follows a road that ran in part between Crowleytown–where the Buttonwood Campground is today–and Batsto Village more than 200 years ago. The 1808 Hiking Trail is lined with massive, towering Atlantic white cedars in several places and cuts through Mordecai Swamp affording fantastic views deep into it. The 1808 Hiking Trail will provide two new hiking loops from the Batsto Visitor Center: a 1.7 mile loop and a 7 mile loop via the Batona and other connecting trails including the new Sand and Water Hiking Trail (0.9 miles, orange blazes) also opening on June 5.

Don’t believe the mileage: I was expecting a 1.7‑mile loop but ended up on a 7‑plus-mile out and back hike!

Here’s a thread on the always excellent NJPinebarrens forum on the Mordecai trail. The swamp was named after Mordecai Andrews, one of the earliest Quakers on the Atlantic side of South Jersey, a founder of the seaport town of Tuckerton in 1699.

Here’s a great article by Gabe Coia on Mordecai’s business empire. He was among the first English settlers in Little Egg Harbor and went about extracting the lumber resources upriver on the Mullica. There’s some great descriptions of thousand-year-old trees the size of 20-story buildings that were taken down by Andrews’s teams. Update: I thought the original roadbed of the trail was built as part of the logging enterprise but Gabe Coia emailed me that the roadbed of the 1808 Trail was built by Batsto owner Jesse Richards (in 1808, surprise!) and postdates Andrews’s lumber business in the area.

Putting a  swamp and felling all of these massive trees would have been a very labor-intensive undertaking. Coia’s article mentions Mordecai’s ties to Barbados: “The ships would return with produce, rum, and other goods to replenish supplies for the community at Little Egg Harbor.” The Caribbean island was the first economic break-out star in the British New World and it was the first place where Quakerism spread like wildfire outside of the British Isles. It also boasted an economy built almost entirely on massive slave-labor camps, where even individual Quakers sometimes owned hundreds of slaves. Given the well-documented trade, at least some of other goods Mordecai’s ships were probably bringing back were kidnapped Africans. This would have been the labor who logged impenetrable swamps.

Genealogy sites back up my suspicions. I looked Mordecai Andrews and slaves and found this, about his son-in-law John Mathis, who took over much of his business:

The virgin forest of the surrounding area provided timber for the ships which supported successful fishing and trade ventures that became the foundations for Great John’s ambitious land acquisition program. Mathis schooners, one of which was captained by his son Daniel, engaged in the West Indies trade, swapping South Jersey lumber for produce and other goods that enabled the Mathis farms to prosper. By the time of the Revolution he had four farms in operation containing about 5000 acres, which were worked and cleared by slaves. Was said to be an extensive slave holder and one of the earliest merchant smugglers. He became one of the largest land holders and one of the wealthiest and most distinguished men of Little Egg Harbor.

John Mathis’s son (Mordecai’s grandson) Micajah was disowned by Friends for refusing to emancipate the family’s enslaved Africans (he “did not then coincide with the rest of his society” when it finally adopted an antislavery stance in the 1770s). He must have recalculated his options by the time New Jersey started abolishing slavery and repented and manumitted everyone in time to be buried in the meetinghouse cemetery, natch.

All-in-all, it’s weird how so many local histories paint early settlers were like some kind of Ingalls-family subsistence farmers, living in caves and eking out hardscrabble lives in the wilderness. I’m sure there were rough patches, and don’t get me wrong: I like my hot shower in the morning and wouldn’t want to swap lifestyles outside of a few camping weekends a year. But in many cases these families planted themselves in abandoned Lenape towns connected by well-established Lenape trails with water access to international trade, amassed title to hundreds of acres of land because plagues and wars had decimated the locals, exploited non-renewable resources like thousand-year-old forests that were only now accessible because of enslaved labor brought from 4,000 miles away. (I’ve written before about how colonial Quakers made fortunes out of other’s wars.)

Insert record-scratch sound effect: but back to a pleasant early June afternoon. On today’s trip, the newly accessible path of the trail is beautiful and a must-visit trip for any nature-lover in South Jersey.

