The Natural's Not In It

 

For nearly seven years on the button, Courtney and I lived on Perch Lake, just outside of Gaylord. Right next to Perch Lake was The Natural Golf Course, eighteen holes that twisted and turned through the best nature that the 45th Parallel could offer. The picture above is the view of the first green, and if you left the wooden bridge to the right and briefly ambled through the woods and over a rusted metal fence, you'd get right to our old driveway. Every now and again, an errant golf ball would appear at the edge of our property, like a single egg laid by an itinerant duck.

Of the three major elitist sports -- golf, tennis, skiing -- I golfed because the barrier to entry was pretty low and the interest in golf on my Dad's side of the family was high, from playing the sport to watching it on television on the weekends. As spare clubs were abundant and my growth spurt had yet to overwhelm statistical norms, my grandmother would take prepubescent me to the Roscommon driving range for golf lessons, which I endured largely due to the promise of her buying me a comic book after the lesson. 

Over the years and decades, I never reached consistent competency at golf, but there was enough variable ratio reinforcement to keep me playing, that one good-to-great shot where the mechanics of swinging and hitting felt like flicking a finger to the sky. I can still remember being on a par-3 on the back nine of The Natural and hitting my drive less than two feet from the hole, which I was able to tap in for a birdie, the rarest of animals on my golf card, especially on a course with tight fairways seemingly designed to punish my errant shots with penalty strokes galore.

But The Natural was more than a simple nearby golf course. In the off-season, it was a place to hike to watch the trees change color and the deer and geese roam freely. More than once, I would lift Wyatt and Olive over the fence and the three of us would explore the smells and sights so different from the dirt road that was their daily path. Sometimes, I grabbed a grocery bag and picked over the marshes and foliage for lost balls, which were present in abundance. The Natural was the first golf course I played in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, when carts weren't allowed and one had to walk the miles of acreage, a few hours of normalcy in an uncertain and upsetting time.

It's hard to justify the resource allocation that a golf course requires, from water to the physical space, so it's not like the loss of one more golf course should elicit teeth-gnashing and boo-hooing, but I always wanted one more shot at The Natural, one more chance to play to my potential on an unforgiving landscape of twists and turns. Playing it also would remind me of a different time in my life, a time when certain people and pets were waiting for me after the 18th hole. And while I'm glad I had the opportunities I had, I can't say that I'm happy to see The Natural move into the zone of memories, shotgun starts now mere echoes.