Golf, Life, and Metaphor

An overhead shot of the Royal Birkdale golf course in Southport, England, looks like a post-glacial landscape: swales and valleys amid gorse-covered dunes. It's a veritable topographical map of the game of golf, and an emblem for the true nature of the game. The photo is of Annika Sorenstam at the approach to the 10th green, during the 2005 Women's Open (the only shot of the course I could obtain legally).

The 2008 Open Championship is also being played on this dramatic stretch of British coast, where the English sand meets the Irish Sea, and it promises to be every bit as exciting as previous tournaments where I like best to watch the game.

"Exciting? Golf? Well, maybe, but Tiger's not there this year, so what's the big deal?" scoff the scoffers.

I'm afraid I'm a bit of a purist, and although I'll watch golf played anywhere, I've been known to refer to the way it's played on municipal golf courses around here in pejorative terms ("sissy golf" is one of the more polite). Maybe it's the Scot in me, but I prefer the wild, rugged, coastal links courses in Great Britain to any of the manicured pretty-boy courses in the U.S.

The wind and rain blow, the clouds lower, the bunkers are real traps, not baby beaches, and the water hazards can pitch a leader out of the top ten in a few strokes. In today's third round, the wind is the main factor, making it difficult for players to mark their balls on some of the greens. The sun's gorgeous, but shots of the sea give you a pretty good idea of just how tough things are going to be later in the day. K. J. Choi leads at the moment, and he's the only player under par.

So why am I yapping away about a game that I don't play (I think I've actually held a golf club in my hand once or twice) in a blog that purports to explore things philosophical? Because golf, like baseball, is metaphor writ large. In fact, I've sometimes shown The Legend of Bagger Vance in humanities classes, because of what it tells us about the nature and scope of myth itself. Based on the book by Steven Pressfield (who based it on the Bhagavad Gita, one of the sacred Hindu scriptures), the film (directed by Robert Redford) pits man against himself as he strives for meaning in lfe. As Bagger Vance (played by Will Smith) says about golf, "it's the only game in which you can call a penalty on yourself."

Golf, especially on a links course, provides lessons in a variety of skills I'd love to see my students develop: tenacity, concentration, patience, physical and mental stamina, fine-tuned technique, and adaptability. Grace in competition is a hallmark of the great players (Tiger Woods, of course, comes immediately to mind), but the real competition is between the player and his or her own mind. Young and old can compete in it; among today's leaders are K. J. Choi (38) and Greg Norman (53), along with Rocco Mediate (46) and Camilo Villegas (26) in the final two pairings for the third round. It's as much a mental game as a physical one, and a tournament can be won by both skill and will.

I was highly amused the other day to notice that the story line in the comic strip Judge Parker (choose July 18 and 19 on the link) is beginning to focus on golf, and that one of the characters is touting Harvey Pennick's treatise on life and golf, his Little Red Book. I've given it to duffers more than once, and it, like Bagger Vance, has as much to say about being human as about playing golf.

But golf is also about landscape, and especially on links courses, it's about nature's interaction with human design. To me, it's silly to see green grass in the middle of the desert (as in Las Vegas or Palm Springs), but the courses in Britain symbolize the human experience of adapting to the land. At the margins of the groomed fairways and greens lie the natural scrub, heather, gorse, beach grass, and other vegetation into which the course has been carved. The bunkers are cut into the underlying sand, and dug deeply to present a real challenge to the player whose ball wanders off the green or lands in one from the fairway. The weather in Britain also changes so rapidly that the character of play can be altered in a few minutes. As I type, the clouds are moving in from the sea, and the jackets are coming on in the gallery.

Golf can, in fact, be played under almost any conditions. The tougher the course and the weather, the hardier the folk it attracts. In More News From Nowhere, my characters play a form of desert golf, and folks apparently even play golf in Greenland (see above) in circumstances that must surely test one's grit.

I've never understood people who find precision-based games like golf to be tedious and/or boring. The character and skill of the players, and the battles of wills that often ensue, are plenty exciting for me, and watching the Open Championship gives me a chance to see talented human beings matching their wits against nature. Sports, for many, are tantamount to religious experiences, and it's easier for me to see this in Britain in July than at almost any other time of year--except, perhaps, during the World Series.

