Columbus, Ohio

Columbus, Ohio, is the setting for J.D. Vance’s transition from Marine to college student and, increasingly, from a life shaped by other people’s upheavals to one he can plan for himself. He arrives excited to begin at Ohio State University, roughly a hundred miles from Middletown. The distance gives him room to build a life of his own without making his family inaccessible: he can return on weekends, and the city offers the movement, institutions, and opportunities that his hometown does not.

Arrival and a New Urban Setting

In early September 2007, Vance arrives in Columbus for orientation, delighted by the ordinary details of the day: lunch at Chipotle, where Lindsay Leigh Lewis eats there for the first time, a walk from the orientation building to the South Campus house that will soon be his home, and beautiful weather. A guidance counselor helps him choose a schedule that requires classes only four days a week and none before 9:30 in the morning. After years in the Marines and 5:30 a.m. wake-ups, the late starts feel like a small but striking freedom.

The contrast with his recent surroundings is immediate. Havelock, the North Carolina city closest to his Marine Corps base, had not felt very different from Middletown; Columbus, by contrast, seems to him an urban paradise. Its growth is tied in part to the university: graduates are starting businesses, historic buildings are becoming restaurants and bars, and even its worst neighborhoods appear to be undergoing revitalization. A close friend’s job as a local radio station’s promotions director gives Vance an entrée to the city’s events, from festivals to VIP seating at the annual fireworks show. Columbus is not simply a campus address; it is a larger world he can begin to enter.

College, Work, and Independence

For all its urban energy, Vance’s first social world in Columbus remains rooted in southwest Ohio. His six roommates include five graduates of Middletown High School and one graduate of Edgewood High School in nearby Trenton. They are younger than he is, since his years in the Marines have made him older than a typical freshman, but their shared regional background gives the new setting a familiar edge. The city offers distance from Middletown without severing the ties that have long defined his life.

Vance approaches college as a test of whether he can turn discipline into opportunity. The Marines have given him not only the sense that he can pursue his goals but also the ability to plan toward them. He wants to attend law school, though his initial explanation is narrow: in Middletown, rich children seemed destined to become doctors or lawyers, and he does not want to work with blood. He knows that good grades and a strong Law School Admissions Test score will be necessary for admission to a leading law school. At Ohio State University he feels, for the first time, that he can control his own direction.

Financial independence is part of that effort. Although the GI Bill covers much of his education and in-state tuition is relatively low, Vance still needs to find about $20,000 for expenses. He takes a job at the Ohio Statehouse with Cincinnati-area senator Bob Schuler. The work brings him inside political life: he explains the senator’s positions to constituents and listens as lobbyists and staff debate whether bills serve their constituents, the state, or both. Mamaw had regarded politicians as crooks; Vance’s experience at the Statehouse gives him a more complicated view, as he finds that such cynicism does not describe the people he observes there.

When bills continue to accumulate and his income cannot keep pace, Vance looks for additional work. He tries to donate plasma as often as possible and applies for a part-time nonprofit job, but his first interview goes badly; his khakis, lime-green shirt, and Marine Corps combat boots do not make the impression he hopes for. He later buys a better shirt and black shoes at Target and gets a consultant position with a local nonprofit working for abused and neglected children. When medical expenses add to the pressure, he takes a third job as an SAT tutor at the Princeton Review, earning $18 an hour. He gives up the Senate position, which he enjoys most, because it pays the least. The choice is a practical measure of what independence costs him: at that point, money matters more than rewarding work.

Family Ties and the Limits of Distance

Columbus is close enough to make family visits possible, but proximity does not undo the history Vance carries with him. After contracting mononucleosis and continuing to push himself through work and study, he becomes dangerously ill. His mother drives to Columbus and takes him to the emergency room. She presses doctors for clear answers and makes sure he receives care; after two days in the hospital, where he is given five bags of saline and diagnosed with a staph infection as well as mononucleosis, she wheels him out and takes him home to recover.

The illness lasts for weeks and coincides with the break between academic terms. Back in Middletown, Vance divides his time between Aunt Wee’s home and his mother’s. Their care is real, but so is his unease. Staying at his mother’s means living alongside another husband he regards as a stranger and encountering reminders of earlier domestic conflict. His increasingly close relationship with Aunt Wee hurts his mother, who insists that she, not her sister, is his mother. Vance cannot make himself feel at home with her, even when she is attentive and kind. Columbus gives him a place to pursue a separate future, but it cannot make the family’s old attachments simple.

Completion and the Meaning of the City

The pace Vance sets for himself is extreme. He works three jobs, takes summer classes, and at times more than doubles a full-time course load in order to finish quickly. During one particularly punishing February, he counts 39 days since he last slept more than four hours in a day. In August 2009, after one year and eleven months at Ohio State University, he graduates summa cum laude with a double major. He tries to avoid the ceremony, but his family insists that he attend. After three hours in an uncomfortable chair, he crosses the stage, obtains his diploma, and leaves without shaking university president Gordon Gee’s hand, already focused on what comes next.

Vance plans to attend law school the following year, and because his August graduation rules out an immediate start, he moves back home to save money. Columbus has therefore served as a substantial but bounded stage in his life: it is where his education, work, and ambitions converge, not a permanent escape from Middletown. Its defining contrast is between the instability he remembers from childhood and the momentum he builds through his own decisions. The city’s university, jobs, and wider civic life help make those decisions possible; its closeness to home ensures that opportunity and family obligation remain intertwined.