Charlie

Charlie is the craft teacher at the school, meaning he is responsible for working instruction in some sort of practical skill into the curriculum. The primary craft that he teaches is landscape design, through his work as the school groundskeeper. He also has a lot of other skills, including making tools and other objects with leather, antler, wood, and bone; felling trees and cutting wood with axe or chainsaw; building and maintaining hiking trails; and both creative and scholarly writing. By training, he is an ecologist, though he never completed his master’s degree because of his alcoholism. He is sober now, and lives a very monastic life. He hardly ever leaves campus.

Charlie is short but very broad, having the low, square build and slight paunch common to older men of southern Italian extraction (though he lacks the classic olive coloration). His hair was black but is now mostly grey, and he wears it quite short. He is sixty-three years old when the story starts, and speaks rarely and in a thick Boston accent. He is intensely private, and is quite deliberately rude to most people in order to drive them away. Those few who can see this for what it is and who treat him gently are rewarded by his keen intelligence, his deep and delighted knowledge of the land, and his friendship, whose depth he does not ever directly express.

The following posts focus significantly on Charlie (though this list is still incomplete).

Tracking
Tin Whistle Evening
Ostar
Why Ecology?
Introduction to Physics
Gardening
A Surprising Meeting
Personal Things
Finding Dumbledore