Tag: Golf

The Old Course

I’ve been watching the British Open golf championship this weekend. This is a special year, as it is the 150th Open Championship, having been held 149 previous times since the first tournament in 1860 (it has been interrupted by two world wars and Covid). This year, the tournament is being held at The Royal and Ancient Golf Club in St. Andrews, Scotland. Also known as the “Old Course,”  the course is wedged between the town of St. Andrews and the North Sea on Scotland’s east coast, and is acknowledged by many to be the official birthplace of this ancient game.

The game of golf dates back 800 years, to the 1200s. It started with shepherds (“sheep herders,” get it?) who were bored while watching their flocks graze along the flat, treeless, coastal lowlands of Scotland. Using their crooks as clubs, they entertained themselves by hitting rocks into rabbit holes. From there, the game evolved. They carved rounded balls out of wood, dug holes in the ground, and shoved sticks in the holes to mark them. The first recorded reference to the game came in 1457, when Scottish King James II officially banned the game. It seems he worried that his soldiers spent more time on the links than in practicing archery. In St. Andrews, golfers shared the links with grazing sheep, cows, and goats, fishermen drying their nets on the thorny plants called whin or gorse, women bleaching cloth, children playing in the low hills, and soldiers shooting longbows at targets. The Old Course was eventually shortened from 22 to 18 holes, and that number became the standard size of a golf course. In 1754, a group of local gentlemen formed the Society of St. Andrews golfers and established the first 13 rules for the game. From that point on, golf was regarded as a rich man’s game, as working people could not take time off to play, and it cost a week’s worth of hard labor (6 days) to afford a single golf ball stuffed with goose feathers.

Old Tom Morris, one of the early groundskeepers of the course, had a great deal to do with the present layout. Morris was one of the first golfers to make his living from the game. He won the Open Championship in 1861, ’62, ’64, and ’67, and his son, Tommy, or Young Tom, also won the title of “Champion Golfer of the year” four times. Purses were small in those days, however, with the winner taking home just a couple of pounds (usually about $25) for their efforts. The real money came from betting on yourself to win and playing head-to-head matches against other top players. To provide a more consistent form of income, Old Tom made clubs and golf balls, caddied, and did the work of maintaining the Old Course. That maintenance was in the form of physical labor that he performed by himself with little assistance.

He generally left the fairways as they were naturally. That’s why Scottish courses look so strange to Americans more accustomed to carefully manicured, table-top fairways of bright green grass. Each St. Andrews’ fairway is marked by hundreds of small hillocks and brownish-green grass that has to be hardy enough to grow on sand beaches and withstand the harsh Scottish weather. A ball hit in the middle of the fairway might roll straight, but it could just as easily kick left or right and wind up resting in the waist-high gorse bushes with no chance to reach the green in regulation. Sand traps were also established in places selected by nature, not a course designer. Most traps were places where sheep or other livestock burrowed into the soft turf next to higher ground to wait out the cold, driving rain during storms. They chewed on the thin grass until a sandy hole emerged. Old Tom used those holes as sand traps, although later groundskeepers added fresh sand and sod walls to make them even more formidable. He moved tee boxes and greens, created new holes, and reshaped the course to a significant degree. Finally, Tom put a great deal of labor into the greens, carrying dirt from one place and putting it in another in a wheelbarrow, leveling it, and experimenting with different seeds until he found the right mixture. All of this was done by hand and most of it by one man. While building a new green for the finishing eighteenth hole, Tom found a mass grave where cholera victims had been buried during an outbreak in 1832. He simply mounded dirt over the grave and went on with his work. The result of these Herculean efforts is a course that, while not as beautiful as the more modern links, has a unique quality laced with history and romance.

Mary Stuart, better known to history as Mary Queen of Scots, became Queen of Scotland in 1542, at the ripe old age of 9 months. Later, as an avid golfer, she made an important contribution to golf when she began calling the lads who carried her clubs around the course “cadets.” This term was eventually shortened to “caddy,” and their job was made easier in the 1800s when they began using archery quivers as cases to carry the clubs and extra balls. (I was actually a caddy when I was 11 and 12 years old. I weighed about 80 pounds, and I swear some of the bags I carried weighed nearly that much. But, on a good day, when I managed to get a round with a golfer in the morning and another in the afternoon, I could take home over 3 dollars, including tips, for being at the course for 12 hours. I was a shrewd businessman even then.) It was said that Mary was playing a round of golf while her husband was being murdered, giving her a solid alibi. And her cadets may have been handy for finding lost golf balls while on the course, but they could not help her when she lost her head while plotting to overthrow her cousin, Elizabeth, as Queen of England.

