{"id":330,"date":"2010-09-01T07:26:52","date_gmt":"2010-09-01T14:26:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tgpnolan.com\/?p=330"},"modified":"2010-09-01T20:33:46","modified_gmt":"2010-09-02T03:33:46","slug":"high-plains-drifting-golf-included","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/golf\/330\/high-plains-drifting-golf-included","title":{"rendered":"From Course to Course, High Plains Drifting"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nThe first and second at The Sand Hills Club<\/p>\n

On America\u2019s High Plains, towns announce themselves as clusters of silvery skyscrapers rising above the flatness, and only with diminishing distance do the great towers resolve themselves into grain elevators.\u00a0 After awhile I knew that the towns were much alike. \u00a0Along with the elevators would be a railroad grade crossing, a convenience store for gas and Coke, the remains of what once was the center of town, and then more road, much more road.<\/p>\n

I have always wanted to see that kind of vastness, grand and unpeopled, always known that I\u2019d never tasted it in the east.\u00a0 When I had a chance to satisfy that craving, along with my more or less permanent desire to play really good golf courses in places that are really hard to get to, I jumped.<\/p>\n

The golf was promising: Ballyneal, Tom Doak\u2019s stroll through the Chop Hills in the northeast corner of Colorado; the Sand Hills Club, the Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw overnight sensation in the Nebraska panhandle, and finally, along the Missouri River, the Links of North Dakota.<\/p>\n

I wanted to get from place to place with my feet on the ground, absent the familiarities that have dulled away the tang of travel, blunted \u00a0the edgy strangeness of new places.\u00a0 I made the concession of flying to Denver, then applied three strictures: no interstates, no name-brand lodgings, no brand-name restaurants. \u00a0It\u2019s come to this: we Americans like to be on the go, but we want to feel like we\u2019re home while we\u2019re on the road.\u00a0 We want to put pushpins on the map, but keep the experience antiseptic.\u00a0 From sea to shining sea, we can use the same overhead bins, roll over the same pavement, read the same green road signs, check in and check out of motels where we can find the light switches in the dark.<\/p>\n

That arrangement wouldn\u2019t answer the question of what vastness looked and felt like, and it would cut the heart out of these golf courses, these gems whose attraction lays partly in the fact that they are far from beaten paths.\u00a0 I let the golf dictate my route: northeast to Holyoke, up into the Nebraska panhandle, doubling back to nearly the Wyoming line, and then north almost to Canada. \u00a0Five days, 1300 miles.<\/p>\n

Suburban Denver was slow going, and I was late to my first stop, Holyoke. \u00a0The terrain had changed as I drove north, growing sandy and dry, developing washes and rises, and eventually gathering itself into a rhythmic pattern of tightly spaced swells and drops running in long parallels.\u00a0 By Holyoke they had a perfect name: the Chop Hills, and in Doak, a perfect architect to shape them for golf.<\/p>\n

Among course architects, Doak is the prototypical minimalist, a man who loves to find good land, create green complexes that invite a variety of tactical approaches, and otherwise let things alone.\u00a0 How he found his way to such a style is mystifying, because he started his career working for Pete Dye, who has done things like run a conga line of sand-filled dump trucks to the shores of Lake Michigan in order to transform a barren coastline into Whistling Straits.<\/p>\n

Doak told me Harbour Town, the relatively short, small-greened gem we see each year as part of the Tour rota, is the Dye course in which his approach is rooted, because it rewards precision off the tees and the ability to play a variety of shots.<\/p>\n

I got out onto Ballyneal quickly and quit at dusk, the only player out, when I couldn’t find a ball I felt I’d hit into the fairway.\u00a0 Ballyneal is textbook Doak, a reflection of its terrain.\u00a0 It sluices through the Chop Hills and their 50 (count \u2018em 50) kinds of grasses, all of which help hold the hills in place. It creates in the player the sense of a world unto itself, and it is fun, because it is really quite eager to reward.\u00a0 It asks for patience, creativity, and favors accuracy over length.\u00a0 It allows players to discover how well they can play jack-of-all-trades style golf.<\/p>\n

When I left the clubhouse I’d marked a radio tower as a good line back in–I’ve learned that a links course without a reference point can turn you around.\u00a0 In the failing light I made for the pulsing red light of the tower, following the fairways as best I could and bushwhacking the rest, not a plant among the 50 varieties failing to get a piece of my ankles.<\/p>\n

The club pro, Eric Petersen, met me outside his shop, arms crossed, taking in the sunset.\u00a0 He told me he had worked in California prior to coming to Ballyneal.\u00a0 “You smile here and you get smiles back,” he said.\u00a0 “Different than California.\u00a0 I feel like I’m in heaven.”<\/p>\n

