Once I'd made up my mind I would attend the Two-Top Mountain School in Tumsaw, I had to write an essay or send something else showing my creativity, brilliance, goodwill, or good intentions. I sent along a batch of watercolors and a passport photo of myself. I also said a few words about my past -- which I'll now expand on here, including much I did not tell them at the school.

I was born on a farm in Tumsaw, where my father's father just rocked in his rocking chair out on our front porch day in, day out. He was my one childhood hero. He died in his sleep. He'd married young and divorced young and he'd raised my father by himself -- then, later, me. My father had married young and divorced young and, like my mother, left me stranded. History repeats itself, that's right.

I have a son I never see. My wife left me and took him with her, leaving clues for me that all led to dead ends. This was before I gave up singing cowboy songs and drinking and before I left Tumsaw for Cheyenne on my quest to find them. They up and disappeared, and stayed disappeared. The marriage had been plainly bad, but not spectacularly bad -- not worse than most, I'd figured. I'd hoped. But then they were gone -- gone.

I've heard horrid tales about a South American tribe called the Tupinamba, or the Tapanumbi, and of how they tortured their prisoners by giving them cute concubines from their ranks, with whom to procreate. This, in order that the child, when born into the world, could be slaughtered in front of the prisoner's --the father's -- eyes. This, in addition to other tortures. That's mighty Goddamn primitive. After my wife left me, I gave her this nickname: Tapanumbi.

Now I realize that even here and now, in the civilized world, we do it to ourselves. We fall in love and marry and make an enemy of our parter -- after the baby is born. Then comes the divorce or disappearance, and the agony. I realize now I myself had not one leg up on the Tupinamba, so far as love and reason go. At least the murdering Tapanumbi explain what the death is for.

Luckily, life's not that hard all the time.

Mine was a happy childhood, all in all. I'd grown up idle on the farm, making pencil drawings of the farmfields and encircling mountains, climbing trees and falling out of them. I never had any headaches or broken bones. Back then, I didn't suffer much.

The divorce of my parents had been nothing to me. I'd simply assumed it had come of God's going about his business in His infinitely mysterious ways. Then had come my own marriage, the separation, the disappearance, my agony, and I changed my tune, howling, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Near out of my head with grief, I'd gone to Cheyenne to paint and to live with my old man aboard his boat. I'd decided to patiently pursue the leads my wife had left, and calmly seek the whereabouts of my precious boy. Maybe I'd take her back. Forgive her. I'd be, in my new tender greatheartedness, a saint of forgiveness.

"Ease up," my wise old one-eyed father had told me. "If you keep clutching that dream, you will snap. Don't you be so bad as to believe you are that good -- at least not aboard this boat." He warned me not to repress my actual righteousness and misery, nor supress my faults and shortcomings. "I'll have no martyrs aboard my boat!" Bill roared. "And don't think for a second this is the boat that will save you from drowning. That boat, Cisco, you must build yourself."

Thus spoke old Bill Wieland, the one-eyed master of all he surveyed. He'd lost his right eye twenty years before. It had been burst by a cork from a champagne bottle on New Year's Eve -- at least that's what Bill told me. My mother, he said, shook up the bottle real good and then opened it on his eye, saying, "Keep your eyes open, Bill."

It had been in all the newspapers, my father's popped eye -- so little happened in Tumsaw in those days. I've since read the clippings several times: my father's father, on hearing his son's cries, and a ruckus coming from the chicken coop, had run down the stairs from his bedroom to the living room with just his favorite ancient purple robe on. The two had run to wake a neighbor in possession of a car. The three had then raced south to the hospital in Lander.

There I was, home alone with my mother, who was about hysterical, laughing hideously. Trembling, I hid under my bed. She did not come looking for me, thank you God. She packed her things, slipped out, and skipped town. My father said she headed for Las Vegas but he knew no one who knew for sure where she went.

As for Bill's bad eye, the cork had exploded the cornea, the optic nerves, and the retinal artery. Bill, who'd long bragged about his excellent eyesight, was bitter about his now being blind in the one eye. But not for long. Finally, it gave him character, he said. He decided he would exact no revenge on my mother. Instead, he got this notion he would build a boat. Wild-eyed Bill, as he came to be called, invited me to stay in Tumsaw to be raised by his father, or to move with him to Cheyenne, where he took possession of a vast piece of property -- formerly a ranch, presently a dump -- which he said he intended to improve upon. I chose to remain with my grandpa.

When I finally caught up with him years later, Wild-eyed Bill still had his vision. In the middle of his junkyard, he had begun work on his boat. He had not yet made the vessel seaworthy. Still under construction, it was high and dry on stilts, a forty-something foot long Bermuda-rigged yawl, a sort of yacht, maybe ten feet wide across the middle and three feet deep from gunwale to keel. From the pilot's booth you dropped down a hatch, hand-over-hand down a rope, to the kitchen. The galley smelled of beer-pancakes, Bill's favorite food, and Rye whisky. Behind the kitchen, toward the port quarter, was my temporary bedroom and bunk. A wall of cardboard-thin plywood separated Bill's starboard quarter chambers from mine. God, that man snored like some kind of chainsaw.