(Post updated various times as I dug more into the Andrews/Mathis family tree.)

But a big gateway is genealogy. Over the years I’ve gotten countless emails and phone calls from excited newcomers who start off the conversation with details of their family tree (when I used to answer the Quakerbooks phone, I would let these folks go for about two minutes before gently interjecting “wow that’s fascinating!, do you wanna buy a book?!?”)

One fascinating factoid in this week’s QuakerSpeak video comes from Thomas Hamm:

If your family arrived in the United States before 1860, there’s probably a 50–50 chance that you have a Quaker ancestor somewhere.

Quaker Meetings shouldn’t try to be the gathering spots for prodigal family reunions. The early Quakers were strangers to one another, joining together because of the fire of their convictions. Ours is a living, breathing, ever evolving spiritual practice. Still: we are also a grouping of people. We look for belonging.

The longer I’m with Friends, the more I think ours is a religious community that draws strength from the tension of paradoxes. I have a soft spot for the old Quaker families. If Jesus brings some of the new people in through Beliefnet quizzes or Ancestry.com search results, well, maybe that’s okay.

http://quakerspeak.com/how-to-research-your-quaker-ancestry/

So it seems kind of amazing there’s an April issue of Friends Journal. But there is and it’s a good one I think: we look at healing. The cover of new tree leaves backlit by springtime sun is seasonal but it also reflects the topic and our mood after a wintry late winter.

Just a moment…

www.friendsjournal.org

My mother died a few days ago. While I’m overwhelmed with the messages of prayers and condolences, at least at some level it feels like cheating to accept them too fully. This isn’t a new condition. This is just the final moment of a slow-motion death.

A little over five years ago my mother was formally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. It was quite brave of her to get the testing done when she did. This had always been her most-feared scenario for aging. Growing up, we had befriended an active elderly neighbor who had gently died in her sleep after a minor slip on some ice. My mom thought that was the best exit ever. She swore Mrs. Goldsmith had come to her in a dream the next night to congratulate herself, saying “See, I told you I was lucky!” For years afterwards, my mother convinced herself that she would go in a similarly elegant way.

My mom, Liz, must have sensed that Alzheimer’s was a possibility when she scheduled that doctor’s visit. The news didn’t come as much of a surprise to us family. I had been joking for years that my mom seemed to have only twenty stories that she kept on rotation. After she read a study that crossword puzzles keep your brain sharp as we age, she became an obsessive crossword puzzler; when the Sudoku craze hit, she was right on top of it. She had bravely bought her first house in her late 60s. How proud she was. At the time she let us all know, repeatedly, that she would be leaving it “in a box.” Caulking trim, replacing windows, and troubleshooting a mud room leak that defied a dozen contractors became her occupation, along with volunteering and watching grandkids. But by 2010, she must have known she wasn’t going to have Mrs. Goldsmith’s luck. It was time to adjust.

When she called to tell me the diagnosis, she couldn’t even use the A‑word. She told me her “brain was dying” and that the doctor was putting her on Aricept. A quick Google search confirmed this was an Alzheimer’s drug and a call with the doctor later that afternoon helped map out the road ahead.

Alzheimer’s is a slow-motion death. She’s been disappearing from us for a long while. Regular outings became less frequent till we couldn’t even take her out to a nearby restaurant for her birthday. As words disappeared and speech began faltering, I’d show her recent kid photos on my phone and tell stories to fill the emptying space. Eventually she stopped showing interest even in this. On my last regular visit with her, I brought the kids and we had lots of fun taking pictures. Mom kept pointing out at the phone’s display as if it were a mirror. But conversation was too disjointed and after a few minutes, my kids started wandering in ever widening circles looking for interesting buttons and alarms to touch and pull and I had to round them up to leave.

In the past few weeks her forgetfulness has extended to eating and swallowing. Intervention would only buy a little more time until she forgot how to breathe. Alzheimer’s is a one way trip.