Some of my favorite caddy stories took place in Scotland, where caddies are often older adults. These guys have been reputed to take a drink on occasion, and have been known to put down a bet or two based on the information they gathered while following golfers around the links. In the 1860s, club members at a Scottish club hosted a tournament for caddies, putting up a turkey for 1st place, and a bottle of whiskey for 2nd. It was a strange finish as one golfer after another purposely mishit their ball in an attempt to lose the lead and take home the 2nd-place prize. Caddies are an invaluable resource to golfers who are new to a particular course and need information that might help them improve their score. At Carnoustie, a wee bit north of St. Andrews on the eastern coast, a player once asked his caddy what to expect from the weather. The caddy gestured toward the sea and said. “There’s a rocky island a half-mile off shore. If you canno’ see the rock, it’s raining. If you ken see the rock, it’s aboot to rain.” Gary Player tells the story of his introduction to St. Andrews as a 21-year-old in his first Open Championship. He was assigned a grizzled old caddy who knew the course like the back of his hand. The inexperienced Player was understandably nervous as he teed off on the legendary course. His first shot was a terrible hook that landed well out of bounds. Embarrassed, he teed up again and sliced a ball out of bounds the other way. The unimpressed caddy watched closely, a cigarette dangling from his lower lip. Player finally landed one safely in the fairway and began walking toward it. The caddy walked up next to him and asked, “Where are you from?” Gary said, “South Africa.” The caddy said, “What‘re you doing here, then?” Gary replied. “I’m here to play in the Open Championship. I’m a professional golfer.” The caddy shook his head and said, “Well, you moost be a helluva putter.” Over time, caddies have developed their own folklore and stories. My favorite is about two golfers who teed off together back in the 1800s. One of them had a heart attack and died halfway through the round. The other man threw the dead body over his shoulder and made his way back to the clubhouse, where a gentleman member said, “That’s a fine Christian thing you’ve done.” The golfer said, “Aye, the worst part was lyin’ ‘im down and pickin’ ‘im up again between shots.”

A few years ago, Kathleen and I took a tour of Scotland, and our bus stopped in the medieval town of St. Andrews. The Old Course is right in the center of the town surrounded by homes and businesses, the golfing equivalent of Wrigley Field or Fenway Park. Each member of our tour was given a bucket of balls to hit on the driving range so that they could return home and brag that they had “played” at the birthplace of the game of golf. Most of our group was elderly, so they thought I was some sort of wizard because I could hit the ball 50 yards in the air.

Still, standing there and looking at the course, I could feel the history of the place and my imagination conjured up images of Old Tom Morris, pipe in his mouth, leaning into the wind and hitting an approach shot to the green he built on top of a mass grave. I nodded to the apparition, and Old Tom tipped his Tam O’ Shanter in response.

Covid Summer

We’re approaching the end of summer now, as the fall season officially begins on September 22. The end of one season or the start of another always represent nice break points in the year. Most people just ignore those artificial landmarks and plow on with their lives, satisfied with surviving another season. Others change their smoke-alarm batteries or their heating-system filters on those days each year. The anal-retentive side of me applauds those people, but I usually forget to take such responsible actions. Instead, I like to pause on those milestone days and take stock of the previous season. So, how will I remember the summer of 2020?

Certainly, this has been the strangest year of our lives. When spring officially began back in March, Kathleen and I were returning home from Florida under surreal conditions. The Covid emergency was just beginning, and no one was quite sure what was going to happen next. Most businesses were closing up and we weren’t even sure we would be able to find food, gas, and lodging on our return trip. Despite the fact that numbers of infected were skyrocketing and people around the world were dying by the thousands, our president assured us that, if we just did nothing and removed all restrictions, the virus would magically disappear. Nearly 190,000 American lives later, he is still saying the same thing and continues to provide zero leadership during this national emergency. People often refer to September 11, 2001 as “the day the world changed.” This virus, however, has been much more traumatic and will produce many more life-altering changes than that terrible day at the start of the new century. Still, as they say, life goes on, and everyone has tried to cope with this bizarre situation in their own manner.

Many people have embraced their families as a haven against the storm. Others, forced to work from home while simultaneously teaching school lessons to their children, would probably prefer a little less family. One of the highlights of the summer for me occurred on a night in which the grandchildren were staying overnight with us. Luke (7) and Abigail (10) were sitting at the counter in the kitchen, starting their dinner, and Kathleen went to the refrigerator to get them something to drink. Since we are the grandparents, and our job is to spoil the kids, she agreed to give them a soft drink. She pulled out a two-liter bottle of Sierra Mist and, for some inexplicable reason, began shaking it. I’m not sure if she thought it was some sort of “shake-before-using” fluid made from concentrate, or if she was so engrossed with her conversation with the kids that she forgot what she was doing. But there she was, one of the smartest women I know, moving the bottle of carbonated liquid up and down vigorously. Of course, the predictable happened: when she opened the top, the clear, sugary juice exploded in a volcanic eruption. We’ve all seen this scenario in cartoons or bad sitcoms, where a hapless character just stands there as liquid from a broken faucet or some other source blasts them in the face for an extended period of time. They don’t move away, they are simply immobilized while the dousing goes on and on. A real person would never do that, you might think. Any normal person would quickly move away. Not so, my friends. The kids roared with laughter as the sticky soda shot into Kathleen’s face until its energy was spent and the carbonation subsided. Not only did she not duck away, I swear she actually leaned into it. I must admit that I was laughing right along with the kids. That is, up until I realized who was going to have to clean that viscous mess from the cabinets, floor, and the various items we had on the counter-tops. It took two days and multiple cleanings on my hands and knees before we stopped sticking to the floor. On the bright side, though, the kids have an indelible memory of Nana Henderson from the Covid Summer.

