“The first Academy was Plato’s,” Townsend told his first class at the outset that semester, meeting in the orchard where Art de Languroc had struck me with his bike. Townsend liked to pluck fruits from the trees while lecturing. “Plato, that glorious pagan -- thanks to him education’s still pagan to this day. Has anyone heard of Icolmkill?” he asked. A hand went up. “Yes?”

“Iona was on Icolmkill,” a female student said.

“Bling, bling, bling, bling!” Townsend clanged like some over-adrenalized TV game show host. “That's right! Iona was on Icolmkill, a Celtic settlement at the southmost point of the island of Mull. In the mid-sixth century, thirty years after Emperor Justinian closed Plato’s Academy, Columba of Ireland landed at Icolmkill in a wicker-boat made of calves hides and, after beating fown the local Druids, began to build Iona, the monastery. What are ‘Culdees’?”

“Columba’s male followers.”

“That’s right! Worshippers of God. At Iona the monks learned the seven fundamental liberal arts -- grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy -- also theology. The Culdees kept wives on Icolmkill’s neighboring Island, Eilen Nam Bam. What did the women on Eilen Nam Bam do while their men studied at Iona?”

"They baked bread, waited, and were devoted to the men."

“Bling, bling, bling, bling!”

The women on Eilen Nam Bam did not bake bread and wait for men. The women stayed hidden, shivering with fear. Roving berserks raided the island on a regular basis, slaughtering children and raping and kidnapping women. It was evident that the worse the gibberish Townsend fed his students got, the more they were devoted to him -- putty in his hands.

But to paint a balanced portrait, I should add that it was Townsend who'd brought windmills, watermills, solar pods, and compost-powered batteries to the campus. Students worked in the raised-bed vegetable gardens, orchards, and fields of alfalfa, hops, barley, oats, and wheat; were reddened by the sun and poison ivy; were brown with manure; were calloused from digging with their spades, shovels, and hands; were tarred and feathered with grease and sawdust, repairing wind and water mills and cutting sawmill logs. It was Townsend's russet-colored Renault station wagon parked out front of the school -- the car with the windmill driven turbine engine averaging upwards of eighty miles to the gallon of mulch-methane gas on any given still or breezy day. His colleague Nathaniel Nestor insisted Townsend wasn't just a dreamer, but "a do-er, a locomotive, a salt-and-pepper shaker of a man."

MacDougall and I had both signed up for Professor Nestor’s Basic Design course, described in the school's brochure as "moving against lethargy and bad taste toward excellence, refined simplicity, and doing simple things exquisitely well.” He and I must have looked like a koala bear and a penguin walking into the initital session. MacDougall walked in long strides, sure-footed, forward-leaning in his pre-pressed white shirt, jet-black coat, black pants, high-top tennis shoes. I liked to dress in soft and loose cotton shirts, khaki painter’s pants, light brown corduroy coat, beige-brown suede desert boots.

Only two of the twenty to twenty-five chairs in the second floor Art Barn classroom were empty. No sooner had MacDougall and I sat down than Nestor flung himself into the room -- this school was nothing if not a haven for theatrics! He looked like Ludwig Beethoven at fifty in a sorcerer’s robe. It was a silk bathrobe died purple, with special cornucopia-like sleeves which flowed and folded beautifully as Nestor threw his arms about. “Good morning, blind fools!” he began. “It’s time to wake up! No more sleeping in class! Here, only your best is good enough!”

Here was a tough old egotistical snob wholly wound up in himself. Half the kids who’d signed up for the class were gone after the second session. Had MacDougall not dared me to remain, I think I would have moved on, too. He seemed somehow to be right on Nestor’s wavelength, enjoying the man’s antics. In a young man like MacDougall, it was easy to take his excessive pride and hubris in stride, but in an older man like Nestor these were unbecoming -- unbearable, nerve-wracking, maddening. You couldn’t tell Nestor anything -- he wasn’t there for that. He was there to tell his students what to do. Grin and bear it, or get the hell out.

