This special bonus episode of the memory palace was commissioned by the Keybank Rochester French festival in Rochester, New York

It was one of two site-specific pieces I did for them

This one is meant to be listened to while standing on the pont to rent bridge over the Genesee River

It really is quite a spot if you can't get there. You will likely enjoy listening to it wherever you are

This is the memory palace on Nate de Mayo

There once was a man from Patucket

His name was Sam Patch

When he was a little kid, he did what most little kids in Patucket or Dioin did in the early 1800s

He went to work

Six days a week in the textile mills

12 hours a day in the winter

14 or 16 in the haze and swelter of the summer

And when Sam Patch was seven or eight maybe nine

He did what some of the men in the mill did on his break little Sam would follow them up to the top of the high bluffs by the waterfall that powered the mill

And he'd jump he'd leap out over the rocks that could break your legs and

Plumb it down to that one spot in the blackstone river that was deep enough that you wouldn't break a neck and for those few seconds

Falling through the air and cutting through the cold churn of the water

He'd be free of the mill

And then he'd swim to shore and dry off and go back to work to finish out the day

And the lifetime of days just like it that lay ahead of him inside

And soon Sam's favorite escape became the favorite escape of most of the other workers there at the cotton mill

They wouldn't actually jump themselves. They'd just sit in the grass in the riverbank eat their lunch and watch him do it

...