Six weeks and counting

Huntingdon is my hometown; I was born and raised here. I graduated from Huntingdon High School in 1996 in a class of 148. I left to go to school at Lebanon Valley College, a private liberal arts college about 120 miles east of Huntingdon in Annville, PA. After living there for seven years, I moved to Boston in 2003, waited tables, bartended and wrote for a couple newspapers outside the city. I swept back into Huntingdon in November to save up money for this trip this summer. Boston is an expensive town, and I miss it a lot, but as a writer, I wasn't saving a whole lot there.

Huntingdon is a small borough of about 6,900 people in Central Pennsylvania. It was a stop on a canal system that stretched across the state, and a stop on a railroad line running from Philly through Harrisburg to Altoona. The canal has long been filled and the railroad mostly carries freight now and doesn't stop. There is a small liberal arts college, Juniata College, that shares its name with the river that cradles Huntingdon to the west and south. Juniata means "people of the standing stone" in a language spoken by the Native Americans who inhabited the area before white settlers.

It's not a bad little place, but there isn't much opportunity and the streets completely die by 8 p.m. I'm a night owl, so that doesn't work out very well for me. Pittsburgh is about 120 miles west, Philadelphia is 200 miles east and 2008 is still 25 years away. And it stands in stark contrast to where I've been -- notably Boston -- and where I'm going. It's incredible being in such different places all in a short time.

The economy here is suffering a painfully slow asphyxiation of abandonment. There had been several industrial companies, Owens-Corning Fiberglas among the largest, but most have left or shrunk their operations significantly over the last 25 years. Huntingdon County has been among the counties in the state with the highest unemployment rate. The middle class is small, with a large proportion of the population being working class in industrial, skilled labor or service industry jobs. There are several small industrial companies in the area, though people are driving further and further out of town to work. There has traditionally been a large sector of the economy devoted to crop farming and dairy, though.

The people are mostly white, religious Christian and conservative. I've always had the impression that the area was very racist and closed minded, and there is a lot of that around here, but it's not as prevalent as I thought. People are always surprising me. Most have a high school education. People are very nice and a good many have the helping-hand mentality of small town America, a very different attitude than I got used to in Boston.

As far as things to do around here, the high rate of alcoholism and heroin addiction tells you something. But the forests and the ridges, which crowd the patchwork farmland into meandering valleys, offer loads of trails and great views. The winding country roads are great for driving or biking, and there is boating, swimming and fishing on Raystown Lake, a large man-made serpentine lake formed by the Army Corps of Engineers damming a stream and flooding a valley 35 years ago.

The woods also hold tons of deer, great for hunting in the fall but terrible for driving any other time. Streams and smaller rivers, including the Juniata, have smallmouth bass, largemouth bass, striped bass rock bass, walleye and some trout.

I like visiting, but it isn't a place I want to live or settle in.

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