“The age of the common man has become too common!” he thundered, indignant, fanning his arms all over the place -- a blur of purple. “Most people play it so cool, they play it dead. But there is yet room in this world for genius!” he cried, almost choking on his spit. It was clear to me he felt himself to be just such a genius, insisting his students should also aim that high. “Why be a mouse when you can be an eagle?” He had the self-asserting western art mortification and suffering motivation thing going on in him, whereas I had myself arrived at the more eastern art side of things, moving toward art from humility, joy, and delight. I was wishing I’d been accepted in one of Tzu Jan Chi’s classes instead of having to come listen to the ravings of this madman.

Through all of that first hour, I kept standing up to leave, but MacDougall kept motioning me to sit back down. Finally, Professor Nestor noticed there was something happening in the room outside himself. He took me brusquely by the shoulder, lifted me, and steered me to the door. Flamboyantly exiting into the hall with me, he finally stood still. With a look of combined exasperation and contempt, he hoarsely directed me to the Art Barn men’s room.

At the end of this punishing first class meeting, Nestor gave his students an easy homework assignment (I thought at first): “On an eight-and-a-half by eleven inch piece of clean white illustration board, please draw three black lines.” (Was that it? -- three black lines?) He said it again: “Three black lines.” (That was it? We could go now?) “Simply three black lines -- and don’t get any Goddamned peanut butter or salad dressing smudges on your work!” With that, Nathaniel Nestor flung himself from our sight.

At the second class meeting, people showed up with collages of ribbon, string, and broken glass glued to cutting boards; an egg carton containing multicolored shoelaces; dried wildflowers and seashells cemented to ocean driftwood; a brick with rubber bands wrapped around it; and worse. Nathaniel Nestor strode into the classroom with his hands clasped behind him. He surveyed the assorted artworks, reddening. He turned to study the faces of his students. He regarded us severely. He closed his eyes. Then he opened them. He started howling.

He raged. Pointing his fingers at the works, he looked like Thor flinging lightning bolts. Then he doubled up and clutched his stomach like a man who’d just been kicked in the balls. It was painful to see. After a little while, he calmed down. “In all my years,” he began. Tears came to his eyes. He picked up the egg carton with the shoelaces in it. “Is there anyone here admitting to being Rose?”

Rose stood up. We knew immediately what had gone wrong. She had signed her artwork. Professor Nestor quietly walked over to where Rose stood and he gently returned her egg carton to her. He told her she was a lovely person and he was truly honored to have made her acquaintance but would she please now leave the room -- and not come back? This ritual he then repeated with the artist who’d wrapped rubber bands around a brick; the two ingenues who’d glued strings, ribbons, and glass to cutting boards; the creative guy who’d cemented flowers and shells to driftwood; and so on. He returned carpet samples, a pillow case, and an entire stamp collection.

I had warned MacDougall just to hoe the row and not get too creative drawing “three black lines” for this miscreant, but he hadn’t listened to me. Now Nestor walked toward the two artworks MacDougall had submitted. “Three black lines!” Nestor raged. “Look what can be done!” On an eight-and-a-half by eleven inch piece of clean white illustration board, MacDougall had drawn three black lines, exquitely placed -- they added up, looked just right. On a second piece of matching illustration board, MacDougall had drawn three lions in silhouette -- three black lions. “Ha ha!” Nestor laughed. “Aaron MacDougall, please stand.” He kneeled before him, then stood again. “Cisco Wieland,” he said. “Please stand. Oh Christ, it’s you!”

I had turned in a water color painting of a well-dressed gentleman conning three beautiful women -- (1)”Would you like to see my etchings?”; (2) “Can I give you a ride home?”; and (3) “But it’s actually your mind I love!” -- three black lines. “Voila!” the madman praised my work, holding it up for all to see. “All of our human problems are commuunications problems,” Nestor said. “It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it.” Then he gave those who remained their second homework assignment -- for the third class meeting -- “Seven black lines. And don’t repeat yourselves!”

Of course only MacDougall and I even showed up. The next thing we knew, Professor Nestor was put on paid leave of absence, then transferred out of Tumsaw to the Maine Two-Top Mountain School.

