Ultimate: Life of a Sojourning Sportsman
by Jacob Kramer-Duffield

How much of Ohio have you seen during your time at Oberlin? No, seriously, think about it. Outside of Lorain County and Cleveland, most of this campus has probably not seen Ohio — and that’s a shame. Sort of; well, let me explain.
I play ultimate frisbee. Have done so since the first week of school. Which means that I am, a) perpetually injured, and b) on the road every fourth weekend or so for my entire Oberlin career; in the spring, it’s more like every third weekend. I’m not trying to brag here or anything, I’m just trying to share a little of what it’s like to be me, should you care.
Point being, I’ve spent a sizable chunk of my Oberlin life on Ohio’s state highways and the glorious tangle of America’s interstates which call Ohio home. Athens, Columbus, Versailles (ver-SAY-uhlz), Toledo, Cincinnati. Hit ’em all, and I could tell you every Wendy’s and Bob Evans within a couple hundred feet of the roads that run from Oberlin to the fields in almost every corner of this state. Not to mention Greenville, Wilmington, Durham and Hillsboro, N.C.; Knoxville, Tenn; Atlanta, Ga; Ann Arbor, Mich.; and Chicago, Ill. Damned if I could tell you all that much about any of those towns outside of the Mapquest predicted and actual traveled times to destination.
This is partially a function of the way ultimate frisbee tournaments work. You leave Friday afternoon, crowd into too few cheap hotel rooms and get a wake up call for 6:30 a.m., and then it’s off to the fields before sunrise (and before the host team gets there) on Saturday. Breakfast is Waffle House if you’re lucky, McDonald’s if you’re not, and Kroger if there are vegans in the car. Lunch is…well, nothing. There is usually a morning allocation of fruit and bagels, which lasts about a game and a half, but otherwise it’s eight hours of constant running without a restaurant or proper latrines.
The evening comes and it’s off to the closest Mexican restaurant, or failing that, Bob Evans. Back to the hotels, watch Back to the Future again, and pass out in the stink of a dozen dirty frisbee players. Another wake up call Sunday morning — make sure nothing’s left in the hotel room, pack up the cars, and sleepily head to the fields. If we’re lucky and play well, we stay all day again and get back to Oberlin at midnight or later; if not, we get back early and stew the whole way home.
Part of the alienation of traveling in mid-America has a deeper root. The simultaneous proliferation of chains and superhighways over the last several decades means that if I hadn’t already memorized the names of industrial parks in Knoxville, as opposed to Greenville, I probably couldn’t tell which state I was in. You can get the same mediocre country-fried steak in pretty much the same Bob Evans, pretty much everywhere in America. While this isn’t what anyone would call a manifestly good thing, people who criticize chains tend to romanticize how things were before. Mostly, restaurants in this country served the same sort of food that they do now, except they stank of cigarettes, the wait staff was openly hostile and the food tended to be really, really awful. It may seem like a small thing that we now have merely indifferent wait staffs who serve standardized mediocre food, but at least you can know what to expect.
Where do I stand on this whole thing? I dunno, actually. There’s something comforting about familiarity, even though the good progressive in me keeps yelling against the crushing conformity of it all. The vast majority of American travel falls right along these same lines. Rather than stuff into cheap motel rooms and eat at Big Boy, most business travelers stay at Holiday Inn and eat at the Olive Garden after a long day at generic convention centers, but the essence of it is the same. Even internationally, American business travelers tend to stay in American hotels, eat American or bastardized versions of the host country’s food and watch American television.
So at the end of the day it comes down to this: actually, no, forget it. There’s no great lesson here. Travelling in Ohio over the same roads and going to the same restaurants again and again for four years is weird, but ultimately offers no higher truth outside the experiencing of the experience.