Campaign And Quarters
As Columbus began, the outset of the War of 1812 gave it added purpose as a temporary garrison, a place for a few thousand troops to file in and out. As the young community served the roving army’s needs, it received in return a guarantee that it would be able to stay in its place in the face of the threat of the British army and the tribes. But while the military would continue to camp around the periphery in one form or another, from a Civil War POW camp to the warehouses of today’s Defense Supply Center, in the main it left behind the occupying force to establish itself. Such an occupying force, detached from its military host, finds itself in the problem of Xenophon – half-disbanded in ambiguous territory. How to preserve its form?
To settle can mean being a Lucas Sullivant, given a script to execute at the head of a small band of followers; but it may as easily take other forms of discipline and coercion in space. People, as masses, may be formed into a queue at a fair, or a chain gang at a roadside; in each case, their forced performance happens in dialogue with a landscape about them. These masses may repeat the antagonism of the military toward the land in different shapes, the violence increasingly covert underneath. The military band looks down on the crowd from the town gazebo. The procession of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade down Broadway, with its collection of high school bands, also displays discipline against the motley crowd watching. Behind the pageantry, the parade shows crystallized labor. It replaces the space of automobiles, gliding along with no effort, with a great straining mass of work.
Every place for general use – the lawns of parks, community centers and halls – was intended in large part to serve such dormant militias. The “bowling alone” complaint refers as well to the disbanding of the volunteer fire departments, Shriners, and other structured voluntary organizations, organizations that continue the older convention of militia units sprinkled through the countryside, convening regularly on the green. But the marching band still tramples back and forth over the field of Ohio Stadium, reenacting the struggle over and over again.
The state fairground here stays silent most of the year. Its great skin of asphalt bakes or shivers in place, the windows of its many mid-sized sheds are dark, the stalls of its many stables empty and damp. The candy-colored vertical ski lift defining its spine swings vacantly over 17th Avenue. But the site rears to life during the fair, nearly clogged with apparatuses busily spinning people around, sealing Almond Joys in batter, demonstrating advanced means of baling hay. 4‑H’ers trot out their ponies in straw-strewn lots under vast sheltering roofs; Holsteins lay underneath an elevated freight rail by the western edge. As though squills were blooming in a burnt savanna, a distinct field of objects suddenly becomes visible through the yawning lawns and parking lots – trailers, campers, camp chairs, bales. In putting up their camp display, these visitors go into a sort of social estrus; they decide to pull away from their local entanglements in Pataskala and Centerville and coordinate their actions in a new field.
Like the university a mile away, the fairgrounds is at once a zone of recreation and a testing ground. Both are literally level playing fields, where all of the amusements double as tests of character – of stomach, of aiming ability, of husbandry. The landscape necessary for this assumes a take on the democratic character dramatically different from the ministering landscape of an Olmsted. No matter the usual landscape entanglements of calf or girl, they are here transferred to the same shed, their original setting only to be guessed at, to be judged against one another.
In this way, oddly, the fairgrounds also take on a representational character, an attempted self-portrait of Ohio – rendered here as a common market of goods to browse through. It condenses the experienced reality of the rural world outside, not through idealizing the landscape of fields and highways it sits in, but by razoring that background out altogether – as a book excises piles of notes and references into one orderly ribbon of thought.
The Arcadian image of the university’s Oval is a not simply a pleasing space, or an arbitrary requirement met, but a representational stage unto itself. It sets forth a huge tract of flat land well-crossed by convenient roads, with a deferential scrim around the edges of sycamore and oak. Students perform their anxiety and leisure as they cross, some (still!) with their noses in books, others doing cheer exercises on the broad triangles of lawn, others representing to their fellows the shame of privilege or infanticide or what-you-will. They represent for any visiting governor or regent the Youth of Ohio, playing on a conveniently Ohio-like grounds. Here, the young assets of the state are observed to appreciate in morality and physique to the point where they can go beyond sufficing as members of society, and begin to return an appreciable profit. This is exemplified on the football field, where lively specimens and marched through their paces like quarter horses.
If landscape’s meaning depends upon the degree to which it is animated by people, the campus landscape makes the most sense on the morning of a football game, where its voids are taken up by a unanimous crowd of amicable followers. In the space around Ohio State’s home games, it becomes clear that the bodies breaking and succeeding on the field are only the central ritual of what manifests among a much larger population as community. The fans redeem the idle spaces of a university that has quite forgotten itself as a verdant academical village and lapsed into blank access roads and parking garages. They set up their folding chairs on medians and shoulders; canvas shelters, coolers, and hibachis in scarlet and gray huddle on the bald patches of what had been grass.
The game has its fascinations as a procedural representation of an aspect of the culture at large – labor forces moved around by old white men to gain territory, for the sake of…gaining territory. But the game itself is only the keystone of a larger structure. This is true on the field itself, where the band is of nearly equal importance, and other forces – the mascot and cheer team, the ghostly announcer, the special guests from the community – joining together in good order to keep the field occupied. And it extends to the field beyond, to thousands of satellite social occasions in the open air, from the surface lots of the surrounding area to the lawns and patios of the endless field beyond.
All of that turns around one meticulously maintained 360’x160’ lawn. It makes possible displays of sentiment, the struggle of the football game as alternated with the satyr plays of the supremely well-drilled band. If the field makes the game even and predictable, minimally liable to delays, it is no less the venue for the band to make moving pictures with their bodies, arranging themselves into chugging locomotives, and finally the word Ohio itself, with a sousaphone dotting the i. Here, the perpetually old-fashioned marching band speaks to its function as a memory of the military campaign – the drilled group acting to make meaning of what is otherwise an undifferentiated green field.