No one imagined Bill would actually live to see his boat in the water. “Doing the work that’s in you is what matters,” Bill liked to say, looking at the chaotic world through his one good eye. Most of the nails he hammered in were askew. As often as not Bill would strike his thumb, then spend an hour doctoring it -- meanwhile eating cookies from tins and sipping whisky from collectible ceramic jugs. He earned his living, by the way, selling collectibles -- mainly junk.

Bill Wieland’s junkyard, purchased from money obtained through the sale of a couple of acres from his father’s far vaster Tumsaw land holdings, was widely known for being an intriguing curiosity and an off-putting eyesore. The place was about the size of two football fields and looked like the outskirts of Calcutta, Mexico City, or Peking -- chaotic, sometimes on fire, often smoldering, completely filled up, and still growing. Pushing in on the junkyard grounds on all sides were neat new tract-house developments. Bill had been offered, on several occasions, a million dollars or more for the land -- but he wouldn’t sell. He was figuring one day his place would be turned into a museum, perhaps a national monument or even national park -- a veritable Yellowstone for treasure hunters. It was already true that people traveled from all across the states and all around the world to have a gander at Bill’s used goods, antiques, memorabilia, trinkets, ephemera, car parts, and garbage.

Four sheep dogs were posted around the grounds. Every day, Bill went in to feed them and to see if the security of his grounds had been breached. He seemed to be familiar with every single item in his steaming heaps. It was his pleasure to give official, guided tours of the grounds, guiding guests to those particular exotic, rare, long-lost, and hard-to-come-by nuts, bolts, screws, tools, water pumps, hubcaps, garage signs, playing cards, valentines, stamps, shoelaces, silverware, cups, plates, rings, bracelets, or lockets they had so-long dreamed of yet finding. When not doing that, you could find him standing sternly on the sun-blistered deck of his boat, admiring its crooked twin masts and the rest, all so lovingly botched by him, the one-eyed king of all he surveyed.

He had hard, calloused hands. His skin looked like something you’d expect to see on a horse-saddle, but not on a man. His knees were bad from having scrubbed his decks so much -- and from all his whisky-sodden falling down. If he caught me trying to improve on any work he’d done himself already, he’d fix that one blue eye of his on me and say, “leave it be, boy. That there’s old Bill Wieland’s job. Now get along and paint yer pitchers.”

I was, in fact, bound determined to be a painter. That was my ambition -- my boat, as Bill would say: to paint. Bill thought it was a fine dream, painting -- for a start. He felt painting pitchers was just warming up. “You’re not really grappling with yer destiny,” he insisted. “You’re just tickling the outlines.”

Still, he would back me up when it came time for me to leave him and to return to Tumsaw to go back to school to study painting with Tzu Jan Chi. With my application, I’d sent in half a dozen of my best pitchers.

Not Tzu Jan Chi, but rather Roger Shepperton, wrote back at once: “Cisco Wieland, No need for a personal interview. Made some calls around. As I understand it, you’re ‘coming home.’ Unanimous acceptance by myself (director) and staff. Be present at the Tumsaw Two-Top Mountain School between ten and four on August the twenty-sixth.”

At about that same time, MacDougall had applied to the Maine Two-Top Mountain School. He’d had a far-fetched notion he’d up and leave his southern California home and go and build a hut like Thoreau, or at least pitch a tent, in the farthest north wilds of New England. Unaware that Roger Shepperton had moved on to Wyoming, he’d written this to the Maine school:

“Dear Mr. Shepperton, I am Aaron Robert MacDougall. I was born in Taramor, California, the next-to-last of three children, brother to a twin sister. My father is a plumber and my mother is a lawyer. She used to work in the Taramor Public Library. Through the years she brought home hundreds of books. Under their spell, I resolved I’d one day be a writer. At the two-Top Mountain School in Maine, I will seek to get much writing done -- and to get more knowledge of, and training in, culture, mythology, fiction, and the future of mankind. I aim high. I am so. I’ve been called intense and austere, me looking down my elegant nose from my six-foot-two height to the inelegant, unruly world below. I fear I’m on the edge of a precipice, on the verge of a meltdown, and I think your wilderness adventure school would do me good.”

With this terrible cover letter serving as his application, MacDougall sent a copy of his privately printed “Assorted Writings,” bound by him personally in Morocco leather with endsheets of moiré fabric, tan and deepest blue.

Not Roger Shepperton, but rather Tzu Jan Chi, wrote back at once “Aaron MacDougall, No need for a personal interview. Made some calls around. Unanimous acceptance by myself (director) and staff at two-Top Mountain, Tumsaw, Wyoming. Prefer you join us here. Be present at this campus between ten and four on August the twenty-sixth.”