The Billows and The Sky
A game day in Auburn, and its aftermath
Auburn, AL — It’s double overtime in Jordan-Hare and the children of The Plains have run wild. A girl of no more than eight climbs atop an aluminum bleacher and asks herself: “Where ees my parents?” Her vowels skip high, hard and flat like rocks above a lake. Kate supposes the girl will find them later in the evening, if a victory spurs the crowd of 88,043 to the oaks on Toomer’s Corners.
We turn our attention back to the game below. Two field goals send it to triple overtime, which soon melts into quadruple overtime. A two-point conversion gives Auburn the lead and Texas A&M the ball. The tense stadium doesn’t hold its breath, it expels it. A bloc of students, alumni, fans, and interlopers crush the field with sound. A&M’s quarterback finds the tight end on a shallow slant across the front of the end zone. The ball hits his hands as he falls to the turf. It’s dropped!
The athletes dash from the sidelines and right-on-their-heels follow the students, who flow down the bleachers and leap over the sharp holly hedge that ring them. They are rushing the field. An unfortunate few find themselves snared in waxy green barbs. Kate is already three rows down, skipping atop the bleachers in worn black cowboy boots she super-glued back together that morning. We sneak through a hole in the hedge and join the crowd in chanting “It’s Great! To Be! An Auuuuuburn Tiger!” under the lights.
Love in the shape of light green almond eyes has brought me here. Kate grew up in this loveliest village. She went to Auburn, as did her parents, as did her grandparents. Her brother is now a senior. He recently retired as president of Pi Kappa Phi. We’ve come to spend a game day with Elizabeth, Joe, and Wheeler, to steep and be steeped in the culture of a place a woman I love knows as home.
12 hours before we dance on Pat Dye Field, we leave the dappled sunlight of the home in the vale at Estate Drive and make for the outskirts of campus in Kate’s Jeep. We pass tidy brick ranch houses of a hue with the inflatable tiger mascot Aubies that adorn front porches. Among them rise new builds, barn-style moderns in shades of cream with walnut sidings, in front of which young children in navy Cam Newton jerseys play 500. Along interstate 85, Korean-language billboards advertise realtors to the executives, engineers, and technicians who run the Hyundai and Kia plants, and the smaller hosts of contract manufacturers that supply them. Next to the venerable Toomer’s Drug is The Irritable Bao, where the neon signs in Chinese buzz out “Stop by, foodies!” and the steamed buns taste is if they’re lifted from a Harbin canteen. We park at the Little House on the edge of campus and start the game day experience.
We pick our way through the white tents set up outside the stadium. Each canopy has a name, most in honor of families, corporate LLCs, or boosters clubs. Some joke about the money that now controls the sport: “NIL Collection Tent.” Others feature a playful religiosity, “Go to Auburn or the Devil Will Get You,” that hints at the menace of evangelical coercion that can haunt the life of those who live here. One, nonsensical to me, “GTHAGTH,” requires Kate’s translation: “Go to Hell, Alabama. Go to Hell.” Later in the evening, we’re with Kate’s parents at one called “The Locals.”
Sometime after noon, we meet Wheeler in his room at the Pi Kap house. He is a tall handsome youth with a shock of dark hair reminiscent of Ash Ketchum. He is a generous host, sharing easily his immense knowledge of the school and the mountain blue Coors Light stored in a beer fridge positioned under a poster of “The Rifleman” Chuck Person. Wheeler and Kate were neighbors with Person at their old place along Elise Lane, that is until he was entrapped by the FBI in a college basketball recruiting scandal. At the frat, the boys dress in the understated finery of gentry: pale straight cut jeans over Ariat boots, worn green Barbours atop white dri-fit polos with navy stripes. The girls arrive with spray tanned smiles ringed by jangling gold hoops and gold pendants and gold bracelets that announce the cataclysmic arrival of grand, outfit-coordinated plans for “the boys.”
We’re nursing beers on the back porch watching brothers play beer die when Mr. Coley approaches. “Old people often come with problems but they rarely come with solutions,” he announces. I first met Mr. Coley in July in a rustic cabin inhabited by his father along the shores of Lake Martin on the last parcel of Alabama Power land. Back then, Mrs. Coley told of their honeymoon in that cabin so many years before: Coley père had refused to vacate the property for the young lovers and demanded they notify him before going #2 so that he might hurry underneath the house and bang on the pipes with a wrench to avoid any blockages. Today, the problem Mr. Coley tells of involves missing composites, the arranged portraits of all members that decorate every bare inch of the fraternity’s walls. “Lose lips at an ADPI tailgate told of a raid at the house, and three bare nails in the entryway testify to that truth.” Wheeler turns to Jack, his fraternity brother, friend, and second youngest of the Coley men, and the two set upon some secret plan of action to recover the stolen photographs.
Around four, Kate and I leave for the white tents we’d passed earlier in the afternoon, lingering only along a roped off path outside the stadium to watch Tiger Walk, the procession of mascot, cheerleader, athlete, and coach that announces the beginning of the end of game day.
The rest of the evening passes as football evenings do: Conecuh Sausage, Dale’s Pale Ale, a shared fraternité of ease and rooting alignment. We enter the stadium and sit with Joe and his buddies near the 40-yard-line in the lower bowl. At halftime, Kate and I meet a D.C. friend, Justin, in the bowels of the stadium. He too is an Auburn man and not just any one at that, a Plainsman and perhaps more. We talk about the exigency of unrequited lust and Auburn’s chances in the second half. As the third quarter slips away we head back to our own seats.
A quarter and four overtimes later the game ends and the jubilant crowd heads to Toomer’s Corner to “roll the oaks.” In the days of yore, the purveyors of Toomer’s Drug would toss the telegraph ticker tape recording an away win over the oaks kitty-corner to the store. Today, fans toss toilet paper. We mummify the trees in TP. We circle them like maypoles, scrounging for rolls to launch across the boughs. The revels complete, we turn down the barred windows of Sky Bar with its covers and lines and the good ole comforts of 1716 for a good nights sleep.
The following morning I awake and find it strange that Auburn, this place of joy and culture and civility, has identified itself with “The Deserted Village.” The 1770 poem by Oliver Goldsmith tells of an Irish “Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain” from where, upon the poets return, “all the bloomy flush of life is fled.” The American Auburn knows itself as The Plains. Aubie, the mascot, is also the progeny of Goldsmiths’s verse: “crouching tigers wait their hapless prey.” It is only upon returning to Toomer’s with Kate for a lemonade and a stroll do I begin to understand. Crews have gathered to rinse the tissue from the branches of the oaks. A man in a green crane shakes unfurled rolls that are stuck in the trees’ crowns. Pulp scooped into trash bags is piled on a flat bed trailer. A women in a cheer outfit takes senior pictures underneath a still-rolled tree.
I think, then, of Goldsmith:
That trade's proud empire hastes to swift decay, As ocean sweeps the labour'd mole away; While self-dependent power can time defy, As rocks resist the billows and the sky.
As power washers remove all trace of Auburn’s victory from the Corner, Kate and I sip on lemonades and recollect. Thoughts of the game and the field fade under the clear blue light of the early noon sky streaked with clouds of memory: fraternity mischief, heeled boots on wet bleachers, embraces in the shadows of the great concrete heights of Jordan-Hare.
You bring the Auburn of game day alive for someone who has never been there. Thanks!
This is excellent