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Bulletin

Dispatches from the Hill

Not everything needs announcing. Now and then, though, something is worth passing along — a change, a quiet tradition kept, a note from the school. These are posted as they happen, and kept here as a small record of the year.

October 8, 2026Dispatch

The Fox in the Reading Room

A fox was found on the reading-room window seat one Tuesday morning. Nobody heard it come in, and a senior decided it was auditing.

It was a Tuesday in early October, and the reading room was already full when someone noticed the fox. It had settled on the window seat in the far alcove, the one that gets the morning sun, and was watching the students the way a proctor watches an exam — patient, unhurried, faintly bored. No one heard it come in. The window there has been painted shut since 1983, which is the sort of fact the school maintains with a real commitment to inconvenience. We did the only sensible thing, which was to keep reading. Mrs. Hollins brought a saucer of water and set it on the floor a few feet away, and the fox regarded the saucer, then Mrs. Hollins, then returned to the window, as if to say that it was here for the quiet and not the hospitality. It stayed through two class periods. A student tried to sketch it and got the tail wrong and kept going anyway, which is the correct way to draw a fox. Someone else whispered that it must be lost. A senior, without looking up, said it was not lost, it was auditing, and the fox did nothing to contradict this. Sometime around eleven it stood, stretched in the way dogs do, and walked out through the door a student had propped open for the mail. We have not seen it again. There is a rumor that it comes back at night, which there is no evidence for and which everyone believes. What I keep from the morning is not the fox but the room around it — fifteen students and a wild animal, all pretending to be busy, and the particular quiet of people being very careful not to ruin a good thing. That is a kind of attention we try to teach. We rarely teach it that well, and we have never managed to teach it on purpose. We are considering, only half-joking, hiring the fox.

August 25, 2026Dispatch

The Year Opens

A new year began this week. The school is full, unhurried, and quietly at work. The oatmeal is honest about what it is.

The fall term opened on a clear morning, as it always does — or as it always has, which is not quite the same thing, but we have stopped checking the distinction. New students were met at the gate by their advisors and walked to their first class before the rest of the school arrived. There is no ceremony for it, no convocation with banners and a brass quartet. We tried banners once, in 1998. The wind took them into the trees, where one remained until 2003, fading nicely. We decided that was ceremony enough. What there is, instead, is the quiet understanding that a year has begun, and that each student now belongs to it. A new boy asked on the first day whether the bell would ring, and was told it would ring when it rang, which is the kind of answer we give and which he will, by November, find perfectly clear. A returning senior held the door to the science hall for a freshman who did not yet know it was the science hall, and said, "You'll figure it out; everyone does, and the ones who don't become English majors." This was meant kindly, and taken so. The dining hall served oatmeal, as is the custom, and the cook told the new students that the oatmeal here is the same oatmeal they serve at the great universities, only here it is honest about what it is. We are glad to have them. We are glad, as ever, to begin again.

August 13, 2026Notes

Astronomy, at Four in the Morning

The upper school walked to the ridge at four in the morning and saw forty meteors. A student brought a telescope and saw 'the usual.'

The upper school walks to the ridge twice a year, once in the fall and once for the Perseids. The August walk is the harder one. We meet at the chapel at four in the morning with whatever we can carry — blankets, thermoses, a few sleeping bags — and we go up by the old logging road in the dark. There is usually a lot of complaining, which is appropriate and which we encourage. A school without grumbling before dawn is a school that has given up on something. This year the sky was very clear and the moon was down, and we counted forty before we stopped counting. The best meteor was a slow green one that crossed the whole of Cassiopeia and left a line you could still see with your eyes shut. A tenth-grader, who had never been before, said it looked like something falling and being caught at the same time. I have not heard a better description, and I have heard a great many worse ones, some of them mine. A student brought a telescope, which was heroic and also, in the end, unnecessary, since the whole point of the Perseids is to lie on your back and not do anything. He set it up anyway, pointed it at nothing in particular, and reported to anyone who asked that he could see "the usual." We let him be. There is always one. We came down at first light. The cafeteria opened early and gave us oatmeal, and the cook, who has been here longer than the maples, told us we looked like ghosts. We did. A chaperone, asked whether the walk had been worth it, said, "Ask me after coffee," which is the only honest answer before seven in the morning. It was a good morning. We will go again in the fall, and complain again, and go again.

June 6, 2026From the Hill

The Bell That Wouldn't Ring

The chapel bell went quiet for a week. When Mr. Achebe climbed the tower, a bird had happened — and the rent was reasonable.

