Ed Fox was whittling an axe handle on his front porch when a stranger walked by on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Edward D. Fox whittles down an ax handle which started from a solid piece of birch. He uses three tools to do the job: a large buck- knife, file and a piece of broken glass. Using a template sketched out on a thin piece of birch, he uses his knife to shape the wood, then a file to round off the shape and then scrapes piece of glass to smooth the handle out.

"Come on over and set a spell," he called out. It didn't take any more coaxing. I had walked 18 miles - including five in the wrong direction - and was ready for a break.

So I just sat beside Ed and learned things that city boys hardly ever learn. Not many city kids know that hickory is the best wood for axe handles and just about anything that you want to keep for a long time.

"Hickory is the strongest wood there is," Ed said as he whittled away. "The Amish use it for chairs and baskets and stuff like that. If you can make a pack basket (back pack) out of that, it will last forever."

I met Ed (Edward D. Fox - there's another Ed Fox nearby) just outside Hazel Hurst, one of the many tiny towns in the northern Pennsylvania Hills. He's been working on this axe for about two weeks, off and on.

He found the blade, cleaned it and sharpened it. Now he's nearly done with the handle. It's an impressive tool, and heavy as all get-out. It has to be heavy because Ed uses it as a hammer when he's hunting, even though he's getting a little old for hunting.
"At 84, about all I can do is whittle," he said. Oh, he still catches a wild critter every once in a while. And he still owns a little feed store next to his house. But life isn't what it used to be.

Once, Ed operated a farm and raised a family on this land. He did that while he was working for the state highway department.

Before that, Ed worked in the oilfields in Bradford, about 25 miles north.

One of the main historic attractions at the Penn-Brad Oil Museum in Bradfod, PA is this 72 foot high wooden oil rig. It is the last of over 600 of these local rigs from the 1880's used in the local oil fields. The Museum preserves an authentic look at the spirit and accomplishments of the billion dollar oil fields, which put the little town of Bradford, PA as one of the leaders in Pennsylvania Grade Crude Oil.

"I worked for Tidewater Oil. I did everything. I was a roustabout (general worker), a pumper, a tool dresser, a driller. Then the fields all went to hell," he said.

According to Ed, some "experts" pumped water into the ground to force the oil out more quickly. It worked for a while, but soon the fields were flooded and useless.

Not everyone around here agrees with that assessment, but Ed didn't strike me as the type to worry about what others think.

In fact, the only time he seemed to have second thoughts was when I asked him about his family. He has children who live nearby, but one of his daughters died before she was twenty-five.

Ed mentioned her. Then he stopped. He had to compose himself. Old curmudgeons aren't supposed to get weepy. He went on, but he didn't have the same enthusiasm.

I guess that's what losing a child does, you go on but it's not the same.

OIL

Edwin Drake drilled the nation's first oil well nearly 150 years ago in Titusville, on the western side of what is now the Allegheny National Forest. But Drake's well produced only a trickle compared to the oil that was later pumped from the wells around Bradford, on the eastern side of the forest.

Commercial drillers flocked to Bradford, making it the nation's oil capital. There were 90,000 active wells in and around Bradford at the turn of the century. There were wells everywhere - on farms, in backyards, even in graveyards.

Pennzoil, Quaker State and Kendall all got their start here.
In one year, 85 percent of the nation's oil production came from the Bradford fields. Even though larger fields were discovered elsewhere, Bradford remained an oil hub because it's oil was rich in paraffin, an ideal lubricant.

The oil was trapped in small veins in sand more than 1,000 feet deep. Drilling rigs dotted the area. Inside the rig, heavy drills were raised 72 feet high and dropped to create and deepen the well. Later, heavy explosives packed into the hole would help free the oil.

For oil workers like Jim Bryner this was a good job.

Surrounded by historic tools of the trade, oil veteran Jim Bryner of Bradford, PA enlightens us with historic stories and personal experiences of the miracle molecule found in Pennsylvania oil fields.

"It would be considered dangerous today, but we didn't think of it that way," said Jim, who worked in the Bradford fields during the depression.

The standard pay was $122.50 a month, a nice wage back then.

"We thought it was a great job; we were out in the open air. We had a lot of pride in what we did," Jim said.

Perhaps it was a great job in the summer, but even Jim didn't care for the winters.

"I can remember when it was 40-degrees below - and you didn't stop because of the weather," he said.

These days, Jim is a guide at the Penn-Brad Oil Museum, a great little exhibit just outside Bradford. Here, you can take a short tour inside an old drilling rig. That's nice, but having someone who actually did the work as your guide makes it a lot better.

There are still a number of active oil wells in the Bradford area and people around here say the high price of oil is luring the independents back to the fields.

ZIPPO

Bradford's biggest private employer now is Zippo lighters. You'd think with smoking on the decline, that Zippo would be in trouble.

But rugged flip-top lighters have become a collector's item - and Zippo has been marketing them that way for decades. In the 50s, the lighters featured pictures of Bobby Soxers (ask your grandparents, kids.) In the 60s, they featured a Space Launch and Kitten Chow, one of what would become scads of product tie-ins.

Bradford, PA is the home of the Zippo Museum and manufacturer of Zippo lighters and Case knives. Atop of the Museum (and every lightpost) are large replicas of Zippo lighters which attract passing visitors.

The lighters have featured smiley faces, sports teams, airplanes, cars, cops, firefighters, ironworkers, ducks, dogs, and just about every hobby imaginable. You name it - Zippo probably has it.