Happily, we both were transferrred into a basic watercolor course with Tzu Jan Chi. In the great Art Barn, on the third floor, on broad straw mats, Chi taught his Calligraphy and Watercolor classes. At the first class meeting, he had bowed to his students, and asked each in turn his or her name, bowing also afterwards. He had begun the lessons with a bried history of Oriental Arts and an introduction to Taoism.

“Painting in the Orient was never separate from the Tao of living,” I copied from a classmates copious class notes. “Painting is head, heart, and hand in accord. A person’s Tao is the life he or she lives. When your heart is quiet, your mind is receptive. Paint as you will, and be at peace.” He demonstrated simple sweeps of his brush made from mouse-whiskers enfolded in sheep’s hair. Other brushes were made of deer hair, sable, fox, and rabbit hairs. His ink stone was an enameled piece of pottery, a remnant from a broken water jar that still sat in one corner of the room, empty. He taight us to make our own ink – “yo mo” – from the burnt vegetable oil of compressed soy beans and lamp-black.

“Feng-liu” -- the elegance of naturalness -- the “going the way the wind goes.” “Chi” – the “vital force” (also “form of grace”).

In late October, the first snowfall touched Tumsaw. We awoke one morning to the whiteness all around -- on the bushes, high in the tangled limbs of trees, clinging to the fences and antennae and telephone wires, piled over the cars, covering the rooftops, carpeting the lawns and fields, enveloping the unraked autumn leaves.

We often went out to paint -- committing transience to paper. The watercolors froze immediately upon being applied to the surface. We could not see what the final picture was to become until we returned to the barn, into the warmth, where the picture would “paint itself” -- spontaneously emerging such as it was, despite our own best intentions as to how the picture “should” turn out. (“The Tao does nothing,” Chi told us softly, “and yet nothing is left undone.”)

In this class we met Mahet Kekmir, the only student at the Two-Top Mountain School from Persia. His stated intention in life was “to write one book” -- a book that would show how Persian farming practices held the key to world peace. On his bedroom door hung a sign: “Here lives Kekmir the Persian, Friend to Every Nation.”

Every other Friday night, in the school’s recreation room, Mahet threw a a party. He served exotic soups, spiced rice dishes, and assorted yogurt-based drinks and desserts. International politics were discussed -- also unemployment, injustice, torture, hunger, terrorism. Kids from all around the world poured in, supping and debating till two or three in the morning.

There was a walking, talking nut who came to each and every one of these parties, in order to walk out of them. Cyrus Rankin got permission to draw pictures on the room’s walls -- white skulls, black devils, blood-tipped silver daggers, and chains of pink and gray sausages. He was not “all there.” He went on monthly visits to a psychologist in Dubois who gave him medications.

Cyrus resented not only Mahet, but also me. I’d shown up out of the blue, obtaining permission to paint a mural on another of the recreation room walls. He despised my encroaching on his space. I was preparing one of the walls in the place for a giant mural I intended to paint. I’d sketched out an amorphous white angel descending from cloudy heavens to the twin peaks of two-Top Mountain. I felt this would be one of the finest things I’d ever done.

“Kitsch!” Cyrus called it.

It was also at this time that another extraordinary thing happened. In town, I happened onto another old friend. I ran into Audrey -- I mean, I ran into her again. My arms were full of groceries. I turned a corner, and there she was. Again. Bam! Her groceries and my groceries fell down together.

“Audrey Peters!” I knew her at once.

“Rick!” she cried.

“Cisco,” I corrected her.

“Cisco!” she cried, and hugged me.

Audrey and I had shared a little history -- our years as school chums reached all the way back to early elementary. In high school, we’d been sweethearts. We’d had a romantic fling. She’d been very nice to me -- very pleasant. The affair hadn’t lasted very long. I’d been looking for hotter stuff -- longer legs, larger breasts, meatier gams. Gads, I got what I deserved. I met my wife Topanimbo -- the sauciest woman-child the town of Tumsaw had ever seen. We’d stewed in our juices, she bore us our child, we married, and she left me.

