For Father's day yesterday, I went golfing with my Dad, my brother and my nephew. I generally dislike the game: you hit a ball, you chase after it, then you hit it again, but my Dad enjoys it, so a round of golf is our usual Father's day gift to him.
Having been in Las Vegas for the last three Father's Days, I was even more out of practice than usual. I had planned on stopping at a driving range on the preceding Saturday for some practice, but then it turned out that I couldn't be arsed, having decided that I would instead just show up raw on Sunday, drink a couple beers, relax and just try to hit the ball any old way.
That attitude led to me playing one of the better games I've played in my life. Golf is similar to darts, pool and bowling, in that the less you think, the better you play. I don't remember my score, as I couldn't be arsed to keep it, but everyone in our foursome agreed that I shot well...for me, which is still fairly awful for the average duffer.
We had a good time, which is always the point of the outing. The course we played on is first-rate, with perfectly landscaped and tended rolling hills, and pathways leading away through quiet woods on to the next tee. Environmentalists bash golf courses as wasteful expanses of water-hogging cut grass, eating up hundreds of acres, reserved for the pleasures of the few, and they have a point, but they're still aesthetically pleasant places to visit, and that has some value in and of its own.
When I was in high school, the back yard of the house I lived in ran into a municipal golf course. I had a snowmobile, and the golf course, with its raised tees and greens and sunken sand traps, turned out to be nothing less than cool-ass jump central, almost perfectly tailored for an idiot kid on a snow machine. One day, I jumped the snowmobile so hard and so many times that I cracked the hood off it. I turned it over to the old man and he welded a swiveling steel plate on to the frame and riveted the hood back on. Problem solved.
Jumping my snowmobile over golf course hazards until I broke it, then going back and jumping it again after my dad fixed it, was probably me at my most white and privileged. But like most teenage boys, I pushed it too far one day, when I buzzed past two cross-country skiers, one of whom I later recognized to be a town aldermen. Less a week later, a new sign appeared on the golf course.