I thought of Doak\u2019s luck in having the Chop Hills to work with when I assessed The Links of North Dakota, the last course I played on that trip.\u00a0 The Links sits on an all but flat piece of land set along Lake Sacajawea, which until a dam went in was far more slender; part of the Missouri River.<\/p>\n

A perfect spot for a picnic, not as prime for a golf course.\u00a0 It so lacked lift, and without lift, depth perception becomes a real problem.\u00a0 Call it drama, or character, it\u2019s hard to find on dull ground.\u00a0 Stephen Kay, a designer who has done most of his work in the New York and New Jersey region, must have had the devil\u2019s own time putting it together.\u00a0 It pops up on 100 Best of this or that lists, but that may have more to do with getting North Dakota onto those rosters than anything else.\u00a0 Golf, however, is as Doak points out, meant to be fun.\u00a0 And playing a round in North Dakota, with its flavor of obscurity, was fun.<\/p>\n

Between my first round and my third, there was ground to cover, about 1000 miles worth.\u00a0 When I struggled back into the pro shop at Ballyneal, a pack of coyotes was howling.\u00a0 Somewhere far to the west, silent lightning flickered from cloud to towering cloud, delineating their edges with lavender light.\u00a0 Petersen gave me directions back into town.\u00a0 Turns on unmarked roads, no lights, no houses.\u00a0 Holyoke seemed a long way away, let alone Mullen, across the Nebraska state line, where I\u2019d spend the night and get to one of our generation\u2019s gems, The Sand Hills Club, next day.<\/p>\n

I found Holyoke, gassed up for the run to Mullen, and within a hundred yards was stuck at a grade crossing.\u00a0 Gates down, signals flashing, bell ringing, hopper cars not budging.\u00a0 After fifteen minutes passed it dawned: They call them freight trains because they take on freight. Long train may mean long wait.<\/em><\/p>\n

Stalled.\u00a0 Hungry. Sandy. Sweaty.\u00a0 I felt like a used up Lawrence of Arabia. But I’d made the rules.\u00a0 No grade crossing-free roads, or familiar neon-announced demi-foods, or bellowing green exit signs promising motels I\u2019d heard the names of before.\u00a0 Have a Coke, for the caffeine<\/em>.\u00a0 I went back to the gas station.<\/p>\n

There lounged a young local.\u00a0 He was smoking in that sublimely comfortable way that suggests his entire being had been organized around his cigarette.\u00a0 Red hair, red beard stubble, freckles, skinny.\u00a0 A rusty razor blade of a fellow.\u00a0 He listened and sent me up past the grain elevator, beyond the head car.\u00a0 I crossed, boxed my way back to my road, and was on the way to Mullen.\u00a0 Self-designed travel has no middle ground.\u00a0 Elation and despair live side by side. Have the trip you’re having. <\/em><\/p>\n

I called Patty Glidden, proprietress of the Sand Hills Motel, to say I’d be running a touch late.\u00a0 She yawned. “Ring the desk bell when you get in.”\u00a0 I could tell it wasn’t the first time she’d taken a call like mine.<\/p>\n

The road to Mullen was runway straight, illuminated exactly as far as my headlights could throw a beam, and I picked up some time.\u00a0 The Sand Hills, burlier by the mile, spooky creatures less seen than felt by night, funneled me along.<\/p>\n

The motel was a little the worse for wear.\u00a0 It was interesting the way nothing–chairs, sink, bed, carpet– smelled particularly savory, but no two of them smelled alike.\u00a0 I turned on the air conditioner to help flatten out the m\u00e9lange.<\/p>\n

Reds-Caf\u00e9, the place to breakfast in Mullen, sits right alongside Route 2, the main east-west stem across southern Nebraska, but the crowd was strictly local.\u00a0 It was a place where you kept your cowboy hat on and any customer who wanted coffee went behind the counter for the pot and said things like Anybody here got dust in their throat<\/em>? \u00a0I was told a good\u00a0Nebraska story: Red, the now deceased owner of Reds-Cafe, served breakfast to a lady who asked for her toast light and got it served up burnt.\u00a0 She made a remark.\u00a0 As did Red, pointing to her butter knife and suggesting she scrape at her toast until she got it to the shade she liked.<\/p>\n