The bell in the chapel tower is rung at the start of each term and on the morning a class graduates. It is an old bell and a heavy one, and for a week this spring it went silent. We assumed, as we tend to, that something mechanical had failed in a mechanical way. This is the school's approach to most problems: assume the building, then blame the building, then eventually investigate. The building usually wins. Mr. Achebe, who has rung the bell for nineteen years, climbed the tower on a Friday to find the rope coiled and untouched at his feet. He climbed the next morning, and the morning after. When asked what he thought the trouble was, he said, "The bell does not wish to," which was not helpful and was, in its way, accurate. On the third morning he found the nest. A barn swallow had built it in the clapper housing — a small, neat, impossible thing of mud and grass, with three eggs inside it. He came down and told the head of school, and the head of school told the school, and the school, which can argue about anything, argued about whether the bell should be rung anyway. It was decided, finally, that we would not ring it for the rest of the term. One parent wrote in to ask whether the silence meant something had happened. Nothing had happened. A bird had happened. We wrote back and said so, gently. The swallows fledged in early June, and the bell rang for graduation on a bright Saturday, and it sounded, that day, like it had been waiting. Mr. Achebe said the swallow would be back next year, because they always come back to a good address. We agree. We are, after all, a good address, and the rent is reasonable.

May 20, 2026From the Hill

Spring Theses, Defended

A year of careful reading came to its close. The questions were good ones, and one student was only 'reasonably' certain.

The senior theses were defended before the faculty last Friday, and the questions were good ones. A good question, in our experience, is one that cannot be answered in the sentence it was asked in, and that the student will still be turning over on the drive home. We ask a lot of these. We are aware it is annoying. We continue. The answers were honest where they could be and uncertain where they had to be, which is what we ask of a defense. One student, asked about a contradiction in the second chapter, said, "I noticed that too, and I kept it, because I think the contradiction is the point." There was a pause. The faculty, who had been waiting forty minutes to ask that question, accepted it. Another student, defending a thesis on the usefulness of doubt, was asked whether he was certain. He said, "Reasonably." The room laughed, which is rare at a defense and a good sign when it happens. We are proud of the Class of 2026, and of the questions they chose to live with for a year. A thesis, we tell them, is not a thing you finish. It is a thing you stop working on because someone makes you graduate. They have stopped. We will miss them, and the way they argued, and the way they eventually, after great effort, agreed to be wrong.

May 2, 2026Dispatch

The Creek, Mapped

A student spent the year mapping the creek. The map hangs in the science hall now, and the otter — unnamed, on principle — is still here.

Mara Osei spent the whole year walking the creek. She started in September as a junior-year project in field biology and she did not really finish, which I think is the point of a creek. She mapped seven bends, named four of them after people in her family, and kept a notebook of what lived in each one — the crayfish, the one otter that has been there as long as anyone can remember, the waterthrush that nests under the second bridge. She did not name the otter. She said naming it would imply she owned it, and also that the otter would not care. She presented her map at the spring symposium. It was drawn by hand on three sheets of butcher paper taped together, and it was the best thing in the room — better, certainly, than the printed posters, which were tidy and correct and told you nothing you would remember. A professor from the university who came to judge asked her how long she would keep working on it, and she said, "I think until I leave, and then someone else can keep going, and then someone after them." The professor said that was the correct answer. Mara said she was not trying to be correct, she was trying to be done, and the creek would not let her. The professor said that was also correct. The map hangs in the science hall now, between the two windows that face the creek. Students add to it. There is a note in the margin, in a different hand from Mara's, that says: "the otter is still here." Beneath that, in yet another hand: "it has not been named and it will not be." And beneath that, in pencil, someone has written, "good," which I take to be the otter's opinion, relayed. The creek, last we checked, is still there. We will keep you posted, though the creek does not require it.

April 10, 2026Announcement

The Maples Planted in 1962

One of the founding-class maples is failing. A student grafted a cutting — 'trees are patient, so I am being patient.' The old tree has not been told.

The founding class planted twelve maples along the drive in the fall of 1962. They were saplings then, barely taller than the students who put them in the ground. There are eleven now. One, the third from the gate, has been failing for years, and this spring we had to decide what to do. This is the kind of decision a school ends up having more meetings about than it should, and we had more meetings about it than we should have. We could take it down, or we could let it stand until it fell on its own, which it might do this year or in twenty. The grounds committee argued about it the way people argue about an old building — politely, and with everything at stake, and at length, and again. Someone said it was just a tree. Someone else said it was not just a tree, it was the third from the gate, and that those were different things. They were both right, which is the usual result of our meetings. In the end a biology teacher took a cutting, and a student in the greenhouse grafted it onto rootstock, and we are waiting to see if it takes. The student, asked how confident she was, said, "Trees are patient, so I am being patient," which is a better answer than most adults manage. The old tree, meanwhile, still stands. It leafed out again this year, thinner than last. It has not been told it is failing. We decided there was no need. If the cutting takes, we will plant it where the old one stands, when the old one finally goes. If it doesn't, we will try again. The point of a founding class, a student said at the meeting, is that it keeps going. I have been thinking about that sentence, and about the third maple, and about how the difference between a school and a place is mostly that a school keeps going on purpose.

