Seams and Walls

UCLA and Oregon fans on their way to Autzen Stadium to cheer on their respective teams, Saturday, October 10, 2026 (all photos by me).
 

On home game Saturdays, I park in the lot at Eugene City Hall (the former EWEB headquarters), cross the Willamette on the Peter DeFazio pedestrian bridge, and follow the path through Alton Baker Park to Autzen Stadium. Somewhere past the bridge, scattered pedestrians turn into a procession: fans clad in green and yellow(1), all moving in one direction, with the giant Oregon “O” on the stadium’s south elevation in prominent view.
 
Christian Norberg-Schulz wrote that meaningful places arise from concrete things and from the ways we move among them. Paths and destinations, routes and goals, help give a place its character. My gameday trek to Autzen offers both quite literally: a route, a destination, and a shared sense of arrival. Yesterday, I joined a temporary alignment of strangers headed toward the same concrete bowl to cheer for our team and root against the visiting UCLA Bruins.
 
I’ve held season tickets for many years. My seat is in Section 17, Row 14, low and near the east end zone. Many of the people around me have likewise been longtime season‑ticket holders. A section of season‑ticket holders like us forms a tribe within the tribe, assembled by nothing more than where each of us landed when we chose our seats.
 
On paper, UCLA’s visit should have tugged at my loyalties. I attended graduate school there but never became a Bruin the way I was, and remain, a Duck. I was older, I lived off campus, and the team played its home games at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, a long drive from Westwood. So, the Bruin tribe never stood much of a chance. Oregon claimed me as an undergraduate, during the formative, coming‑of‑age years when such affiliations are set. Which tribe claims us turns on place and on timing, often both at once.
 
Every tribe cultivates its rituals, and one of Autzen’s best grew out of a rule. Before each home game, public address announcer Don Essig, the voice of Ducks football for more than half a century, delivers the weather report and closes with a line the crowd now shouts with him: It never rains in Autzen Stadium. In a 2014 oral history interview, Don traced the line to athletic director Bill Byrne’s 1990 decision to ban smoking and umbrellas in the stands. An umbrella suits whoever sits beneath it; the fans behind catch the runoff. Announcing the ban each week, he gradually turned it into the claim that no one needed an umbrella anyway, because it never rains here. A long run of dry home games made the joke seem prophetic. Years later, Don considered retiring the line. He was told it had nothing to do with the weather anymore. By then the phrase belonged to the crowd rather than its author. A rule about the building created a ritual, and the ritual created a fiction everyone inside the bowl agrees to share for an afternoon. Visitors hear an inaccurate weather report. Ducks fans hear a password.
 

The Ducks take the field before the start of the contest. UCLA fans, identifiable by their powder blue garb, occupy the visitors' section.

Why does this kind of tribalism strike me as healthy when so much of what goes by that name does not? I see four conditions. It is voluntary. It stays bounded in space and time, gathering in a vessel built for the purpose and dispersing when the clock runs out. The game operates under rules that both sides agree to play by, however loudly we dispute their application. And its loyalties nest. Don, an Oregon State graduate and one-time Beaver rally king, put it plainly in the same interview: “When the Beavers are playing the Ducks, I’m a Duck.” Otherwise, he roots for the Beavers.
 
Christopher Alexander made the case for something close to healthy tribalism, though he would have bristled at the word; in A Pattern Language, he wanted the city’s subcultures distinct but not “tribal or closed” (Pattern 8: Mosaic of Subcultures). He envisioned a city that accommodates varied ways of life, each with room to flourish, separated by boundaries that also serve as places where neighbors meet. He explicitly rejected ghettos and enforced segregation. Yet the distinction between a boundary that protects a community and one that excludes others depends on more than design. His mosaic presumes that people can choose their affiliations and that the boundaries between them remain permeable. As I’ll come to, Eugene's history reminds us that neither condition can be taken for granted. A boundary may give a community room to be itself, or it may enforce a separation that those on the outside never chose.
 
Of course, the tribe falters at times. Against UCLA, as Oregon turned the ball over seven times and saw its running game stuffed again and again, the crowd booed, and I can’t say the frustration was unearned. After the loss to Oklahoma State earlier this season, online message boards turned on head coach Dan Lanning. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the worst behavior surfaces outside the stadium. Booing is frustration voiced inside the bowl, and it ends with the game. The tribe sours when it slips its bounds and follows its animosities home.
 
My walk to Autzen passes near the site of a community that lived under very different, far harsher terms. In the 1940s, five Black families (the Reynolds, Mims, Nettles, Washington, and Johnson families) built homes on the north bank of the Willamette, just outside Eugene’s city limits, because they were not allowed to live within them. The settlement became known as Ferry Street Village, or Across the Bridge. In 1949, Lane County razed it to make way for the Ferry Street Bridge. At least 65 Black residents and 36 white residents had to relocate. Most moved to the West 11th Avenue area, which was largely undeveloped and lacked access to sewers or running water. Others moved to Glenwood and the base of Skinner Butte.
 
Racially restrictive covenants were one instrument of the exclusion that helped force Black families to live beyond Eugene's city limits. The deed to the house Lynne and I bought in 1989 had one, restricting its sale to "Caucasians." Our real estate agent brought the covenant to our attention, assuring us a 1948 Supreme Court decision rendered such exclusionary restrictions unenforceable. But that didn’t erase the words on our deed; they reminded us that people once built a wall meant to keep me out of their neighborhood.

Ducks and Bruins leave Autzen together after the game.

 
My other alma mater won, 17–15. After the game, as I walked back through Alton Baker Park, I watched a group of UCLA fans pause on the DeFazio Bridge to take photos against the backdrop of the Willamette River and autumn leaves. A pair of Oregon fans, fresh from a deflating loss, offered to snap their picture. For a moment, the boundaries between the tribes seemed to disappear. I wish the lesson here translated to neighborhoods, but it doesn’t easily. Neighborhoods don’t end at a final whistle. Perhaps the question for those who design and govern cities is not whether to make room for tribes, since people will form them regardless, but whether the edges we draw function as seams or walls, and who gets to decide. 

 
(1)  Oregon is notorious for its sartorial diversity. For the game against UCLA, the UO directed fans to wear black, decidedly not an official school color, but whatever.