But what really makes the Zippo special is it's place of honor among servicemen and women. If you were in the trenches in World War II, Korea or Viet Nam, you probably smoked and you almost certainly used a Zippo at one time or another.

This was the lighter that was passed around from buddy to buddy in the foxhole. And if you were lucky enough to return home, that lighter was your connection with those who didn't.

In Viet Nam, the lighters carried the history of a soldier's travels. They were inscribed with the names of battles or places where the owner was deployed.

Trench artists drew ships, soldiers, maps, insignias and other memories on the lighters. You can see some of them at the company's museum in Bradford. It's free, but there's a large gift shop, so bring money. Travis bought a lighter - and he doesn't smoke. It's all for a good cause - keeping the fine folks of Bradford employed.

Theresa White who lives in California, was visiting the museum last week while her dad, a Bradford native, was in town for family business.

"I've wanted to come here for a long time. Half our family worked here at one time or another," she said.

RAIN, RAIN

It was a wet week in northern Pennsylvania. The area went through nearly a decade of drought, but the past two years have turned the other way.

That's what Oakley Colley told me as he surveyed his property after a flash thunderstorm dumped inches of rain in just a few hours.

Oakley, his wife and children were pulling rocks and muck from a clogged culvert west of Smethport when I passed by. The water that should have gone through the culvert washed down his driveway.

"I lost about seven ton of gravel last night. I shouldn't have to worry about this," Oakley said, noting that a logging operation higher on the hill contributed to his problems.

In East Smethport, Robert Dunn was shoveling a thick layer of mud and rock off his sidewalk as though it were snow. The rain had washed roadside gravel down Route 6 and onto property at the bottom of the hill.

"It was a hell of storm," Bob said. "They even had the snow plows out last night, plowing the dirt and water off the road."

Bob hadn't seen it this bad since he bought the house just after Potato Creek flooded in 1972.

About a half-mile down the road, Route 6 passes over Potato Creek, just after it merges with Marvin Creek. The river was running so fast that you could get dizzy looking straight down into the muddy brown water.

Alongside the creek, Walter Arthur and Joshua James were working on a pickup truck. Walter has had a rough go of it lately, with diabetes and a blood clot that put him in the hospital. He's recuperating now, but he had enough compassion to think about someone else when he saw me without a raincoat (I forgot it) on a day when another storm was in the air.

"Here, I don't have much, but take this," he said, handing me a dollar bill and small emergency poncho in a pouch.

Things like that aren't unusual around here. I get offers of rides nearly every day. Today, a woman gave me $10, saying she couldn't treat me to dinner, but she wanted to pay for the meal.

People here don't have much. There's not much steady work. You pass through the towns and you think you've returned to the 50s -- and, in some of them, you see a lot of vacant storefronts.
But don't think these folks aren't as good as their more wealthy cousins in the cities and suburbs.

They just might be better.

HILLS

I walked from Galeton in the center of the north country to Warren on the eastern side of Allegheny Forest. It's pretty, but very hilly. The stretch from Port Allegany (yes, that's the way they spell it) to Smethport (home of the original Christmas store) was perhaps the roughest, with a series of short but steep hills that never seemed to end.

19 year old Rob Brown and 16 year old Carol Dorward of Smethport, PA are taking a break in downtown Smethport on a quiet Sunday afternoon. For a small, quiet community they may look different, but everyone knows them as just two local boys who like to express themselves. The local kids suggested the need of a skate park so they wouldn't get in trouble, occupying the main sidewalks, so with their parents and local borough support, they held a local "walk-a-thon" which raise enough money for the town to build their small skate park.

Then it got worse. I missed a turn Smethport and walked five miles in the wrong direction - most of it up a nasty hill. After a number of vile curses, I called Travis, who drove me back to turn I should have made. I've been recovering a little each day since then. We're now about three miles behind our Pennsylvania schedule.

Earlier, on notoriously long Denton Hill west of Galeton, I met Christl Hoffert, who was also walking up the hill.

"I like the exercise," she said, making me feel pretty wimpy for trudging up the hill as though it were Mount Everest. But it turned out that she was only walking a short distance. (Hah! I'm tougher than her.)

Christl and her husband have a cabin on the hill. They're here this week for some family time with their son, who's scheduled for a tour in Iraq next month.

"Here, it's so easy to forget everything," said Christl, who hopes to move here permanently some day.

One of the things Christl would like to forget - actually erase - is her son's experience with the Marines.
"We're not happy about that," she said, adding that the Marines told her son that he wouldn't be shipped to Iraq when he joined a year ago. They told him he could change his mind, but when he did change his mind, they said he couldn't, she said.

"He went to cooking school, now they've got him in the infantry," she said. "If we could hide him away and put him someplace else..." she said, leaving the thought unfinished.
Wouldn't it be nice if the old men (and women) who make the wars, were the first to go out and get shot at. I bet we'd have fewer wars.

A GEOGRAPHIC TRIPLE PLAY

Denton Hill is just 2,500 feet high, but it's the only triple continental divide east of the Mississippi. The summit gives rise to Allegheny River, which flows west to the Mississippi and eventually to the Gulf of Mexico.

On July 21, 2003 a tornado struck the 121 year old Kinzua Viaduct in Mt. Jewett, PA which soars 301 feet high and stretches 2,053 feet across, which made it the longest railroad bridge in the world. Engineers and workers were in the process of rehabilitating the old bridge when the tornado struck. 11 of the middle towers were ripped away and are now scattering the landscape with huge metal debris.