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Thursday, November 17, 2011

CORWIN impresses class and professor with unusual transportation to field trip

As printed on the Cover Page of   "Fifth Volume of Essays for American Landscape History and Contemporary Landscape Architecture", written and taught by Professor Sheafe Satterthwaite

Maybe more notorious, in any course annals yet to be written, CORWIN becoming the first Sheafe student to cycle long-distance in order to attend a field session, and it happening to be the all-day Forced March, 4 November 2011. (Maybe the ride was to make up for missing a Nordic Ski practice?) Picture an assemblage of ten students with their teacher facing the Rensselaer County Historical Society curator (and Smithie), Stacey Pomeroy Draper, and she alone from the stoop facing, as it were, the street (or students), while the class itself was standing on the sidewalk, facing also (and learning from?) the marble facade of Richard and Betsy Hart's 1820s manse at 57 Second Street, Troy - and into our midst between paralleled parked cars arrives Ben, in cycling garb but stashed away in a backpack with Forced March attire too, and he accomplishing the thirty-six (or more?) miles from campus to downtown Troy in two hours or so. (He estimated his speed at 17-18 miles an hour, replete with two summits to cross, namely Petersburg Pass and Grafton Mountain, and a snow squall to endure, as well as a change of bikes, since going up Bee Hill Road before 8  o'clock on his mountain bike, he decided a road bike would be better, and hence returned to campus.)*  Maybe uniquely in the history of the Marble House, Ben's bike immediately stowed away in the front hall, as a temporary (but uninterpreted) exhibit!

*After the next class session, 7 November,  MIKELL informed S.S. that he thought no one else in the 201 class, with many athletes could accomplish what CORWIN  did: "Getting up Petersburg Pass, you know, is really hard in itself. Would runners ABSOLO  and SMITH demur?
Ben Corwin: Man of Many Talents

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