. Not surprisingly, the land offered a rich field of candidates, and we carefully weighed the dimensions, color, and geology of several dozen, factoring in a handicap based on a given boulder’s proximity to the site. A cubic foot of granite weighs approximately 150 pounds, so a boulder sitting more than, say, a hundred yards from the foundation really had to be gorgeous to receive serious consideration. Within an hour we had wheelbarrowed or rolled a half-dozen promising rocks to the site, most of them flattish specimens of granite or gneiss about a yard wide and at least eighteen inches deep; anything smaller, we decided, would seem dinky beneath the big posts. We avoided shale or slate, rock that is more likely to crack under pressure, and even though we found some nice limestone and marble, these didn’t look indigenous, so we passed. In short order I’d become a connoisseur of the local stone and could see that Cornwall rock had a certain look to it. Its skin was mottled gray-green, and its shapes were softly rounded, every sharpness weathered away. So these qualities became part of our ideal.

  Joe had managed to borrow a rotary hammer from a landscaper he worked for, and the tool, which is actually a high-powered drill, made surprisingly easy work of boring half-inch holes through the boulders for our pins. The drill was the size of a viola and heavy enough that it wanted two hands, and ideally a big gut, to hold it steady, like a jackhammer. We took turns, one of us wielding the drill, the other a bucket of water, used to dissipate the heat generated by the bit boring through rock and to flush out the fine stone dust that collected in the deepening cavity. The bit emitted a terrible scream as it ate into the stone, but the granite yielded easily, almost as if it were tooth.

  Now the boulders looked like monstrous gemstones; strung on a length of steel cable, they’d make a necklace for a Cyclops. We set them in mortar, slopping scoops of steel gray mud on top of the piers to form a custom-fitted seat beneath each rock. It took the two of us to hoist a boulder over its steel rod, struggling to line up the tiny hole with the even tinier pin, a process not unlike threading a 350-pound needle. The weight of the rocks could easily have crumpled the steel, so before we could begin to lower a boulder onto its pin we had to position the opening over it exactly, peering through the pinhole in the rock, as if it were the lens of a microscope, until the tiny metallic point swam into view. As we struggled to reconcile these rough beasts to their improbable new purpose, the orderly drafting table in Cambridge where the rock footings had had their immaculate
conception seemed a world or two away. Did Charlie have any idea what was involved in making these footings actually work? For the first (but not the last) time, I was able to join in Joe’s diatribe against the architectural profession with some gusto.

  After we’d secured our boulders to their pins with lug nuts, two more holes in each rock remained to be drilled, to anchor the pins that would hold the posts in place, preventing any sideways movement, or “shear.” Now the location of each hole became more critical still, so we measured our diagonals once again to make sure we were square. Next we cut a short length of steel rod for each hole, into which we squeezed a dab of Rockite, a space-age mortar that Joe claimed would form a bond stronger even than the granite itself; once the stuff set, it supposedly could hold up a truck. The other end of each rod we’d slip into a hole drilled in the bottom of a post.

  Now our footings were ready to receive their posts—once we’d settled, that is, on an acceptable way to join them. Charlie had come back with the idea of using post anchors: small aluminum platforms that are typically used to protect the wood framing on decks from their concrete footings. A post anchor is like a shoe; it elevates the wood an inch or so above the concrete in order to keep its end grain from getting wet. Since post anchors are commonly used to join ordinary lumber to concrete, we figured the precedent might help persuade Jenks to accept Charlie’s footing paradigm—in which the boulders are regarded as part of the foundation rather than the ground—and drop his insistence on pressure-treated lumber. The only problem was, we could find no manufacturer who made post anchors large enough to accommodate a six-by-ten post. The biggest we could find were six by six.