Dick Youngscap, the man who bet that a golf course hundreds of miles from a city of any size would stand up if it was very, very good, and had purchased a great many acres of Sand Hills real estate to back it up, was the portal to my getting out for a round at The Sand Hills. \u00a0(The club is far from public, but the opportunities in that special landscape are now well-understood. \u00a0Dismal River, not far down the line and open to all, is said to be well-worth looking into.) \u00a0He gave me the mile marker to watch for on the side road leading south from Mullen to the club entrance and warned me to watch carefully because it was so small. \u00a0Youngscap is a languid-sounding man of few words, but his accomplishments speak clearly. \u00a0Highly-regarded Firethorn (designed by a somewhat kinder, gentler Pete Dye) on the other side of Nebraska, in Lincoln, is also a Youngscap brainchild, though he\u2019d never bring something like that up.\u00a0 \u201cWe don\u2019t wear our boots too high around here,\u201d he told me, in one of his longer sentences.<\/p>\n

From the parking lot to the first tee it\u2019s a long cart ride up into the dunes.\u00a0 On the rise, the golf course slowly takes on its shape, flag by flag, green and tan runs of prairie grasses separated by slightly greener fairways, and shaggy-edged \u00a0explosions of intensely white sand called blowouts.\u00a0 It has the one attribute great courses of every stripe must: character.\u00a0 It just feels so well-executed, so complete, consistent without repetition, and it imparts a can’t-wait-to-see the next hole feeling. \u00a0Crenshaw and Coore, who are philosophical brothers-in-arms with Doak, created a blend of very generous fairways and greens that slip and slide so much a caddie is well worth the hiring.\u00a0 Getting to the greens isn\u2019t terribly hard unless the wind is running, which it certainly will do in the High Plains, but without a very fine touch and deft reads, the putting can be a terror on any day.\u00a0 I liked it too for its we-don\u2019t-care-what others think eccentricities.\u00a0 It has, for example, no tee markers, just boxes in which to peg it as you please.<\/p>\n

After I played at The Sand Hills Club, I headed back through the hills themselves, towards South Dakota and the run up through Hot Springs and into North Dakota.\u00a0 The hills are exhilarating, so long-running that the word forever<\/em> popped into my mind.\u00a0 Smooth-topped, big-chested, they loafed along beside me mile after by mile.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That was the beginning of a long ride, more than 800 or so two lane miles of roads not many people use any more.\u00a0 On Route 85 north through the Dakotas, the miles fled by, yet I seemed never to advance.\u00a0 Fifty miles of telephone poles carrying a single wire ran in perfect tandem with barbed wire confining \u2013 if that\u2019s the word \u2013 range cattle zip codes from their barns. \u00a0Clouds billowed to 50,000 feet, the hot wind throbbed, and I was all the time reining the car back down from 90 because 90 seemed, if anything, a little slow.\u00a0 Another vehicle was an event.\u00a0 Occasionally, 18-wheelers appeared, mirage-like, quivering in the road heat, closing no distance at all until in a trice they blew past and left me in their backdraft.<\/p>\n

I stopped the car once in awhile, because I was curious about the sound of such hard, profoundly lonely land.\u00a0 It was silent, enormously still, devoid not only of sound and movement, but even the possibility that that could change.\u00a0 By then I thought I had nailed down the idea of vastness.\u00a0 It was a spaciousness beyond comfort, a deep loneliness with nothing to offer but a strange, abiding beauty.<\/p>\n

In Watford City, N.D., I pulled onto Main St., parked, and walked.\u00a0 Sun-cooked, unmoving, dominated by a grain elevator along the railroad tracks, Watford City seemed to have pretty much closed up shop.\u00a0 Most of the storefronts, and there were few, had blinds snugged down, fending off the heat or suffering the last years of their near-barren irrelevance.<\/p>\n

I turned a corner and there gleamed, as improbably as spats at an Iowa church picnic, a spiffy limousine.\u00a0 It sat outside of a bar.\u00a0 Out of the bar came music and chatter.\u00a0 I walked in; it was cool and dark and alive, there was a white cake on the bar, people of every age were laughing and drinking, and the bride, luminous against the good cool gloom in her white dress, was dancing.\u00a0 I was welcomed.\u00a0 A visitor from another world was just fine.\u00a0 The beer was cold, and I regretted having to move on.<\/p>\n

I wished afterwards that I had asked where that limo was headed.\u00a0 Back down Route 85 to a small resort in Hot Springs, South Dakota?\u00a0 Or maybe an airport and a flight to New York.\u00a0 I pulled for New York, I suppose because the best places are the ones you haven\u2019t gotten to yet. \u00a0As for me,\u00a0\u00a0I can only tell you that when in Mullen, eat at Reds. \u00a0Good coffee, friendly, and word has it no bad place for a chicken-fried steak if that’s your mood. \u00a0And while Belle Fourche, Buffalo, and Bowman may have their points, I recommend a stop in Watford City. \u00a0You\u2019ll probably have a bunch of miles under your belt and a bit of High Plains dust in your throat, and the folks in Watford City will see to it that you don\u2019t leave on that next long leg of your trip without getting rid of that dust.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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