80s Flashback Time

November 10, 2016

11/10/2016 · Martin Kelley

Some of my younger friends are freaking out about Trump, wondering how we’ll get through his presidency. For those of us of a certain age though this is deja vu, a return to the days of Ronald Reagan. Though many people lionize him in retrospect, he was a train wreck through and through.

I was young when he came into office and my only memory of his first term is being interrupted in gym class to an announcement he had been shot in an assassination attempt. My first inkling of him as a politician came from a high school social studies teacher Roy Buri who constantly made fun of Reagan’s statements and policies. I laughed at Buri’s characterizations but I also began to internalized them. He was a legend at the school and had reportedly provided a safe haven in the 1970s for students organizing against the Vietnam War. Retro bonus: he even looked a bit like Bernie Sanders!

When I graduated and moved onto a mostly conservative college, I would stay late at nights in a basement lounge talking with friends in about how we could deal with the era we were living. I remember an epiphany that even though the media were telling us to believe certain things because that was the mainstream national discourse, we didn’t have to. We could be independent in our actions and convictions. Yes, that seems obvious now but it was a major realization then.

So what did we do? We protested. We spoke out. We knew government wasn’t on our side. For those losing friends to AIDS, there was deep mourning and righteous anger. There was a melancholy. A lot of my world felt underground and gritty. I started writing, editing a underground weekly paper on campus (really the start of my career). I figured out that the geography department was full of lefties and spent enough time there to earn a minor. Most of all, I worked to de-normalize the Reagan and Bush St Administrations – the deep corruption of many of its officials and the heartlessness of its policies.

The PTSD of the suburban drone warrior

June 16, 2015

06/16/201506/16/2015 · Martin Kelley

Something I’ve long wondered a lot about, As Stress Drives Off Drone Operators, Air Force Must Cut Flights.:

What had seemed to be a benefit of the job, the novel way that the crews could fly Predator and Reaper drones via satellite links while living safely in the United States with their families, has created new types of stresses as they constantly shift back and forth between war and family activities and become, in effect, perpetually deployed.

I mention this toward the end of my review of The Burglary, the story of the 1971 antiwar activists, and it’s something I’ve been trying to pull from potential authors as we’ve put together an August Friends Journal issue on war. Much of the day-to-day mechanics of war has changed drastically in the past 40 years — at least for American soldiers.

We have stories like this one from the NYTimes: drone operators in suburban U.S. campuses killing people on the other side of the planet. But soldiers in Baghdad have good cell phone coverage, watch Netflix, and live in air conditioned barracks. The rise of contractors means that most of the grunt work of war — fixing trucks, peeling potatoes — is done by nearly invisible non-soldiers who are living in these war zones. It must be nice to have creature comforts but I’d imagine it could make for new problems psychologically integrating a war zone with normalcy.

So why is Pea Patch Island (supposedly) owned by Delaware?

September 8, 2014

09/08/201407/02/2015 · Martin Kelley

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How did a sandbar halfway between New Jersey and Delaware become the property of one state and not the other?

The British royal government was notoriously sloppy in its awarding of land grants in its colonies. There’s a lot of boundary ambiguity and overlapping claims. With American independence, the task for refereeing fell to the new federal government.

The specific problem of Pea Patch was as young as the nation itself. According to testimony recorded in the 1837 records of the U.S. Senate, Pea Patch was formed around the time of the American Revolution when a ship loaded with peas reportedly sunk there (smells of a tall tale to me but I’ll let it stand). Alluvial deposits formed a sandbank around the wreck and it eventually coalesced into a full-fledged island.

When claims overlap on an island in the middle of a boundary river, it’s typical to look at two measures: the first and most obvious is to see if it’s closer to one side’s riverbank. The other is to look at shipping channels and use this as a de facto boundary. According the the Senate testimony, Pea Patch Island is both closer to New Jersey and on the New Jersey side of the early nineteenth-century shipping channel.

There’s also human factors to consider: according to testimony in the Congressional Record the island was generally considered a part of N.J.‘s Salem County through the early nineteenth century. In 1813, New Jersey resident Henry Gale bought Pea Patch Island and began developing fisheries on it. New Jersey formally minuted the island as his property, confirming the land deeds and giving it to his “heirs and assigns for ever [sic].”

State ownership of Pea Patch would seem to be a pretty straight-forward decision then: geographically New Jersey’s, culturally a part of Salem County, and owned by a South Jersey businessperson.

