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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