March 15, 2026Notes

A Letter Found in a Book

A 1971 letter slipped from a donated copy of Walden. We read it at assembly, then put it back where it was found — uncatalogued, on purpose.

A box of donated books arrived from an estate in Asheville — about three hundred volumes, mostly mid-century, well-read, some with marginalia. A freshman was cataloguing them for service hours when a letter slid out of a copy of Walden and landed on the floor. Service hours, for the record, are how we get the unglamorous jobs of the school done, and cataloguing donated books is among the most unglamorous, and also, it turns out, among the best. The letter was dated September 1971. It was written in a careful hand to someone called only "M." and it said, among other things: "I have decided to come home after all. I was wrong that the mountain would be enough. It is enough for a visit, but not for a life. I will take the train on Thursday. Leave the porch light on, and if it isn't on, I will understand." We don't know who wrote it, or whether M. left the light on, or whether the writer got on the train. The book had been read many times; the letter had stayed put through all of them, which is a kind of patience in itself. We read it aloud at assembly, the way you read a thing that isn't yours but that you have been trusted with. A student said afterward that it was sad. Another said it wasn't, really, because whoever wrote it had decided, and deciding is the hard part. I think they were both right, which is the kind of thing that happens at assemblies here more often than it should. Then we put the letter back between the pages of Walden and sent the books to the shelves. It is there now, if anyone wants to find it. We are not cataloguing it. Some things the library keeps by not keeping track of them.

February 20, 2026From the Hill

The Guest Who Stayed an Extra Week

A visiting poet's ride down the mountain was blocked by a fallen tree. She stayed, ate the oatmeal, and left us a poem we were asked not to share.

A visiting poet was meant to stay three days. She read on Thursday evening, taught two classes on Friday, and was supposed to take the road out Saturday morning. The road, that Saturday, was closed — a tree had come down in the night across the only way down the mountain, and the county said it would be Monday before it was cleared. The county says this sort of thing often, and means it sometimes, and this time it meant it until Tuesday. She stayed. She stayed Sunday and Monday and most of Tuesday, because the tree, it turned out, had taken a power line with it and the road needed more than clearing. She taught classes that were not on the schedule and sat in on classes that were. She was, it should be said, a very good sport about being marooned at a school in the mountains with a lot of teenagers and a dining hall that serves oatmeal as a philosophy. She ate the oatmeal. She asked for seconds. She learned the names of the kitchen staff and told one of the cooks that his cornbread was the best she'd had outside of her grandmother's, and she meant it, and the cook, who is not given to being moved, was moved. A student asked her, at dinner on the last night, whether being stuck here had ruined her week. She said it had rearranged it, and that she had stopped minding around Sunday afternoon, and that she would come back on purpose, which was the kindest thing anyone has said about our road. When she left she gave the school a poem, handwritten, and asked that we not publish it. We haven't. It is pinned to the board in the English office, where students sometimes stand and read it, and where it will stay until the paper gives out. A tree fell, and we got four extra days of the best kind of luck. We are thinking of writing the county a thank-you note. We will not, because they would not know what to do with it.

January 12, 2026Notes

The Literary Magazine, Reopened

Submissions are open. We want writing that's been read over more than once. The record for resubmissions is four.

The literary magazine returns this winter with a new format and the same old patience for a sentence. Submissions are open to all students. We are looking for writing that has been read over more than once — the kind that earns its place on the page. If you wrote it in one sitting and changed nothing, it is probably not done. If you changed everything and it is now shorter than when you started, it is probably getting there. We do not have a theme, because themes are how good poems get awkward. We do have a word limit, which we will ignore for the right piece and enforce mercilessly for the wrong one. The editors are three seniors and one junior, and they argue about commas with a seriousness that would embarrass them if they knew how it looked. They are very good. A note on rejections: we reject most of what we receive, including, on principle, some of the things we like. This is not cruelty. It is the magazine being a magazine. If your piece is not taken, bring it back next term, changed. If it is not taken then, bring it back again, changed differently. The record for resubmissions is four, and that poem is now the first one in the issue. We are not telling you which one. You will know it when you read it.

The school keeps its own quiet record of the year.

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