We also remodeled our master bathroom in July. We had planned to tackle the project next year, but moved it up when the shower grout and tile began to crumble, creating water stains on the ceiling below. The room was gutted and everything either re-built or replaced in a 2 ½-week project. Our contractor had already done several things for us in our first months in the duplex/condo, and this, too was excellent work. It cost considerably more than we originally planned to spend, but the end result is a master bath you might find in a high-end hotel, complete with a state-of-the art bidet. As you might guess, the bidet was not my idea. I have to admit, though, that the heated seat is pretty nice. Also, whenever you walk into the room, a light goes on and the outer lid opens up automatically. It’s a nice demonstration of respect. I feel like a Four-Star General walking into a room full of Privates. Also, when I need to . . . do what men do in a bathroom . . . I just reach to the left and press a button, mechanically lifting the seat. No more bending over to raise the lid like some sort of a cave man. Another press of the button lowers it when I’m done. Very civilized.

As the world ground to a halt this summer, the slower pace actually created one of those “stop-and-smell-the roses” moments for me. During my many ambulatory explorations of River Falls, I finally noticed that this town is a hotbed of Little Free Libraries. If you are not familiar with this phenomenon, it is an informal program that began about ten miles from here, in Hudson, Wisconsin, in 2009. Using scrap lumber, a man named Todd Bol built a box in the shape of a schoolhouse on a post, put a few used books in it, and installed it at the end of his driveway. The idea was that anyone who happened by could take book or leave a book in the box in order to encourage recreational reading in an inexpensive way. This simple concept took off, and today there are more than 100,000 of these little boxes registered around the world, with thousands of other, unregistered libraries springing up every day. This summer, I have discovered at least a dozen of these around town. There is a whimsical, serendipitous quality to opening the door and seeing what treasures might be hidden inside. In a regular library, you tend to know what you’re looking for and go to that section of the building. With the LFLs, however, you never know what you’ll find. This summer, I’ve read several books that I stumbled onto in this way. So, if you’re seeking something new to read, look for a little box shaped like a house and take a peek inside. Or drop off one of those books that are just gathering dust in your basement. You might be starting that book on a journey that will take it far from home.

The other thing that has happened recently is that I have started a new job. I have tried golfing this summer with terrible results. I enjoy playing, and I hit just enough good shots to give me hope and bring me back for another round. I finally came to the realization that, if I want to improve, I have to play more often. Golf is an expensive hobby, however, and I can only afford to go out once every other week or so. I also go to the park to hit fairly regularly, but I spend more time looking for my balls in the tall grass than I do hitting them. So, when I saw a pop-up, “now Hiring” ad on the website of the Kilkarney Hills Golf Club a few minutes from my house, I thought it must be fate. During my interview, I was asked why I wanted that particular job. At that moment, I realized that there is a wonderful freedom that accompanies applying for a job that you don’t really need. So I just waxed poetic about how, since my days as an 11-year-old caddy, I have loved the sight of a golf course in the morning, with the silver dew glistening on the green grass. He hired me on the spot. It probably had less to do with the poetry and more to do with the fact that all of his summer employees were returning to high school or college, but I am now gainfully employed once again. I will be working the pro shop, the kitchen, and the bar simultaneously, but it’s a small operation and it should be fun. I even offered to mow the fairways, should my services be required. The best part is that I get to play golf and use the driving range for free as often as I want. Actually, it just dawned on me as I was typing this: I have no idea how much I will be paid. I probably should have asked that during the tense salary negotiations that accompanied my interview. The phrase “minimum wage” springs to mind, but the free golf is the perk I was after.

Okay, so the past three months haven’t been, in the words of an old Nat King Cole song, “Those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer,” and you may not want to “dust off the sun and moon and sing a song of cheer.” (If you want some campy fun, check out the film clip below of Nat entertaining a bunch of really, really white people.) Most Americans have not been able to take their usual vacations, cruises, or trips to exotic lands. Instead, it has been a summer of simple pleasures, and, for me, the season had its moments. Take a minute to stop and think about what you will remember most from the Covid Summer of 2020.

