Blue Fairways: Three Months, Sixty Courses, No Mulligans - Hardcover

New England

1

My tires crunched to a stop in the gravel parking lot of the Fort Kent Golf Club, a nine-hole course on a hillside three miles west of Fort Kent, Maine.

"On parle français ici," a sign in the neat, white clubhouse read.

"American or Canadian money?" asked the young woman behind the lunch/green fees counter.

"American," I said. "Will you take a credit card?"

"Oh oui," she said.

The greens fee was $10.

There were a few groups already on the course but nobody waiting to tee off, and nobody in the clubhouse. I now could understand the manager's casual "yes" when I had phoned the day before asking if they might squeeze in a single the next morning.

Fort Kent, population 2,100, marks the northern terminus of Route 1, near the northernmost tip of the continental United States. This section of Maine lies a couple of hundred miles inland from the rocky coast and is rounded by a sort of camel's hump defined by the St. John River. The river runs north from Fort Kent for a few miles before turning south on its long run tothe Atlantic Ocean. Route 1 pushes north with the river, peaks at a town called Madawaska, then plunges south for 2,200 miles to Key West, Florida.

I arrived in Fort Kent on a cool, bright Sunday morning in June, just as the local Catholic churches--not quaint, cozy New England churches of lore, but tall, austere, European-looking structures with pointed arches--were letting out. I inched my car through throngs of parishioners exchanging hugs and playing with their children on roadside fields strewn with wildflowers. The golf course lies along Route 161, which is actually an extension of Route 1. Follow 161 for about thirty more miles and you would pass the tiny outpost towns of Allagash and Dickey, and then come quite literally to the end of the road, the last paved frontier before the start of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway and the interminable forests of northern Maine.

I headed to the first tee box alone. An urban golfer in such a setting is like a starving man who continues to hoard food after the famine is over. I hurried out to the tee box without even lacing up my golf shoes, as if at any moment some assistant manager might appear with the news that there had been a mistake, I must actually wait for a couple of slow foursomes to tee off in front of me. When it was clear this would not happen, I slowed down.

I stood for a moment on the tee box, staring up the fairway, not wanting to smudge the crisp, virgin canvas of my adventure. So far, my scorecard read even par. You can't avoid getting old, but if you play golf you know what it feels like to have life begin all over again with each new round. You have a shot at redemption, a chance to correct past mistakes, erase regrets; all is forgiven. Today will be different. There is the smell of wet grass, the crisp cardboard of an unbent scorecard, a sharp pencil, a new ball still cool and slightly sticky to the touch. It's the moment of infinite possibility, when all drives will land in the fairway, wedge shots will float like angels to welcoming greens, and putts will roll true. And here I was on the cusp of not just one round but an entire summer's worth of golf, the road trip of a lifetime.

The idea had first come to me one summer evening about a year earlier as I drove home after a round of golf near my home in Richmond, Virginia. Some great old rock song, "Mony Mony," "Louie Louie," something like that, blared from the radio. A fresh breeze rushed through my opened windows. I had played well; well enough, that is, to be thinking about the next time I could golf instead of thinking about throwing my clubs into the nearest body of water. A thought popped into my head. What if I just kept driving? What if I extended this sublime moment, and, instead of going home to prepare for another workweek, I just kept driving, with my only destination being the next golf course down the line?

I stowed the idea with the thousand other harmless fantasies of the sort that get you through your chicken salad on wheat toast at the lunch place around the corner from the office. But over the next several months this particular fantasy returned at odd times, such as the middle of the night or the middle of some phone call at work. Unlike, say, the fantasy involving the copra schooner and forgotten coral atolls in the South Seas, this one seemed just doable enough to unsettle me. Finally, I broached the subject with Barbara, my wife, assuming (hoping?) that her incredulous reaction would jolt me into forgetting about the idea. Surprisingly, she seemed positive, after raising a few basic questions, such as how we would pay our mortgage and feed ourselves and our daughter. Women are so practical.

Perhaps Barbara sensed, as I did, that I had reached a point in my career and my life that demanded some sort of action, or at least an elaborate gesture. At thirty-five, I had been reporting for the same newspaper in Richmond for a decade, first as a general assignment feature writer, then as a business reporter on the transportation beat. I had arrived at the paper in 1986 as an eager twenty-five-year-old cub. Richmond was going to be a two-year stop. Then we'd move to Boston, Washington, New York. But somehow the years slipped by. We bought a house, had a daughter, started worrying about taxes and school districts. Rootssprouted despite our stubborn protestations that we'd be moving on at any moment. I was no longer the youth of twenty-five. I had morphed into a veteran, a reliable pro, a solid member of the team--all those double-edged plaudits guaranteed to fuel the quiet desperation Thoreau wrote about.

Lately, I'd found it harder and harder to jump-start my professional engines over airline strikes, trucking regulations, highway construction contracts. I'd been around long enough by now to see the same stories, the same conflicts and characters, disappear and come around again like carousel ponies. The crush of daily deadlines, amid the barely controlled chaos of the newsroom, no longer gave me that terrifying thrill. More and more it felt like speed skating through Jell-O--a furious expense of energy in order to wind up more or less where I had started.

"So, what is this, some kind of midlife crisis?" a fellow reporter demanded, after I'd wangled a six-month leave of absence from my job.

I hadn't thought of it that way. I didn't know I was old enough to qualify for a midlife crisis. But what the hell. These days you qualified for senior citizen discounts in your fifties. Perhaps they were offering midlife crises to thirty-five-year-olds. Crisis, burnout, call it what you will. Staring at that ever-shrinking buffer zone between Someday and Today, I could tell it was time to do ... something.

"I didn't know you were a big-time golfer," another reporter said, as if I were a source who'd been withholding key information all these years.

"I'm not," I said. And that was true. Not if "big-time" meant highly skilled.

But I loved the game. I'd hacked around the local course near my home in Boston as a teenager, but I didn't start golfing in earnest until thirty. With predictable results. Regardless of how badly the adult mind wishes to master the game, the adult body hates to learn golf. Golf demands all sorts of strange grips, postures and motions that are utterly useless in the rest of life.Learning to golf means ignoring those marquee muscles (biceps, pecs and so forth) that one has spent a lifetime training, preening, fretting over in the bathroom mirror. Instead, you demand precise movements from an odd assortment of B-list muscles that have lain...