On my last few visits she was mostly sleeping. She’s was calm, preternaturally calm. Lying on her back, pale and peaceful, she looked as if she might already be a body resting in a casket. Only the slight rise of sheets as she breathed gave away the news that she was still with us, if barely. I felt awkward just sitting there. Some people are good in these kinds of situations, but I self-consciously struggle. With little chance of interaction, I struck on the idea of reading from a favorite book of poems that she had read to me on countless nights as a child.  “Up into the cherry tree, who should climb but little me?” I don’t know if she heard me or pictured the cherry tree in her haze, but it was a way for us to be together.

The slow-motion nature of Alzheimer’s means she slept a lot until she didn’t. For reasons that go deep into biography, she was a wonderfully friendly person who didn’t have a lot of close friends anymore. It seems peculiar that one can walk upon the earth for so many decades and only have a dozen or so people notice your departure. But then maybe that’s the norm for those who live deep into their eighties. Most of us will leave life with the same kind of quiet ripples with which we entered.

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Friends traditionally have lumped Christmas in with all of the other ritualistic boo-ha that mainstream Christians practice. These are outward elements that should be abandoned now that we know Christ has come to teach the people himself and is present and available to all of us at all times. Outward baptism, communion, planned sermons, paid ministers, Christmas and Easter: all distractions from true Christian religion, from primitive Chritianity revived.

One confusion that arises in liberal meetings this time of year is that it’s assumed it’s the Christian Friends who want the Christmas tree. Arguments sometime break out with “hyphenated” Friends who feel uncomfortable with the tree: folks who consider themselves Friends but also Pagan, Nontheistic, or Jewish and wonder why they’re having Christianity forced on them. But those of us who follow what we might call the “Christian tradition as understood by Friends” should be just as put out by a Christmas tree and party. We know that symbolic rituals like these spark disunity and distract us from the real purpose of our community: befriending Christ and listening for His guidance.

I was shocked and startled when I first learned that Quaker schools used to meet on Christmas day. My first response was “oh come on, that’s taking it all too far.” But it kept bugging me and I kept trying to understand it. This was one of the pieces that helped me understand the Quaker way better and I finally grew to understand the rationale. If Friends were more consistent with more-or-less symbolic stuff like Christmas, it would be easier to teach Quakerism.

I don’t mind Christmas trees, per se. I have one in my living room. In my extended family Christmas has served as one of the mandatory times of year we all have to show up together for dinner. It’s never been very religious, so I never felt I needed to stop the practice when I became involved with Friends. But as a Friend I’m careful not to pretend that the consumerism and social rituals have much to do with Christ. Christmas trees are pretty. The lights make me feel good in the doldrums of mid-winter. That’s reason enough to put one up.

Unprogrammed liberal Friends could use the tensions between traditional Quakerly stoicism and mainstream Christian nostalgia as a teaching moment, and we could use discomfort around the ritual of Christmas as a point of unity and dialog with Pagan, Jewish and Non-theistic Friends. Christian Friends are always having to explain how we’re not the kind of Christians others assume we are (others both within and outside the Society). Being principled about Christmas is one way of showing that difference. People will surely say “oh come on,” but so what? A lot of spiritual seekers are critical of the kind of crazy commercial spending sprees that marked Christmases past and I don’t see why a group saying Christmas isn’t about Christ would be at a particular disadvantage during this first Christmas season of the next Great Depression.

I’ve been talking about liberal unprogrammed Friends. For the record, I understand Christmas celebrations among “pastoral” and/or “programmed” Friends. They’ve made a conscious decision to adopt a more mainstream Christian approach to religious education and ministry. That’s fine. It’s not the kind of Quaker I practice, but they’re open about their approach and Christmas makes sense in that context.

Whenever I post this kind of stuff on my blog I get comments how I’m being too Scroogey. Well I guess I am. Bah Humbug. Honestly though, I’ve always like Quaker Christmas parties. They’re a way of mixing things up, a way of coming together as a community in a warmer way that we usually do. People stop confabbing about committee questions and actually enjoy one another’s company. One time I asked my meeting to call it the Day the World Calls Christmas Party, which I thought was kind of clever (everyone else surely thought “there goes Martin again”). The joy of real community that is filled once a year at our Christmas parties might be symptom of a hunger to be a different kind of community every week, even every day.