A neighbor kid, while in conversation a few years ago, had a sudden epihany. "You grew up in the 50s and 60s?" she asked. "Wow! What was it like back then?"

I asked her how kids would respond, thirty years from now, if someone asked them about growing up in the 90s. Centuries ago, people weren't saying, "Great day to be living in Ancient Greece, huh?"

That led to a discussion about how we define words such as "old" and "change."

For example, two thousand years from now, how will critics discuss the "modern" or "post-modern" period when speaking about today's art? If we’re “modern,” what will they be? It's just another expression of our cultural hubris.

It's too easy to think that some things in life last forever. Incorporating local history with geology and landscape study, though, helps us appreciate the role of change in our lives.

You don't necessarily have to like change when it occurs. You're free to believe you're controlling and shaping events to suit your tastes. You can also sit back and amuse yourself as life passes by your doorstep. No matter how you approach life, change is inevitable.

We all try to learn from experience as people pass in and out of our lives. Fires, floods and neglect can destroy cherished buildings. We learn to wean ourselves away from once-mighty industries such as railroads and lumbering. Thriving businesses rarely last more than two or three lifetimes. Just as small town department stores disappeared into oblivion, so malls and mega-marts will go the way of the five-and-dime.

All things must pass. It's part of the cosmic ebb and flow.

Even the mountains that wrap around us like giant wombs are not exempt from change.

This corrugated terrain, what geologists call the Ridge and Valley Province, has not always looked this way. Our current topography is roughly opposite of what it used to be. In a nutshell, these sandstone mountaintops are the remains of ancient valleys. Today's valleys, in turn, occupy spaces once filled by long-extinct mountains.

Check out the Mount Nittany Expressway near Lemont. Or the new interchange below Skytop. Look at the angle, or strike, of the formations around us. We can still see ghostly reminders of an earlier presence. Let your eyes follow the angled uplift of these rocks, and then imagine it in three dimensions. You can immediately see how high those original peaks were. In fact, they once scratched as much of the sky as newer mountains - the Rockies, Alps, the Himalayas and Andes - do today.

According to John McPhee's Annals of the Former World, they all eroded - and still erode - at three inches every thousand years. Formations that resisted wind and water are all that remains.

Central Pennsylvania is the limestone capital of the world. This stuff stretches five miles down beneath our feet. And where there's limestone, there are caves. Penns Valley has plenty: forty-four separate systems at last count.

Several ridges in the region have another set of treasures: quartz crystals. But you don't find them. As our friend, local poet Linda Buchanan, once noted, "They find you."

Road cuts leveling out the distance from point A to point B are extremely revealing. Thanks to earth-moving machinery, our roads can slice through these hillocks and mountains.

Route 45 passes through two mounds east and west of the Woodward Gymnastics Camp. A few patient minutes can yield some interesting impressions of brachiopods and trilobites in the stone. Similar specimens can be found at the abandoned quarry along Route 144 just outside Bellefonte.

Another great spot is east of Lock Haven, where a sheer rock wall rises above the south side of Bald Eagle Creek. No matter how the sun hits the dark gray face, you can still see giant ripple marks frozen in the uppermost layers of mud. Four hundred million years ago, long before these mountains were shoved skyward, this cliff lay flat as the floor of an inland bay. Fossilized chunks of an underwater coral reef still lie scattered at the base.

Early human presence has left behind some interesting clues too.
In the hills between Beaver Stadium and the Mount Nittany Medical Center, Jim Hatch, late anthropology professor at Penn State, once supervised some digs. This was the site where, for thousands of years, Native Americans quarried jasper to fashion spear points and arrowheads.

Not all of this “stone age” technology, thankfully, has been lost. Every June, near Janesville in Clearfield County, the Bald Eagle Flint Knappers Association sponsors excellent outdoor demonstrations of these art forms.

Visiting and poking around all these geological sites is not just an educational experience.

It's free. It's in your own backyard. It humbles your perspective.
And you don't feel so "old."

Bruce Teeple is a free-lance writer, speaker and local historian and is writing a book about Prince Farrington. He lives in Aaronsburg, Centre County and can be reached at mongopawn44@hotmail.com