Audrey, in the meantime, had gone her own way. She was still quite plain, and yet good to look at. She was actually very pretty, I could see now -- which got me to thinking. We were walking together in the town, carrying our grocery bags, and suddenly I hit on my idea. It was Gustav Courbet who'd said he would paint an angel if ever he saw one. I knew here was the model for my angel -- the angel for my mural.

She told me she was living in the neighborhood, making jewelry for a living. -- getting by. I explained my situation -- I told Audrey about how I’d designed greeting cards, painted, had odd-jobs, helped my father build his boat, started school again, and the rest. I told her I was working on my mural, had some money, and was looking for someone to pose for the angel in my picture. I put it to her straight -- would she model for me? She said yes, so we got to it that same afternoon.

She stood five-foot-seven. Her legs were long. She had long blonde-golden hair that reached to the middle of her back. Audrey’s eyes were green. Her face was round, milk-white, with high cheekbones and (like MacDougall) red, flushed cheeks. Her lips were wide, padded, broad. Her chiffon blouse was white and sheer and stitched with filigree. When she removed it, the beauty of her high breasts and massive brown aureoles and nipples sent me soaring. (This was not the girl I’d dated in high school!) She wore a necklace made of turquoise and jade and an armband made of gold. She wore leather moccasins inlaid with turquoise and jade, echoing the necklace.

Cyrus came into the recreation room while we were working, not knowing anything about this turn of events, and just about had a heart attack. Audrey was entirely undressed. His eyes looked like headlights. He said, “Oh my God! What’s that, a coonskin cap? This is a whole new chapter in the history of angels.”

That was right around the same time as our life drawing classes started at the school. It all happened pretty much as a result of my savvy and connections. Art students and teachers were to work together, drawing from the figure. There were about twenty of us at that first session. I’d got permission to have Audrey model, negotiating with the front office and behind the scenes with Chi and Shepperd, obtaining excellent wages for her and for forthcoming models, too. That night, in the Art Barn, we set up our drawing boards on easels and sawhorses, clipped up our big manilla sheets of paper, set out our brushes, pens, and pencils, and were ready to go.

Then came the usual putting off beginning -- lots of idle milling about, murmurs, yawns, somebody spilling their tacklebox of paints. Then she came in -- Audrey. She very casually floated around the room with a cup of coffee clasped in both hands, steam coiling up from the cup. She was wearing a sheer red loosely draped kimono, silkscreened with cherry blossoms, and navy blue bedroom slippers. She walked to the wooden platform at the center of the room, letting off her kimono as she went. She folded it over a chair, took off her slippers, and stepped up on the platform and posed.

We made quick gesture drawings -- warming up. Then, from the surface to the underlying skeleton. I knew MacDougall knew all about bones -- the xyphoid process, manubrium, epicondoyles, trochanters, peroneus brevis, and the rest. Him almost carving the structure of the figure out of the drawing on the paper, bringing out the delicious tension in the relations between bones, muscles, and surface skin. Bold marks. And he had a special gift for getting the proportions right, him working all through the picture -- back and forth and through it, all at once. Now Audrey took a longer pose, sitting like Rodin’s Thinker on a piano stool. We had an hour more of drawing. Afterwards, MacDougall and I saw her home. I’m quite sure it was then, that night, a love triangle was set in motion.

On the last Sunday in October, on Sukkoth, the so-called “Feast of the Tabernacles, the school sponsored a huge vigil. It was not a happy celebration. A campfire was made in the morning and was kept going all day. Tzu Jan Chi solemnly played both his Chinese water-gongs and an ancient Chinese xylophone with thirteen bronze bells rapped with two small wooden hammers.

On Halloween, a magnetic storm of exploding gases erupted on the sun. On the earth, the people of the southwestern United States were privileged to see an Aurora Borealis in the evening sky, a series of golden arcs and many-colored streamers falling across the northwestern horizon, shimmering and shimmering. According to Roger Shepperton, the sun's eleven-year magnetic activity cycle was at its minimum point, so the event -- this display of Northern Lights -- shouldn't even have been happening. That just made the whole thing seem all the more exceptional and spectacular.

