As a lover of maps, I’ve often be intrigued by the environs  of the Delaware River. As the tides go up and down, the timelessness of the river becomes a kind of gentle solace to the industrialization along its banks. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the islands which somehow remain in its course. I’ve camped at Pea Patch Island down by Delaware and found a surprising family connection in its convoluted ownership. But closer to my commute is Petty Island, sitting alongside the New Jersey mainland a short distance north of the Ben Franklin Bridge.

Petty Island is owned by the Citgo oil company and until just a few months ago was still dotted with its oil tanks and a large marine cargo facility. Satellite views still show this twentieth century industry. But in a very long and oftentimes-uncertain process it’s due to become part of New Jersey natural lands and eventually to become a preserve. The public is generally still not allowed on the island but there are occasional trips and on this past Saturday I got to tour the island.

We were very lucky to have Bob Shinn as our tour guide. He’s a walking encyclopedia of the island and the state geopolitics and waves of names and commercial uses it’s been through. He literally wrote the entry on Petty Island in the Philadelphia Encyclopedia. Not surprisingly there’s a lot of Quakers in the early recorded history and the deed between the first Quaker owner and three Lenape representatives is intact in the Haverford College collections (this deed was also a major part of a talk by Lenape–settler history given by Jean Soderlund a few months ago at Rancocas Meeting (see also her book Lenape Country)).

The ever-changing, never-settled history of the island continues with its name. Wikipedia, Google Maps, and—most importantly—Bob Shinn call it “Petty Island,” while the guard shack, welcome sign, NJ Audubon Society, and New Jersey Natural Lands Trust adds the possessive to make it “Petty’s Island.” The latter is especially awkward-sounding to my ears, as South Jersey place names characteristically drop the apostrophes over time (for example, the river landing named after Captain George May is now the town of “Mays Landing.”)

Remnants of the industrialization remain: the massive three-story loading facility has been kept to become the bones of a future visitors center; the adjacent asphalt parking area has just been replanted as a meadow and is mostly a lot of rocks and short blades of grass (with some Fowler’s toads!). We were lucky enough to be the first public group to be there since this had all been cleared away.

Bonus: I didn’t realize till we were about to get in our cars that South Jersey Trails was also on the tour. He wrote it up too! If you look carefully, I’m in the background of one of the shots, and now that I’m looking I think that’s him in some of mine.

But this blog is just my life spun out. I don’t aim for keywords and I don’t want to dominate a thought-sphere. If I see a movie and jot down some impressions that attract a small audience, then my blog post is a success. A dozen or so random people a month Google in to spend a couple of minutes reading my thoughts on a fifty-year-old movie. That’s cool. That’s enough. In all the talk of targeting and SEO we sometimes forget that it’s an honor to simply be read.

The other night stayed up late to cuddled with my wife and watch good-natured but flawed Rom-Com. I read some reviews on IMDB and pondered the cliches in the shower the next morning. Boiling these impressions down into 500 words on a train commute would be easy enough. I should do it more.

Of all of the many people I spoke with, only one had any kind of
featured role at the conference. Without exception my conversation
partners were fascinating and insightful about the issues that had
brought them to Philadelphia, yet I sensed a pervading sense of missed
opportunity: hundreds of lives rearranged and thousands of air miles
flown mostly to listen to others talk. I spent my long commute home
wondering what it would have been like to have spent the weekend in the
hotel lobby recording ten minute Youtube interviews with as many
conference participants as I could. We would have ended up with a
snapshot of faith-based peace organizing circa 2009.

Next weekend I’ll be burning up more of the ozone layer by flying to California to co-lead a workshop with Wess and Robin M. (details at ConvergentFriends.org,
I’m sure we can squeeze more people in!) The participant list looks
fabulous. I don’t know everyone but there’s at least half a dozen
people coming who I would be thrilled to take workshops from. I really
don’t want to spend the weekend hearing myself talk! I also know there
are plenty of people who can’t come because of commitments and costs.

So we’re going to try some experiments–they might work, they might not. On QuakerQuaker, there’s a new group for the event and a discussion thread open to all QQ members (sign up is quick and painless). For those of you comfortable with the QQ tagging system, the Delicious tag for the event is “quaker.reclaiming2009”. Robin M has proposed using #convergentfriends as our Twitter hashtag.

There’s all sorts of mad things we could try (Ustream video or live
blogging via Twitter, anyone?), wacky wacky stuff that would distract
us from whatever message the Inward Christ might be trying to give us.
But behind all this is a real questions about why and how we should
gather together as Friends. As the banking system tanks, as the environment
strains, as communications costs drop and we find ourselves in a curious new economy, what challenges and opportunities open up?