Photos: Annika Sorenstam at the approach to the 10th green at Royal Birkdale during the 2005 Women's British Open Pro-Am (modified), by Cath Mudford. Golf in Greenland (modified), by Graphicos. Both from Wikimedia Commons.

Everything Flows

Heraclitus said it. You can't step in the same river twice, because everything's in flux. Boy, is it.

Last summer I posted an item on the wild fires in the Owens Valley, and during the last two days I've learned yet another lesson about how nature works.

The area lies between the Sierras on the west, and the Inyos on the east, forming the deepest valley in the lower 48 states (Deepest Valley is also the name of a definitive book on the region, originally written by Genny Smith). The rain shadow effect, which causes most precipitation to fall on the western side of the Sierras, creates a high desert climate with annual rainfall at about 4 to 6 inches. Except for dwindling snow cover and receding glaciers, things have looked pretty much the same in this part of California for as long as I can remember. But when stuff happens in this place, it really happens.

The combination of burned-out land and a torrential rain in the mountains produced this last Sunday a mudslide of proportions big enough to cut a swath through the valley north of Independence, destroying parts of the historic Mt. Whitney Fish Hatchery. The building itself was spared, but homes in the area (including those of hatchery personnel) were damaged or destroyed. No human lives appear to have been lost, but a couple of cats didn't make it--nor did 3,000 rainbow trout. The hatchery, according to the Fish & Game people, is the "sole source for Golden trout eggs in California," so the impact could be more far-reaching than its immediate devastation. I'm not sure yet whether the eggs and fry were damaged (I seem to remember some in the main building), but losing several thousand pounds of rainbows isn't exactly small . . . well, you get the drift.

The slide covered a segment of the main north-south transportation artery, U. S. 395, causing delays of several hours for people bent on returning to LA from their cool weekends in the mountains. But it spared the L. A. aqueduct, which carries a good deal of the valley's water south, much as the highway carries the cars. This is the same aqueduct that's partly (although not completely) responsible for the very dryness that made last summer's fires as extensive as they were. In the interest of full disclosure, however, I must mention that my blissful childhood visits to this same valley were made possible by the fact that my grandfather managed the Cottonwood power station for the City of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and I grew up next to this same aqueduct. My feelings about the whole issue are, therefore, complex.

For more complete accounts of the event itself, a semi-local account (from Mammoth Lakes) is available through Sierra Wave television, and here's the LA Times story.

My interest in this event rests not only in my attachment for the area (we often stay in the Winnedumah Hotel in Independence, and some of the photos I've featured in this blog have been taken nearby), but in particular in my family's fondness for the fish hatchery itself. If my archives were more organized, and my scanner working, I'd include here photos taken of my grandfather holding me on the steps of the main building, and a similar shot of my father holding my son. We like generational symmetry in this family. At any rate, I loved to take my kids there when they were little, and only a lack of time prevented me from taking Beloved Spouse the last time we drove by the road that leads up to the complex.

For visual background, here's a Flickr page on the aftermath of last summer's fire by an ichthyologist who calls himself "oncorhynchus," (there's something wonderfully coincidental about the fish connection here--maybe that's why he'd been in the valley) and a nice VR panorama of the hatchery grounds, before the slide.

So this is the lesson: some things that seem always to have been there, may not always be there, so we'd best not postpone visiting places (and people) we love. Nature has a way of knocking us on our kiesters every now and then, and not all of the messes that get made are made by us (both the fire and the mud-flood were caused primarily by natural phenomena; I say "primarily" because the real damage occurred to human-made structures, and the abnormal rainfall itself may reflect larger, human-augmented, climate conditions).

There does seem to be some irony to my writing this account on the day that the All Star game will be played in Yankee Stadium for the last time. Beloved edifices are hard to come by these days, and I hate to see any of them go. At least the fish hatchery's still standing. Maybe it'll be there long enough for me to get a photo with a grandchild--but I'm not counting on it.

