We just returned from a trip to Meadville, PA where my wife celebrated her 50th High School class reunion. Actually, it was a trip into the past! Only her classmates have gotten old!

 

Many of the roads around Meadville are not paved and our car was soon covered with dust. We stayed with friends whose telephone line is little different from 50 years ago. They do have Internet, but it takes several minutes to download an email that has no attachments. A simple photo takes half an hour. There is no such thing as cable or broadband where they live, so I didn't watch TV and was not online for ten days -- and I didn't even miss it.

 

Other than these little inconveniences, life in the 50's was great! We took walks through the woods and fields, picking berries where it is so quiet you can hear butterflies flapping their wings. One evening we counted 7 deer grazing near the woods - all of them bucks! In a few weeks their velvety antlers will be grown and hardened and they will fall in love. Then they won't be so nice to each other! Lightning bugs near the ground blend with the stars in the clear sky.  We couldn't count all the groundhogs and no one complains if you shoot them -- some cars even swerve to hit them! Raccoons are also very numerous and we saw where a bear had marked its territory by scarring a tree with it's claws.

 

Not far from Meadville, we watched people feeding bread to the huge fish at the Pymatuming Lake spillway just like they have been doing since the early 30s. Ducks and geese can be seen actually walking on the backs of fish, hoping to snatch a few crumbs. Politicians and environmentalists have decided to put an end to this practice on January 1, 2009. They want visitors to buy fish food from them.

 

The Class of '58 was the last class to graduate from the old Meadville High School, so we took a tour of the building which has since been tastefully converted to apartments and commercial offices. We also visited the football stadium that has artificial turf. I asked if it contained lead but nobody knew or cared. 1958 was the last year the Meadville Bulldogs had a perfect 10-0 winning season.

 

We bought lunch at Eddie's Foot-Long, which has been around for 61 years and got our desert at Hank's ice cream, which has also existed since the early 50s. We traveled to all these places on yellow school busses that had no AC or seat belts -- just like 50 years ago. Saturday night after getting the class picture taken, we had a delicious meal in a restaurant on Conneaut Lake -- managed by a classmate. A band played and sang 50's music to which some of the forever young members of the class jitterbugged, rocked and rolled.

 

Now we have returned to the 21st century. There are mountains of washing to do and 70+ emails screaming for our attention. The car needs a tune-up and the tank is empty again!

 

It's difficult to believe that all this hectic began 150 years ago right there in the paradise where we stayed last week! In 1859, Edwin Drake drilled the world’s first oil well, leading to a boom that surpassed the “California Gold rush” ten years earlier.

 

Like the area around Drake's Well, the region of Sutter's Mill is also a quiet paradise today. There are 180 species of birds, black-tailed deer, wild turkey, coyote, fox, and even mountain lions. 

 

What will New Jersey be like in another 100 years?!