This special bonus episode of the memory palace was commissioned by Freepoint Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

It is a site-specific bonus episode, best enjoyed while walking around Fresh Pond across the street from the hotel.

But it is still a fun listen, I think, wherever you happen to be.

To get to that specific site, beyond getting yourself to Cambridge, I will leave those logistics to you.

When it starts from the lobby of the lovely Freepoint Hotel, walk out to the sidewalk, bang a left, cross safely at the light.

Once across the street, walk along the fence to your right until you get to the entrance, and then just wander in and listen while taking a leisurely stroll around the pond.

This is the memory palace, a neat to-mayo.

Beneath these waters, beneath the glassy surface of Fresh Pond, down in the darkness, beneath the bottom, the muck in the reeds, and some old abandoned shopping cart from back when the whole food was a stop and shop, our relics from a lost world, where there was magic once.

What else would you call it? When a Maharaja, in his palace in Manipur, through Andhra Pradesh, where the summers are unrelenting, a man who had known luxury all his life,

land in power and servants and jewels and fine clothes, who had thought he had everything, until he had his first drink, with ice in it, until he became the first in his line to know the pleasure of cold liquid on a hot day.

What else would you call it? When a girl, 14 or 15 years old in Martinique, or Haiti, or St. Lucia, a girl who had nothing, had her first ice cream, and in island that had never known ice, since it rose up from the ocean floor some 50 million years before.

But beneath these waters, and the darkness beneath the muck in the reeds, beneath the silt of a dozen dozen summers, a relics, that if we were to bring up to the surface, and lay them out in the sun, and they suddenly gleamed as if brand new, as if the mud at the bottom of Fresh Pond had some sort of magical, preservative powers, as though Tutankhaman could have been sunk here in some ancient ceremony, only to emerge whole and restored, and,

and just towel off and walk the freedom trail. Even if these rusted, corroded artifacts that are down there right now were dug up, and could suddenly announce themselves as what they are, purpose-built tools and machine parts, you still couldn't guess that they're specific purposes, which are as obscure now 150 and more years later, as the implements of some ancient Egyptian ritual.

But you would at least have a link, something that connects you today, here among the dog walkers and joggers, the stroller pushers and shortcut takers, to that lost world, to the Maharaja, sudden the cooler, to the girl in St. Lucia, beaming.

It took Frederick Tutor decades and decades to conjure that magic. He grew up around here, born to Boston Brahmins right after the Revolutionary War. His father was a big shot lawyer, and when it came time for Frederick to go to Harvard and follow in his footsteps, his son refused.

Since Frederick was a kid, he had been obsessed with business, with coming up with the killer idea, the product, the service, the something that would make his own name.

And sometime after his 21st birthday, it came to him in a flash. He would build his fortune from ice.

In many places, even then, at the turn of the 19th century, you could get ice in the summertime. As long as you lived in a place where things froze in the winter, there were ways of keeping that ice frozen.

You could dig a hole in the ground, you could build an ice house of stone, you could wrap a block of ice and moss or hay in the winter, and then take it out in the summer. The block would be smaller, but you could still tinkle pleasantly in your glass and cool you off.

The ancient Romans and Greeks and Persians and Chinese and Mesopotamians all took ice from nearby mountain tops and found ways to save it for sunny days.

But there, at the start of the 1800s, there were still places all over the globe that had never seen frozen water until Frederick Tutor came along.

But between his flash of inspiration, between when he bought his first ship at 23 years old for 5 grand, when everyone around him told him he was nuts, literally straight up questioned his sanity.

...