Carpe Diem

Golf has been going well.  If you have golfed much at all you know that as a game golf presents great challenges.  You can play really well Tuesday, hitting the ball a long way, more or less where you intended, connecting solidly on nearly all your swings, chaining together three or four good shots in a row, putts included, to score well.  Try as you might, knowing it’s not true but unable to stop yourself, you begin to secretly believe that golf, at least for you, after all these years, has at long last become a fairly easy game.  There’s a bounce to your step.  You feel skilled and accomplished.  If life was an ocean you would be skimming over it like a surfer, ahead of the wave, triumphant.

And so you seek out more opportunities to play.  In fact, you can hardly wait to get out there again.  The next time you venture onto the links you get off to a bad start, hooking your drive on the first hole, hitting your approach shot fat, misreading the green and putting the ball wide of the hole.  Uncharacteristic of me, you think to yourself.  The internal dialogue goes like this: I just need to settle down, concentrate on making better swings, and play within myself, like Tuesday.  Play the course and don’t let the course play me.  It will get better. 

By the eighth hole you want to sneak off to the parking lot and go home.  You haven’t hit a good shot all day.  Clubs that used to be reliable fail you.  You can’t hit your driver, your utility clubs are wildly off the mark, your iron shots dribble down the fairway or worse disappear out of bounds or into the hazard.  Close to the green you muff chip shots.  You haven’t made a putt all day.  You’ve missed every opportunity, no matter how slim, at par.  You’ve blown up on several holes though you can’t bring yourself to mark double digits on your score card.  You hate golf.  You may never play golf again. You find yourself thinking “I could probably get good money for these clubs on e bay.  There are better things I could be doing. Lots better.”

Golf is like that.  It can be hugely rewarding, and then without notice it can make you feel like a bottom feeding fish, a big fat carp with sucker lips that can do nothing but scour the river bottom for the flotsam and jetsam nature leaves behind, available to you only after it sinks to the river’s mud floor and begins to smell.  You feel wretched but you keep slogging, swimming against the current, the pressure of the entire river on top of you, desperate for any glimpse of hope the game may grudgingly allow you.   Golf can do that to you, defeat you wholly and without mercy.  It can gut you.

Fortunately Tuesday, August 23, 2016 at Tanna Farms in Geneva was one of those wonderful golf days I first described.  Like many days this summer the weather was iffy and hard to predict but at tee time, 9:48, the sun was shining.  The sky was bright blue save for those high wispy white clouds.  Lower and in front of the wisps hung giant soft cotton ball clouds. There was a nice breeze.  My group teed off, the weather held, the course (aside from the bunkers) was in good shape, and we played well.  We had 15 par equivalents.  A number of birdies contributed to that total.  It was three guys, each playing 18 holes for a group total 54 holes, notching 15 pars.  For us the day was almost other worldly.  That combination of numbers, pars scored divided by holes played, is 27.8%.

If our group was organized enough to keep records, Tuesday’s score could our group’s all time best.  Screw record keeping.  I’m declaring it our best.  On top of it all we ended our day in the restaurant/bar enjoying lively conversation over cold beer and great Reuben sandwiches.  We had a convivial two beer lunch and headed back home.  Lovely day.  As our local LaSalle County Democratic Party chairman Rocky Raikes is wont to say “It don’t get no better than this.”  I haven’t golfed since.  Why screw up a good thing?

I’m getting out of here on that high golf note, leaving the country, heading to Canada.  I’ll drive with six other guys to Red Lake Ontario and take a seaplane from there which will land on a remote lake with one cabin and a dock.  We will unload our stuff and the plane will take off.  Once he is out of sight we will be the only human beings there.  They take us in on Sunday and pick us up the next Saturday. We will have no connection to the rest of the world except for a satellite phone used only for emergency.  Up there in the woods and water there are no cell phone towers.  Solar panels will provide a little electricity in the cabin, but outside that structure there will be no artificial light, no roads, nothing else man made.  An occasional plane flying overhead will be the only reminder of the modern world.  The quiet is breath taking.  The only artificial noise we will hear is the sound of the small gas motors on our four fishing boats.  I’m very anxious to get there.

I obviously won’t be posting my blog from there, but I’ll be thinking of one to write when I get back.  Chances are both you and I will get to the wilderness less and less in our future.  It’s an experience that should be shared, I think, when possible.  I like to fish, and I like the experience of being away, but most of all I appreciate the beauty of the natural world.  Up there you get to soak in it, roll around in it as it were, every day and night.  It becomes part of your daily rhythm.  You notice every part of nature more; the sun, the clouds, the water, the trees.  We could do that at home each day but the world we know so well takes over.  Familiar streets, leading to often traveled roads invite us to speed past the beauty around us.  We look at screens now to experience each other and the world: TV screens, computer screens, phone screens.  We hear other sounds, react to other voices, think of other things.  Up there it’s different, and the difference is wonderful.

It’s my third year of taking this trip over Labor Day weekend.  I know from experience I’ll miss out on things that happen back home; Cub games for one.  Last year when I got back to Wi Fi and reconnected to the world of information I learned Jake Arrietta had pitched a no hitter.  On the other hand I will also miss a full week of presidential campaign news, which will subtract seven full days of media bullshit from my life which I will never again experience.  I might make it till election day after all.  My fear though is that it will be like watching a soap opera.  One day of viewing will probably catch me up on everything I missed.

   

And so I’m off, lead head jigs, spoons, and steel leaders packed along with a rain suit, a wool sweater, homemade chocolate chip cookies, and carefully packaged garden tomatoes.  I take a survival kit of sorts with me in my tackle box in case I get lost out there on the lake.  It consists of wooden strike anywhere matches in a waterproof container, four tins of sardines, a compass, a compact emergency silver tinfoil shelter that’s supposed to keep in your body heat (never used), and a flask of whiskey.  I don’t expect to use any of it, except for the flask.  We will live rustically for a week but we’ll eat well.

In addition to the walleye we eat most every night we buy this wonderful Canadian Rye bread across the border.  Toast it and layer some lettuce and that thick Canadian bacon (more like ham) with mayo and salted home grown Illinois tomatoes between the slices, wash it down with a LaBatt’s Blue, and you will have enjoyed right there a simple internationally sourced lunch that is nearly impossible to top.

Don’t worry about me.  I’ll be fine up there.  Take care of things while I’m gone and I’ll make a full report upon my return.  Golf if you get the chance.  Try not to be a carp.