Unfortunately for Gale, the federal government thought it was a good strategic location for a new fort. They offered him $30,000 but he didn’t think it was a fair price. They didn’t want to negotiate and so made a side deal with the State of Delaware. They decided the state boundary line should be drawn to the east of the island to make it a part of Delaware. The state declared Henry Gale a squatter and gave full ownership of the island to the U.S. War Department. Gale was forcibly evicted, his buildings demolished, his fishery business ruined. It doesn’t take a conspiracist to imagine that the Congressional Delaware delegation got something nice for their participation in this ruse.

(Later on, continuing boundary disputes between the two states led to the truly-bizarre geographic oddity that is the 12-Mile Circle. Anything built off the New Jersey coast into the Delaware River is Delaware’s. This still regularly sparks lawsuits between the states. If you could get behind the scenes I imagine you could set a whole Boardwalk-Empire-like show in the Delaware land grant office.)

A century and a half later the crumbling ruins of Fort Delaware would come under the administration of the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control. The DNERC folks do a great job running Fort Delaware. When reading up on this I was surprised to find Henry Gale’s name. My wife’s family has Salem County Gales so Henry is at least some sort of distant cousin of my kids. I think Delaware should give us a special toot on the ferry horn every time they land back on the soil of their ancestral home.

Three-fort touring

September 1, 2014

09/01/201410/05/2018 · Martin Kelley

Here comes the ferry boat

Getting closer.

The family enjoys the windy ride.

But first, some good food.

Ice cream is never a bad idea.

It’s a long walk

A long walk but there are flowers.

Finally, we’re beat. Everyone lays out under a tree before embarking on the next mile hike.

Some cool older buildings

A pretty field

Some crumbling ruins.

Stairs to gun mounts.

Finally back out of the weeds.

Gun at Fort Delaware.

Hmmm…, this is all built on a sandbar.

Dark-lit rounded stairwells.

Family shot atop one of the ramparts.

Good view inside.

Waiting for the boat, storm clouds appear.

Getting closer.

Lots of birds on the dock

Stormy marshland.

Hello Delaware.

The three-fort tour from Ft Mott near Salem, New Jersey, to Ft Delaware on Pea Patch Island (de facto Delaware), to Delaware City, Delaware and adjacent Ft DuPont.

A few weeks ago Yummygal at Southjerseyexplorer.com wrote up a trip report on The Three Forts Ferry Tour. It didn’t take more than two minutes of texts before my wife and I decided we would recreate this.

It’s wasn’t so easy at first. I spent way too long on the park system’s website trying to figure out how to board the ferry at Ft Mott on the New Jersey side. Every option I tried had me board in nearby Salem, N.J. It wasn’t till I was home that I read that the Ft Mott stop had been out of commission until early this summer because of Sandy and that Salem had been the alternate boarding location. The website hadn’t been updated.

Once we got to the dock we saw there was no ticket kiosk. Once the ferry came in we found they couldn’t swipe a credit card onboard (really? can’t any modern smartphone handle that?, but I digress…). The only place they could handle a credit card was the far end, in Delaware City. We’d have to dock on Fort Delaware/Pea Patch Island but stay in the boat and continue to this city. We’d hadn’t even really planned to necessarily go to Delaware City but we ended up spending much of our day there.

Delaware City was a small port town whose claim to fame was its location as the eastern terminus of the original nineteenth century Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. The modern canal bypasses it a few miles to the south, so Delaware City is a bit frozen in time.

First stop: Crabby Dick’s, one of three eateries recommended to us (the others being a pub and an Italian restaurant). Being a vegetarian I don’t get into this sort of a restaurant very often but they had veggie burgers and creative sweet fries (cinnamon-covered with an apple butter dip – yum!). Luckily it was nearly empty around noon in a Sunday so our troublemaking kids didn’t cause too much commotion.

Next door was a small ice cream shop. The temperatures were in the 90s so this was an obvious stop.

What we should have done next is wander the town until the next ferry to Pea Patch Island and its fort. One of our party was determined to see all three forts so we set out for Ft DuPont. It’s adjacent to Delaware City’s dock and downtown as the crow flies. But we aren’t crows, or fish. DuPont’s on the other side of the old canal. You have to walk about a mile to the first bridge that crosses it, a rickety one at that, then make a sharp left to travel in the same direction you had just come from, only on the canal’s south side.