It snowed and snowed through November. Audrey began appearing at our cabin door like some kind of sorceress, bearing fresh fruits, nuts, casseroles, and bottles of wine. She and I often went shopping together at Tumsaw’s Organic Foods Co-op. Audrey knew health foods! She introduced me to a new world. We roamed the place, stopping at barrels full of noodles -- spinach noodles, whole wheat, buckwheat, barley, soy-flour noodles. Also barrels full of beans – Audrey sank her soft, small hands int the fat barrels filled with soy, pinto, azuki, and mung beans and looked just ecstatic. She explained differences between parmesan, mozzarella, and ricotta cheeses. We sampled Calimyrna figs, dried pineapple, sultana raisins, Califonia and Morocco dates, exotic chia seeds, pine nuts, pumpkin seeds, and almonds. We bought bags of buckwheat, barley, and soy flour. Also tomatoes, carrots, eggplant, zucchini, kohlrabi, lettuce, tofu, and assorted kinds of cheeses and flavors of yogurt. We got little bottles of salt, pepper, curry, paprika, tumeric, oregano, chervil, foxglove, basil, and hyssop.

We were ready to feast when Thanksgiving came. There were to be no Thanksgiving celebrations at the school -- no campfires, rites, orations, or readings. Roger Shepperton had advised students to share the occasion with local Tumsaw families. MacDougall and I got invitations to spend the day with Audrey, her mother, and her father.

As requested, we showed up Thanksgiving morning at Audrey’s parents’ home. The door was wide open, so we just walked in. She was in the kitchen, making bread. “Come in, come in,” Audrey said cheerfully, holding out her hands, palms out. “I’ve just started baking,” she said, putting her hands back in a great red crock or bowl of dough at the far end of a sturdy wooden table that half filled the room. She had her long hair tied up in a knot under her a blue cowboy’s kerchief and she wore a clean white baker’s apron. Bright Sunday morning sun slashed in across her arms. There were numerous coffee cans. Wooden spoons, exotic bottles, bowls set out.

“My parents decided to go to Salt Lake City for the day,“ Audrey now mentioned, dissolving yeast and pouring it, with salt and warm water, into her bowl. Next, she dumped in wheat flour and stone-ground cornmeal. She added gluten. The batter foamed larger. We kneaded the dough. Audrey poured in wheat germ, soy flour, buckwheat, and milk. After a while, when the dough got to a nice height, Audrey pummeled it back down again. Some of the dough, when it had risen again, then was flattened with a rolling pin and rolled into buns. These were painted with milk and egg white. The rest of the dough was put in cans, and the cans went in the oven.

For our dinner Audrey served her homebaked bread with butter, jams, olives, radishes, pickles, corn, carrots, cabbage, green beans, parsley, then fresh-baked apple pie. Afterwards, the three of us cleaned up, loaded the dishwasher, and headed for the school. It was starting to drizzle. Soon, it was a downpour. Shortly after we reached the sanctuary of our cabin, Roger Shepperton made a surprise visit. He came in out of the rain, we made him good strong coffee, and he told us his good news. He said he’d got an extension on Audrey’s modeling contract and announced he had winter work for me, helping out in the Art Barn. As for MacDougall, Shepperton had found excellent employment for him, too -- in the glass house, the two-story library. He was to take over where Art de Languroc had left off. He not only put MacDougall to work there -- he put him in charge. He mentioned, with a tinge of regret, that he’d made Cyrus Rankin a page -- a humble book shelver. And, on leaving, he warned MacDougall of several other challenges and burdens.

For Christmas, I gave Audrey rice, soy flour, buckwheat, barley, mung beans, dates, raisins, almonds, and figs. MacDougall gave her Jade and turquoise jewelry. I presented MacDougall with half a dozen watercolor portraits I had made of him -- reading in a café; pushing a library cart filled with books; standing arms akimbo in front of high bookstacks; studying by lanternlight at our kitchen table; eating from a soup bowl with a large wooden spoon; and a close-up portrait attempting to exaggerate the wild-rising hair, the jutting cheeks, the flash of red, the flint-steel eyes. MacDougall gave me an oil portrait of myself -- me with my green eyes, big ears, bad teeth, and… I almost said beard. But, while on occasion I have grown a full beard, I mostly go around with just this perpetual five o’clock shadow. I never have been overmuch fond of shaving. In his painting, MacDougall had exactly nailed down the drift of this.

