Field Trip to Field School

Our communications team organized a small press event at the Dutch Reformed Church for this past Wednesday. Ben Haley (Communications Assistant) and I caught the 7:16 a.m. train to Garrison, where Holly Evarts (Director of Communications) picked us up and drove us to Newburgh. When we arrived around 9:00, the kids had already been hard at work for an hour. Some were shellacking window sashes, others were chiseling debris from the floorboards of the stage.

At 10:00, everyone gathered on the stage as Jeff Finch of the National Park Service gave a lecture/demonstration on the use of a miter saw, including a stern warning about safety, using his heavily bandaged thumb as an example.

Three (!) television crews showed up over the course of the morning, filming the church inside and out and interviewing a few of the students and a couple of the supervisors. (Stay tuned for clips.) This was my first “field trip,” and it was instructive to see the work being done and to see that the high-schoolers are really enjoying it.

On our way back to the train station, we stopped for lunch at Poppy's in Beacon. The local, grass-fed beef burgers were great and the three of us together could not finish the “larger” size fries.