Weekend travels offer opportunity to savor simplicity

Walt Mills

Early in October, we drove to Clarion for the Autumn Leaf Festival and a football game featuring Clarion University’s Golden Eagles.

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As we drove through the green and gold hills of central Pennsylvania, we might have been traveling in a time machine, as decades of modern life dropped away and we found ourselves slipping into a simpler place and time. When we reached Clarion, we were somewhere around 1954.

Maybe it is only in memory or in old movies that a real golden age exists, when life was less stressful and we were not so filled with anxiety. But Clarion on this day had the feeling of a place stuck in a time it liked and had no desire to leave. The festival had been going on for a week, but this was the culmination — the university’s homecoming parade and then the football game.

Clarion is a familiar place, with a nice main street and a town square with a cannon. The town slopes down to the Clarion River a half mile to the west, and in summer, the river is filled with rubber rafts, canoes and boats.

Our older daughter, who is a sophomore at Clarion, plays every Saturday in the fall in the marching band. Her sister, mother and I were there to see her play. We parked on a residential street above the town and walked down to the square where the food vendors had set up with all the varieties of food that fairs usually have, plus a few I had never seen before.

Large crowds lined the sidewalks for blocks in either direction, and far off we could hear the first sounds of the marching band.

Oh, they were fine, with their faces shining and their uniforms blue and gold, and their instruments

bright and brassy, the pounding of the

drums as the drum line passed and the drum majors strutting and the flutes trilling.

We watched them out of sight, and then the next band appeared, and then a dozen bands from high schools we had never heard of from towns too far away and small to be known.

It was quite a parade — not just one contingent of Shriners on go-carts, but three — and homecoming floats, and pretty girls waving from open convertibles, and politicians jumping out of their moving vehicles to shake hands in the crowd, stilt walkers and clowns, little girls throwing batons, everyone tossing candy.

We moved to the stadium and sat near the band. We heard them singing the fight song, “Watch the Eagles, Golden Eagles, soaring on and on, so there will be another victory for mighty Clarion.”

And they sang the schmaltzy words without cynicism, and on this afternoon at least, the Golden Eagles did soar.

After the game, the band sang the alma mater, “Oh Clarion, dear Clarion, oh college on the hill,” and it seemed like 1954, like a time to be savored, as the band swayed arm in arm to the tune.

Walt Mills can be reached at awmills@verizon.net.