Every Other Saturday In The Fall, My Street Isn't Really Mine

I live in Clintonville, a couple miles north of campus, and it’s about a twenty minute walk door to door if I ever actually wanted to go, close enough that I feel it every home game without ever setting foot in the stadium. This has nothing to do with games or books, I just think it’s one of the truest things about living here and it doesn’t come up when people ask what Columbus is like, so I figure I’ll say it here instead.

Ohio State plays seven or eight home games a season and by Thursday of a home week you can already tell. Somebody two doors down puts a hand lettered sign in their yard, ten dollars parking, and by Friday night there’s a second one across the street undercutting them at eight. Saturday morning the whole street fills in a way it never does otherwise, cars nose to tail along both curbs, people walking down the middle of the road in scarlet and gray carrying coolers, and my own driveway becomes a small piece of real estate I have to actively defend if I want to leave the house before noon.

The actuary in me finds the whole economy of it actually pretty cool. Somebody’s kid is out there with a folding table and a cash box making more in one Saturday than a week of allowance would ever get them, and the going rate climbs the closer you get to kickoff the way any market with a fixed deadline should. I’ve thought more than once about renting out my own driveway and never actually done it, partly because I don’t want the hassle and partly because I like having somewhere to put my own car, which tells you my price sensitivity has limits even on my own street.

What I actually enjoy about it, and this took me a few years to admit, is the noise. Not the game itself, I don’t especially care how the team’s doing most seasons, but the specific sound of a neighborhood getting loud together for a few hours, grills going in driveways that are usually empty, a guy down the block who apparently owns a marching band snare drum and isn’t afraid to use it before ten in the morning. My wife and I usually end up sitting on the porch with coffee just watching it happen, half amused and half annoyed, the same reaction every single time.

By six or seven that evening it’s over as fast as it started. The parking signs come down, the coolers go back inside, and the street is just a street again until three Saturdays from now when the whole thing repeats. I used to find it purely irritating, another Saturday where I couldn’t get out of my own driveway without a ten minute negotiation with somebody’s uncle. Now I mostly just plan around it, like weather, and there’s something almost comforting about a disruption that shows up on a predictable schedule and leaves exactly on time. Columbus does a handful of things at full volume and this is one of them, and you either move somewhere else or you make your peace with the six Saturdays a year your street belongs to somebody else’s tailgate.