In mid-July, 2004 I crossed the country to Jackson Hole, Wyoming to be at a memorial service for the controversial American painter Aaron Robert MacDougall who, in the early 1970s, had moved from California to Wyoming, where he’d studied, married, and found a prairie home with a view to the Grand Tetons. On the shore of Jenny Lake, we now stood and paid our tributes. I recalled how he'd enjoyed hiking and painting in those mountains, meanwhile enduring three decades of routine rebuke and censure. Though scandal had still raged around his pictures and their influence late in his life, an early 2004 poll showed MacDougall had become one of America’s most cherished living artists. He was dead within six months.

I first met MacDougall in Tumsaw, Wyoming in 1971. We were freshmen in college. He was twenty; I was thirty-one. In good spirits, wearing brand new golden cowboy boots, I was crossing the wide lawn at the center of the campus of the Two-Top Mountain School on a pristine autumn day. I glanced in his direction and caught my first upsetting eyeful of him. He looked freshly shaved but had wild, shining, black upspringing hair. Though white as alabaster, he had flashes of red color high across his bony cheeks. His eyebrows grew together in a bridge over intense blue eyes and a hawk's beak nose. The eyebrows furrowed darkly down. Tall, lanky, and awkward, he leaned precariously forward into the air. He seemed intently to be studying his forward stepping black and white high-top sneakers. He had on a black coat, white shirt, black slacks. He looked seriously disheveled -- he looked mad. My first thought was, help him.

Let me put this in context. In 1971, everybody was helping everybody all the time. Life was getting better every day. Like everybody else, I was determined I would also make a difference -- would make the world a better place. I was the first person ever in the history of my family to pursue a higher education -- to go on past high school. After living in Cheyenne for several years, I returned home to Tumsaw to attend what was then called "an alternative college."

The two-Top Mountain School in Tumsaw was one of two. The other, the first Two-Top Mountain campus, was in the Castalian mountains of northern Maine -- from where I now write this, me busy posting my paintings on the Internet or keeping current the unruly content of my two websites, CastaliaMaine.us and CiscoWieland.com (me being Cisco Wieland). The original school had been founded in the 1960s by a Mandragoran refugee (Mandragora being that little island in the South China Sea that, between 1962 and 1992, endured almost constant civil war) and an ex-Harvard professor.

The Mandragoran, Tzu Jan Chi, was said to have escaped from the northern end of his island homeland in a rowboat at the time of the original invasion by South Mandragoran troops. He'd made his way out to sea and had been intercepted by a rickety twenty-foot fishing boat already carrying twenty-two other escaping refugees. In their frail, overloaded vessel, they'd crossed the equator and passed between java and Sumatra into the Indian Ocean. They'd been saved from certain death and disappearance by an Australian freighter passing under South Africa on its way to Wilmington, Baltimore, New Haven, and Boston.

In Boston, Tzu Jan Chi had become something of a celebrity, what with his dual status as being one of the North Mandragoran "boat people" and a brilliant watercolorist. His pictures were being shown (and sold) in some of Boston's best galleries. Inside of a year, he'd become an international success, his work purchased by individual collectors and by museums around the world. He first taught calligraphy and watercolor courses at Boston University, before helping found the Two-Top Mountain School in Maine. No one knows what attracted an emigré North Mandragoran watercolorist to wurst, potato salad, and dunkel beer, but it was during one of his regular evening visits to a German pub in Boston, Jacob Wirth's, that Tzu Jan Chi had met the white-haired, red-cheeked Englishman, Roger Shepperton.

Shepperton had studied at Oxford and been a professor of Teutonic Literature and Mythology at Harvard and had, still later, become Boston Commissioner of Parks and Recreation. After just an hour of chatting with Tzu Jan Chi at Jake Wirth's dark brown, much polished bar, Shepperton had proposed their partnership, the school, and the direction they would go.

In the autumn, the two men had left Boston and gone north to Maine. Between them, they had plenty of dough. They acquired exactly the property they sought, at the base of Two-Top Mountain in Castalia. In the spring they began adding to existing log cabins, building their dreamed-of school. The school opened (humbly) the following October (a month later than projected).

The call for students -- both young men and women -- had gone out: "people eager to burn their candles at both ends" (from Oriental serenity to Nordic perseverance). I suspected that, to be admitted, you had to be either a budding genius or a budding nut. Sure, I fell more into the latter category than the former. To speak of MacDougall, he was clearly in the first category -- very smart.

Shepperton and Chi aimed at gathering together "a glorious circle" of aspiring young poets, scholars, philosophers, scientists, and would-be saints. Troubadours, magicians, artists, acrobats, flame-swallowers, and jugglers were also welcomed. At the school were archives (Scandinavian and Asian papers, mainly), laboratories, artist's studios, windmills, watermills, waterways, and rooftop solar panels fed by many days of blue skies. The Englishman, Shepperton, was a photovoltaics expert -- he knew the power of sunshine. The Mandragoran, Chi, was a vegetarian humanist -- an advocate for healthy kidneys and soy beans. At the school were farm fields, gardens, and vineyards. Bread was baked, beer brewed, books written, paintings painted, inventions invented -- the sky was the limit.

From the outside, it must have looked like some sort of amusement park, but on the inside it was all heady, earnest, difficult, and challenging. Besides offering courses in history, geology, biology, anatomy, comparative religion, and mythology, the Two-Top Mountain School had tap-dancing classes, courses in magic, courses on games, courses solely for the study of esoteric texts (of both the east and the west). There were sign-up sheets for proposals to work with advisers to make new translations of ancient classics from all lands.

The idea clicked, caught on. The Maine school prospered. After the initial glory of their success had set in, the two founders of the school handed over the school to a Board of Directors and to their colleagues and moved on -- moved west. They went to Tumsaw, Wyoming to start the other, western Two-Top Mountain school.

As I had been born in Tumsaw, the idea of this school thrilled me. I decided, though I was at that time already past thirty, to go for it. I lied to them about my age -- I erased ten years of my life from my application. Though I was, yes, worn from use, a little weathered, still I felt deep enthusiasm for getting educated. My great-grandfather had in fact set aside, in a special account, particular funds expressly for this purpose -- that his son should get a higher education, and if not his son then his son's son, or his son's son's son, and so on down the line. Well, when my time came up, I was ripe to attend -- even if a decade late. The money had just been sitting there, waiting for a Wieland to finally catch up with it -- why not me?

After attending Tumsaw High School, I'd begun doing artwork for greeting cards, which had led me to seek my fame and fortune in Cheyenne, painting western scenes, oil paintings, for local galleries. By the age of thirty I'd become largely unknown, approaching totally forgotten. But I'd saved my money through the years and, what with that and my great-grandfather's fund, when it finally came to attending the Two-Top school, the high tuition didn't faze me.

I saw the advertisement for the Tumsaw Two-Top mountain School while I was still in Cheyenne, where I was hungering to be of more use to people -- to anyone. Though everybody praised my work, it didn't seem a single person even knew my name. I was adrift. The ad stated: "We offer the liberal arts in liberal doses -- Anatomy, Anthropology, Architecture, Art, Art History, Asian Literature, Atlantis Mythology" and on and on like that, right on down the line, through to "Watercolor Painting, Western Culture, Western Literature, Western Mythology, Western Philosophy, Wilderness Exploration, and Zoology" and I thought, yep, that's just the thing for Cisco Wieland -- Watercolor Painting -- I'm going home.