Don't get me wrong, the place has merits -- abundant wildlife, lovely fall foliage -- but, until this month, it tended to be a part of the state that candidates blinked past on their way to national office. Never in my life did I expect to see so many Altoona bowlers, Yuengling beer drinkers and small-town, deer-hunting, Mass-missing former strip miners and woodcutters dissected on CNN.

My mother said people were "heating it up with the election talk," though many, like her, had already made up their minds.

She's in her 70s, lives on a fixed income and suffers from emphysema and kidney failure. She goes to dialysis three times a week, requires a portable oxygen tank and gets around in a wheelchair. When I was a child, growing up among the red oaks and the slag heaps, she and my dad were considered well off for working-class people. He cut wood and sold logging equipment and made enough money to send five children to college, with some left over to drop a donation every Sunday into the church collection basket.

Our tiny community was 2 1/2 hours from the nearest city, but there were jobs -- at the coal mines, the brickyards, the shirt factory. The county seat had a department store where my mother went shopping. Sometimes she and my father would go dancing on Saturday nights, and she would look so beautiful with her black hair and her perfume and her red lipstick that I would throw my small arms around her and bury my face in her off-the-rack cocktail dress just to see her smile.

In the 1970s, though, recession forced my father to sell his business. His was one of many places of employment that began to disappear. By then, the strip mines had shut down and the factories were moving. Kids at the high school -- in numbers far larger than they had when I was a teenager -- started viewing military service as the one way they could afford college.

The little downtown in the county seat began inexorably shrinking. Now it is all but shuttered, and my brother, who cares for my parents in his off hours and is in his 40s, works day and night and still can't afford to fix his pickup. Old friends give me a reckoning every time we talk of this one's son or that one's daughter lost in desert combat. My father, a joyful, affable man, talks about the economy nonstop. Unreimbursible medical expenses consume my mother's Social Security check, and she worries constantly about money. A big night out for her is a dollar spaghetti dinner at the local Sons of Italy with my father and aunt and uncle.

"You can't believe the price of gas here," she fretted. "Thank God summer's coming -- we spent $800 on oil to heat the house last month."

Had they heard much talk about Barack Obama describing rural Pennsylvanians as "bitter"? Not too much, but thinking about it made my mother laugh.

"Bitter?" she asked. "Well, yes, of course we're bitter. Who wouldn't be?" She giggled until she started to cough.

Here's what I've thought as I've watched my hometown -- and so many others like it -- materialize so improbably at the forefront of this election: As much as the truth may hurt, Obama was right. Maybe he overdid it a bit, but generally, people don't feel secure when you leave them behind. And people who don't feel secure are vulnerable to other feelings, small feelings -- feelings of fear and suspicion, like the ones that politicians in this country have been exploiting for most of this decade.

My father was in the next room, watching CNN in his recliner. A registered Independent, he can't vote in the primary, but come November, he said, he's backing "a straight anti-Bush ticket." In the 1980s, he was a Reagan Republican. Now, he told me, "I don't care if they nominate a one-armed orangutan, I'm voting for the Democrat."

My mother, meanwhile, will cast a vote in today's primary. She's playing it close to the vest, though she confessed she has a soft spot for "that Obama." Even though a lot of people around town had a hard time envisioning a black man in the White House, even though the guy who drives the van that takes her to dialysis had whispered to my dad that he'd heard that Obama was secretly being backed by "Big Oil money," and even though her heart went out to the other candidates too.

"I like Hillary," my mother said, "and Dad likes McCain, but they're old school, and we have to do something about this war and these oil and healthcare prices."

Old school? While I pondered the fact that my Pennsylvania mother had somehow learned to talk like my Laguna Beach teenager, my father yelled something from his recliner about how the country just couldn't afford to go on like this.

"Tell her we want to stick it to Big Oil," I could hear him joyously, affably, bitterly shouting in that vowel-y accent that is the hallmark of rural central Pennsylvania. "Trade in the truck. Get us one of them Priuses."

Freelance journalist Shawn Hubler is a former Times staff writer.

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