There’s no signs for the fort. Even Yummygirl had gotten lost on her trip so I knew to rely on my phone’s maps. Most of Ft DuPont’s acreage is a large campus dotted with an odd assortment of run-down early twentieth century military buildings surrounding an old parade field. The camp had been a major deployment center during WW II and had also served as a POW camp for Germans. The state’s been trying to repurpose it in recent years but it’s an odd assortment of halfway house services and national guard associations, stuck in between crumbling buildings that will never find a new role.

At the far end of all this a nature trail going through what remains of the nineteenth century Ft DuPont. Walking it is a bit like touring a jungle-covered Aztec city: every so often a ruin sticks out of the trees and tangled vines. It’s an interesting-enough trail but not worth a four mile round-trip hike with four kids in 90 degree heat. We were able to beg a ride back from a park ranger finishing her shift thank goodness but much of our day was sitting under trees drinking the last of our water.

Back at the Delaware City ferry office, we bought a small fortune of water from the vending machine till the next (and final) boat to Pea Patch Island. This is typically the destination of the tourists but by this time we only had about 45 minutes before the last boat from the island to Jersey. We had an extra half hour as the boat waited in dock for a spectacular storm to pass over the river.

We’ll definitely return but probably skip Delaware City except for possibly a meal.

Links:

Ft Delaware ferry info (and on Wikipedia)
News story on the Ft Mott dock reopening
Fort Delaware, Confederate Hellhole on Roadside America
Yummygal’s trip report

Why I’m fasting with @eqat against mountaintop mining

March 23, 2013

03/23/201303/23/2013 · Martin Kelley

On March 22nd, I joined the fast against mountaintop coal mining called by the Earth Quaker Action Team.

When I was growing up we’d make the trip from Philadelphia to my grandmother’s house a couple of times a year. As we headed north, the highway threaded across farm fields and through rock cuts in the hills. About an hour in, we’d start noticing the thin blue band on the horizon. It would slowly get larger and larger until Blue Mountain loomed in front of us and we whooshed into Lehigh Tunnel.

My Nana lived on the other side of that mountain. On this side the mountainside was red. The forests that carpeted the rest of the thousand-mile ridge had been ripped up by the decades of chemicals pouring out if the smokestacks of the giant zinc processing factories that bookended the town of Palmerton.

When conversation turned to adult matters, I’d wander to the back porch and count the dirt bike trails going up the barren mountain. When I tired of that I’d play in the stones of my grandmother’s backyard. Even grass didn’t grow in this town. Ambitious homeowners would sometimes make rock gardens for the space in front of each house that had been designed for marigolds, but most of the town had gotten used to the absence of green. When the EPA finally got around to declaring the mountain a superfund site we all snorted dismissively. My grandmother was actually offended, having long ago convinced herself that the factory effusions must be healthy.

The Palmerton factories were funded by New York bankers. Princeton University got multiple multimillion-dollar bequests in the wills of the founders of the zinc company. I’m sure there are still a few residual trust funds paying out dividends.

Today we have Philadelphia and Pittsburgh bankers orchestrating the removal of the mountaintops in West Virginia. As our technology has improved so has our capacity for ill-considered mass destruction of our natural surroundings.

All living creatures have an impact on their surroundings. My comforts rely on the coal, oil, and natural gas that are brought into our cities and towns. But I do know we can do better. I’m optimistic enough to can find ways to live together on this Earth that don’t break our mountains or poison our neighbors.

Photo: “Old Zinc Factory; Palmerton” by road_less_trvled on Flickr (creative commons license)

Spiritual Biodiversity and Religious Inevitability

August 2, 2011

08/02/201107/30/2015 · Martin Kelley

People sometimes get pretty worked up about convincing each other of an matter of pressing importance. We think we have The Answer about The Issue and that if we just repeat ourselves loud enough and often enough the obviousness of our position will win out. It becomes our duty, in fact, to repeat it loud and often. If we happen to wear down the opposition so much that they withdraw from our companionship or fellowship, all the better, as we’ve achieved a patina of unity. Religious liberals are just as prone to this as the conservatives.

These are not the values we hold when talking about the natural world. There we talk about biodiversity. We don’t cheer when a species maladapted to the human-driven Anthropocene disappears into extinction. Just because a plant or animal from the other side of the world has no natural predators doesn’t mean our local species should be superseded.