Photo credits: Denise Flynn, from her Flickr photostream. Limited use Creative Commons license. Denise: you should visit your parents more often and take more pictures!

Adventures in Rehab: Or, The Recycled House, Part 2

Have I mentioned that I'm getting old? If I had ever doubted the fact, or had ever held on to illusions of my eternal youth (don't we all feel 16 somewhere in our psyches?), I am now fully disabused of them.

After two weeks of down-on-knees and up-on-ladder efforts, we finally finished (more or less) one of the two rooms we had planned to complete over my two-week break from teaching and prep. On Monday, a new quarter begins for me, and Beloved Spouse begins a five-week stint of teaching two summer session classes, and we won't have much time for these shenanigans.

But we will have a nice, sunny (read: warm) study, with newly refinished floors, newly painted walls and baseboards, and newly installed and painted crown molding. Still to complete: the former study/potential guest room (or Sitting Room, as he wants to call it), which still needs all of the above done to it, except for installing crown molding.

The necessity for all the fixing-up stems from a really bad job of updating begun by the previous owners, but never completed. Extensive work had been done on the living and dining rooms (glazing the beaver-board walls, stuccoing the fireplace, and installing gold shag carpeting throughout), but somebody decided to take out the beaver-board in the rest of the house and install wallboard--badly. They never seem to have finished it out, and the taping and bedding that was done, was carried out haphazardly and incompletely. I'm not sure when this all happened (evidence suggests that the glazing and carpeting was a '70s effort, but the rest may have happened later). The photos above are of the crown molding on top of the glazed beaver-board in the living room, contrasted with the equivalents in the re-painted dining room (accomplished a couple of years ago, before we installed a wall of bookcases in there). The living room re-do will involve somebody who knows what he or she is doing, because the ceiling panels are damaged and/or sagging, and will require professional help.

At any rate, we set aside two weeks to shift our lives around a bit, and to take care of problems that had been bugging us since we moved in. We began by sanding the floors in what we have been calling the sunroom (because it's at the southwest corner of the house, with expanses of windows in both those directions). The red pine had originally been varnished, but the '70s up-dating had included the removal of the shoe-molding, the laying down of crappy carpet pads, and the installation of the shag carpet. The first thing we did when we moved into the house was to rip up all of the carpeting everywhere (including the astroturf on the front porch!) and strip the varnish from the floors in the living and dining rooms. We threw down rugs everywhere else, planning to get to it all eventually.

What we forgot is that we're now eight years older than we were when we moved in, and the weather is not exactly cool. Nonetheless, we rented sanders (which helped, but not as much as we had hoped), bought spackling compound and molding and paint, and got to work. What the drum-sander didn't get, we removed with citrus stripper and hand-sanding, and then we went on the Great Floor-Finish Hunt, which became a problem because we were running out of time and our options were narrowing. We settled on Velvit Oil, a penetrating wood stain that binds with the wood molecules and seals the floor. Thus began a three-day ordeal, which left me with blisters on my knees and the worst back ache I've ever had. But the floor looks pretty good, and nicely rustic (we didn't apply anything to make it shiny, but it is smooth, and there are no traces of the rug padding). It's a rich deep red color (the result of blending a light blond shade with a cherry) that's satisfying enough to use on the hallway and in the breakfast room, when we finally undertake those.

We had to re-think our original plans for where the Ikea "Billy" bookcases would go, but what we ended up with avoided our having to saw holes in the backing to accommodate light switches. We need to put in another one where the TV is still ensconced (until we can get the cable switched--something that can't happen until the other room is finished). But after moving a thousand books (I'm not exaggerating) into the room, along with two desks, we're pretty happy with how it turned out. The few changes left can wait, and we'll be taking it much more slowly from here on in.

I have to wait until my knees heal, and I can walk fully upright again. But now I can sit here at my desk and watch the squirrels run around the pecan tree outside the west window, and enjoy the cool morning breeze. Life in an old house can be really good--if you're not too old to make it work.

Photos: View of my view from my desk; living room and dining room crown molding contrasted; study floor stripped (left) and being stained (right); east wall bookcase view (see The Recycled House post for "before").