It seems a lot of conversations I’m in these days, on social media and IRL revolve around how we should be responding to Trump’s election. I know there’s a certain danger in being too deterministic, but a lot of answers seem to match where individuals are in the vulnerability scale. Some are counseling patience: let’s see how it goes after the inauguration. Maybe we don’t know the real Donald Trump.
Well, I think we do know the real Trump by now, but what I don’t think we know is the actual flavor of a Trump presidency. Have we ever seen a president elect who was so thin on actual policy? Trump rode his lack of policy experience to victory, of course, citing his independence from the people who govern as one of his chief qualifications. But it’s also his personality: on the campaign trail and in his famous 3am tweets from the toilet he often contradicted himself.
He’s a man of high-concept ideas, not detailed policy. This means the actual policies – and the governance we should and shouldn’t worry about – will depend disproportionately on the people he hires. Right now it seems like he’s trolling lobbyists and a handful of neocon dinosaurs that started the Iraq War on forged documents. He’s bringing the alligators in to “drain the swamp” and in the last 24 hours they’ve already signaled that a lot of key campaign pledges are open for reconsideration. How much we have to worry – and just what we have to worry about – will be clearer as his team assembles.
A few days ago my two-year old Theo and I took a meandering bike trip that brought us to the charmingly-named Piney Hollow Road (alas, not quite as rustic as it sounds). We stopped on the unassuming bridge over the Great Egg Harbor River and I looked for a trail into the woods. We found one about a hundred feet north of the river, hiked in another hundred feet and picnicked along the river. When I got back home I started Googling around and discovered that our sand trail was the Blue Anchor Fireline Road and that we were on one of the main paths in to the famed Blue Hole.
The best stories on Winslow’s Blue Hole come from Henry Charlton Beck, whose folk histories of South Jersey are must-haves for any local’s library. He wrote newspaper columns profiling old-timey local characters on the back roads and deep woods of the area and his accounts have been collected in volumes such as Forgotten Towns of South Jersey and Jersey Genesis: The Story of the Mullica River. He wrote about the Blue Hole legends in More Forgotten Towns of South Jersey and one helpful fellow has broken copyright laws to scan in the relevant pages.
Entrance to Blue Anchor Fireline Road from Piney Hollow Rd.
Today my two-year old and I set out again for the Blue Hole (well, I did: he actually napped half the way there). We started on Piney Hollow Road in Winslow Township. About 100 feet north of the very unassuming Great Egg Harbor River bridge is what the maps call the Blue Anchor Fireline Road. The picture on the left show the trailhead from Piney Hollow Road.
We went into the woods along this sandy road. It curves right, parallels Piney Hollow Road for awhile, then curves left back into the woods. There are weird metal bunker openings marked “confined space entry” in day-glow orange every so often: some water-related thing I suppose (though the conspiracy-minded might beg to differ). About a mile in there’s an intersection with the equally-sandy Inskeep Road (those wanting an alternative path could take Inskeep from Piney Hollow: it’s entry is about a half-mile north of the Great Egg Harbor River bridge).
Make a left onto Inskeep and go left when it forks. Within a quarter mile you’ll see a creek with the remains of a bridge. This is the Great Egg Harbor River. Some of the trip reports I’ve seen end here with the sad report that the washed-out bridge prevented the creek from being forded (“Since the stream was too deep and too fast moving to ford, we were forced to retreat. The Devil’s Hole was only 100 yards away, but it might as well have been 100 miles.”). Bah: it’s three feet deep in September, quit yapping and get your feet wet, okay? Just up the path on the other side is the famed Blue Hole itself.
It’s always fun to retrace Henry Charlton Beck’s footsteps but the Blue Hole itself isn’t all that exciting. Yes, the water is kind of blue, underneath the pond scum. It does look deep and it’s certainly not a normal geological feature. Some have wondered if it’s an asteroid hit, which is as good a theory as any other. Here’s a close-up of the hole in all its blue’ness:
No, I didn’t see the Jersey Devil (wasn’t really looking folks) but some sort of giant heron or crane did circle the hole overhead twice when I got there. One theory of the Jersey Devil legend is that it was inspired by sightings of the Sandhill Crane so our companion’s presence was appropriate. I didn’t swim into the hole to test out the Devil leg-pulling reports, bottomless depth or remarkable cold. I’ll leave that to more intrepid souls.
Quakers Uniting in Publications, better known as “QUIP,” is a collection of 50 Quaker publishers, booksellers and authors committed to the “ministry of the written word.” I often think of QUIP as a support group of sorts for those of us who really believe that publishing can make a difference. It’s also one of those places where different branches of Friends come together to work and tell stories. QUIP sessions strike a nice balance between work and unstructured time. It has its own nice culture of friendliness and cooperation that are the real reason many of us go every year.
Quakers Uniting in Publications annual meeting in Richmond Indiana 2004.
The theme of the 2004 annual session was “New Ways to Reach Our Markets in a Changing World” and our guest presenters were publicists Doug and Kate Bandos of KSB Promotions: http://www.ksbpromotions.com
The Evans House, built 1855: Gurneyite high style back in the day… It’s now the home of the Quaker Hill Conference Center, where we met. The Gurneyites evolved into Friends United Meeting and I had some good conversations with Friends about some of the visioning FUM is doing. Pretty interesting stuff, like many Friends they too are trying to figure out how to wrestle more fully with Quaker tradition.
Our hosts were the staff of “Friends United Meeting. The FUM campus in Richmond, Indiana, is very pretty in April, with flowers and the crabapple trees
Even prettier is the reforested trail down to the Whitewater River Falls.
We wouldn’t be Quakers if we didn’t have lots of meetings. Left: QUIP clerks Lucy Duncan, Barbara Mays, Elizabeth Cave.
Philip Arnold from the Quaker Bookshop in London, Ann Raper of North Carolina YM (FUM) publications committee and Liz Yeats, a former FGC employee and longtime QUIP stalwart (Ann and Liz are also both board members of “Friends Journal).
QUIP meetings are really all about the conversations in between sessions. Barbara Mays of Friends United Press talks with the new FUM webmaster Curtis Hermann (who later showed me the secret FUM coffee supply and chatted about collarless shirt vendors).
Marjorie Ewbank holds up QUIP’s “Quaker Tapestry”:http://www.Quaker-tapestry.co.uk panel, which should be finished by the end of the century.
Obligatory picture of Simon, sometimes referred to as the “QUIP baby“since his parents met at an annual QUIP meeting.
A field trip to the Levi Coffin house in Fountain City. Run entirely by very dedicated volunteers, it’s the only home still standing of Levi and Catharine Coffin, Friends who helped thousands of escaped slaves get to Canada through the Underground Railroad.
How many cameras does it take to make a group shot? That’s Trish Carn (the UK’s Quaker Monthly), Anthony Manousos (Western US’s Friends Bulletin) and our very gracious photo-taker (who I think might be Ann’s son?).
The many faces of Sally Rickerman, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting character par excellence. Sally spent part of the weekend challenging me about my plain dressing — okay, politely asking me a question and then following up my answer with her opinions. Sally also brought along a parody she once put together, a flyer for an organization called something like “The Society of Sentimental Friends” for all those who want to be Quaker because their great great grandparents were Quaker and they like antiques like old musty meetinghouses.
The many faces of Sally Rickerman (2)
The many faces of Sally Rickerman (3)
Barbara Hirshkowitz in front of the falls. I think Friends General Conference should put in a nature trail near our office too (I vote for bulldozing the “National Constitution Center”).