Scientists tell us that biodiversity is not just a kind of do-unto-others value that satisfies our sense of nostalgia; having wide gene pools comes in handy when near-instant adaptation is needed in response to massive habitat stress. Monocrops are good for the annual harvest but leave us especially vulnerable when phytophthora infestans comes ashore.

It’s a good thing for different religious groups to have different values, both from us us and from one another. There are pressures in today’s culture to level all of our distinctives down so that we have no unique identity. Some cheer this monocropping of spirituality, but I’m not sure it’s healthy for human race. If our religious values are somehow truer or more valuable than those of other people, then they will eventually spread themselves – not by pushing other bodies to be like us, but by attracting the members of the other bodies to join with us.

God may have purpose in fellowships that act differently that ours. Let us not get too smug about our own inevitability that we forget to share ourselves with those with whom we differ.

Focused blogs and side trips

November 23, 2007

11/23/200702/19/2012 · Martin Kelley

Over on Eileen Flanagan’s Imperfect Serenity, there’s an interesting post on blog publicity, “Blogging dilemmas,” inspired in part by Robin M“ ‘s recent “How did you get here?” post. Both bring up interesting questions about the role of blogs in community building and the location of that line that separates good blogging from mere self-promotion and pandering.

Readers will probably be unsurprised to learn that I use Technorati, Google Blog Search, etc., every day to keep track of the Quaker blogosphere. I act as a kind of community organizer and my searches are for interesting posts talking about Quakers (until reading Eileen’s post I hadn’t check my Technorati “rank” in months). Many people’s first introduction to QuakerQuaker.org is getting linked from it, and I suspect I’ve accidentally outed a few beginning bloggers who hadn’t told anyone of their new blog!

I have a professional blog on web design and analytics (with a somewhat off-topic but satisfying post on top at the moment) and separating that out has allowed me to use this personal blog, QuakerRanter, for whatever I like. Most regularly readers would say it focuses on Quakerism and cute kid pictures and while those are the most common posts, the most read posts are the minor fascinations I indulge myself with occasionally. Quaker plain dress is something I practice but don’t think about most of the time (806 readers in past month). My wife and I love to bust on bad baby names and unfairly unpopular baby names (627 visits). I’ve also detailed some outings to semi-legendary South Jersey haunts (317) and score high on searches to them.

The conventional wisdom of the blog-as-publicity tool crowd would probably say these off-topic posts are distracting my core audience. Perhaps, but they’re infrequent on the blog and long-lived on Google. Besides, I think it helps people to know I’m not just obsessed with one topic. Being a part of a real community means knowing each other in all of our quirks. I’m more tender and forgiving of other Quaker bloggers when I know more of their story: it puts what they say into a context that makes it sound more lived, less ideological. There’s certainly good reasons for tightly-focused professional blogs (I’d drop Techcrunch from my blogroll if they started posting kids pictures!), but as more people read posts through feeds and aggregators I wonder if there’s going to be as much pressure for personal, community-oriented blogs to be as single-minded in their focus.

We all have diverse, quirky interests so why not indulge them? I have seen blogs that try too hard to pander to particular audiences and boy, are they boring! A certain degree of idiosyncrasy and subjective orneriness is probably essential. Personality is at least as important as focus.

PS: I’m also interested in making sure I don’t loose the core audience with all my side trips, hence the “latest Quaker posts” at the top of the page. I have at least one request for a Quaker-only RSS feed and will eventually get that going.
PPS: As if on queue, the next post in Google Reader after Eileen’s is Avinish Kaushik’s Blog Metrics: Six recommendations for measuring your success. Parts of it are probably a bit technical for most QR readers but it’s useful for thinking about blogs as outreach.

An Autumnal Halloween

October 29, 2007

10/29/200702/19/2012 · Martin Kelley

The Batsto Village Halloween party wasn’t quite so much fun this year: their website didn’t mention that most activities ended part-way through the afternoon so that the organizers could sit in front of the old houses giving out candy. We arrived on the late side so no face painting or pony rides for the ~~boys~~ butterflies. We still had fun in the first really autumn day of the season and Batsto was looking more bucolic than ever. More pictures (including some of the cool gearing in the old Batsto gristmill) over on yesterday’s Flickr page.

Right: rare video footage of a Genus Franciscus Butterfly in migration.

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