Yule came to the Two-Top Mountain School -- the Eucharist celebrated with fresh-baked loaves and sweet Lachryma Christi wine. From the low, long covered bridges came singing, dancing, clapping of hands. Fritz Dahlmann, a soprano yodler out of Minneapolis, sang away. Arlen Townsend took a break from the ongoing Taps game sessions to attempt to take a tablecloth out from under a long spread of Yuletide plates, cups, glasses of beer, bottles of wine, and lighted candles with one swift tug. He almost set the hall on fire.

Paul Kegan played banjo and sang Old Black Joe, Lord of the Dance, Old Man River, and Halelujah, I'm a Bum. Then he took up a saxopphone and cut loose on that. Tzu Jan Chi played his sixteen-string Chinese zither in an ancient, esoteric mode, singing A Drunken Fisherman’s Evening Song, The Moon Above a Mountain Pass, and Night Rain on Banana Leaves by an Open Window.

The celebrations were open to everyone. Roger Shepperton recited the Declaration of Independence to some local cowboys and they got so wild they about tore the tent off its supports.

The place was packed right up until a quarter of midnight. Prayers were then offered -- prayers to Jesus Christ, Buddha, Marduk, Odin, Baldur, Shiva, Vishnu, Zeus, Osiris, and to Quetzalcoatl.

The school was closed between Christmas and New Year’s Day. I busied myself with visiting old school chums, acquaintances, family members.

MacDougall joined Audrey Peters, sledding down school hillsides -- pulling sleds doggedly up the slopes, then soaring down. Big German Shepherds and red Irish Setters chasing after. Little terriers and poodles also. Yapping and yapping. At the town skating rink -- a baseball diamond in summer that now, in winter, was covered with water by the fire department. Audrey taught us to ice skate – to glide, pirouette, slide backwards over the ice just as nice as snow lighting down. Raw staium arc-lamps glared down into the soft mists. At midnight the lights clunked out. Just the gentlest touch of light then permeated the scene. It was so still -- hushed. There was just the soft scrape of the skates and the low, haunting reverberations over the ice.

MacDougall got things rolling at the library. He got to work, hunting down documents that provided him with insight into the original intentions as to what the library should be for, and how it should be run. He studied what had gone before. He traveled to Cheyenne to talk to legislators and the State Librarian about library grants previoulsy denied the Two-Top Mountain School. He did not return to Tumsaw empty-handed, but brought back a conditional and provisional SEG and LMSDG -- an inspiring Striving for Excellence Grant designed to encourage formal planning while providing funds to use above and beyond operational needs, and a plain vanilla Library and Museum Services Development Grant. With these in hand, MacDougall began making new plans. After that, he was at the library every day.

MacDougall wrote a library and museum mission statement, outlining the library's goals, objectives, procedures, and policies. He wote up and had printed a formal manual, considering and describing the school community and local community relations, evaluating the library's past strengths and weaknesses, proposing priorities, and setting down policies concerning hours of operation, personnel, job descriptions, salaries and benefits, performance evaluation, hiring and termination, responsibility and authority, security, budgeting and purchasing, the loan and return of materials, collecting of fines, reserving materials, protection of confidentiality, photocopier and other equipment use, scope of collection and priorities, regular and special collections development, evaluation, and weeding, interlibrary loans, and exhibits and displays.

On New Year’s Eve, I treated MacDougall and Paul Kegan to dinner and beers downtown, at the Horsehair Inn. I realized that night that I was in the company of a couple of authentic geniuses -- just in the way Kegan talked about his music, and the way MacDougall talked about libraries. Paul, who later gained fame as a composer of symphonies, said he would not have been surprised had MacDougall turned out to be the Director of the National Library, the National Archives, or the Smithsonian Institution. I could not have agreed more.