Columbus, Ohio: Autopsy

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Originally uploaded by Butch Wynegar.

Wanderlust, meet Columbus.

At the close of tonight's game -- which Columbus won 3-2 with a hit in the bottom of the ninth, re-establishing our karma for the home teams after a speed bump in Pittsburgh yesterday -- the loudspeakers started blaring "New York, New York." Columbus is the AAA affiliate of the Yankees, and the song plays in the Bronx after every win. Still, the irony was not lost on us, since we decided that Columbus is the converse of the song's lyric: If you can't make it here, you can't make it anywhere.

It's not that Columbus is unsightly. We passed through Wheeling, West Virginia, today, so we know from unsightly. The city has a decent skyline, a big university, and twice as many people as Pittsburgh (after learning of this fact from our trusty road atlas, JF asked, "Where are they all?" and walked to the hotel window, as if expecting to see 700,000 gathered in the parking lot.)

But still, Columbus has a ways to go in the First Impression Department. It has the affect of a city during war-time that has tragically turned to rationing chromosomes. It's possible that everyone at Cooper Stadium on Monday night doesn't accurately represent the broader populace, but that seems extraordinarily unlikely.

I spend a good deal of my time defending places from their worst stereotypes, but it's difficult to muster the energy to do that for Columbus. Thoroughly average-looking women here are like beauty queens; the beauty queens are hallucinations. When a normal-looking family of four walked by us at the stadium, it was all I could do not to leap out of my seat and follow them back to the mothership before it was too late.

People here are fond of T-shirts with text. One scrappy feller walked by with this dictum printed across his chest: "If I gave a crap, you'd be the first person I'd give it to." He was holding a toddler whose future I stopped thinking about immediately, in order to go on.

Today's been fun, like every day on the trip, but we leave for South Bend tomorrow morning, and not a moment too soon. --JW