Field of Dreams

As the Covid-19 crisis drags on, and our president continues to refuse to acknowledge that it is even a problem, boredom is a constant fellow traveler for many of us. We take our antidotes and diversions wherever we can find them, and, for us, it has often been sports.

For the past week, daughter Kristin and her husband, Kevin, visited with us in River Falls, and we had a great time with them, albeit confined to the house most of the time. Monday, on Ben’s day off from the clinic, the four of us went golfing, while Kathleen stayed with the two grand-kids and the three dogs. As Abigail later explained it, Nana Henderson was on “poop and barf patrol” following the dogs around Ben and Amber’s house and cleaning up after them. So, while she took one for the team, we had a great time golfing.

Golf has been a big part of their visit, because we spent the previous four days watching the PGA Championship from San Francisco. I had devised a somewhat-complicated pool of sorts for the tournament, and everyone got involved including the kids and Ben’s father-in-law, Tom. Thus, we all had a rooting interest, and we watched the tournament every night until 9:00, since it was held on the West Coast. Ten-year-old Abigail was on a team with her brother, but didn’t really get interested until the day after the tournament. At that point, Ben showed her how much money the leading golfers received for playing that weekend. Abigail, who has a decided mercenary side to her, said, “Holy cow! The winner of Survivor had to spend 40 days in the jungle to get one million dollars, and these guys just play golf for 4 days and can win two million!” I believe she will be more interested in golf in the future.

The tournament was, of course, played without fans, which gave it an eerie, silent quality when a player would make a great shot and you expected to hear a roar from the crowd. This is the way virtually all sporting events are being played in this age of Covid-19. It’s hard to believe, though, that a relatively short time ago, all sports were played that way.

Organized sports teams and leagues really began in earnest in the years just after the Civil War. One thing that happened was that, by the late 1800s, people began to worry about becoming too “civilized” from living in an urban environment, with few parks or open spaces, and working at sedentary jobs. By the early 20th Century, this fear of becoming overly citified manifested itself in several ways. People like Teddy Roosevelt advocated a strenuous life in the outdoors, thus helping boost organizations such as the Sierra Club and the new Boy Scouts, and set aside federal land for national parks. Popular books began to encourage people to take up a more active lifestyle. In an example of this, Jack London’s Call of the Wild used dogs as a metaphor for people who needed to return to a more primitive state to reach their full potential. Finally, every major city began to set aside green space for their citizens to enjoy the outdoors and play sports. Another development of the late 1800s was that the Industrial Revolution had progressed to the point that the growing middle-class of businessmen, merchants, and managers had something that, for the first time, people referred to as “leisure time.” Even working-class people, because of the efforts of labor unions, were able to negotiate shorter work weeks. That meant that they had Sundays off, and many worked only half-a-day on Saturdays. People, primarily men at the time, began to fill this new-found free time with sports, games and other recreational activities. Middle-class athletic clubs in every city and town began to organize baseball teams to play against each other or even travel from town to town for competitive games. These two developments led to an explosion in sports for adults to get physical exercise or as an outlet for competitive juices. Those games were usually played in any available open fields, and, like today, with few or no spectators.

Then, as crowds began to gather to watch these contests, entrepreneurs realized that they could build an enclosure around those fields and charge people to observe others playing games. So, ironically, sports that started as a way for city people to get more exercise, quickly evolved into games played in stadiums in which a handful of men played, while thousands more paid good money to sit and watch them. Colleges got into the act as well. Intramural sports such as football began as a way to get students out of the classrooms and onto the playing fields for exercise. Quickly, though, administrators realized that they could make money from these sports and, if your team was good enough, their school could attract national attention and broaden the pool from which they could recruit top students. The top universities even hired “tramp athletes” who would play football for a different college each week, selling their services to the highest bidder.

In my nostalgic mind, then, baseball games, golf tournaments, track meets, and other sports being played in empty stadiums hearkens back to a time when these sports were played for fun and exercise, rather than to make money. I want to say that there is a purity to these games today, but in order to do that, I would have to ignore the fact that sports are a billion-dollar industry, and we wouldn’t see them at all unless someone had figured out a way to make money off of them.

Still, in a surreal world in which we are confined to the house most of the time, watching sports and feeling a connection to something outside our living rooms is a distinct pleasure. Adding to that surreal quality are the cardboard cutouts of fans in the baseball stadiums and artificial, piped-in crowd noises. We purchased the MLB Extra Innings package in order to watch as many games as possible in this truncated season. Kathleen is feeling ripped off because her Cardinals only managed to play five games before an outbreak of Covid sidelined the entire team. But me, . . . hey, the Cubs are six games in front about a third of the way through the short season. They’re off to their best start since 1907. This . . .could . . . be . . . the . . . year!

And the cardboard cutouts go wild.

Self-Improvement

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”

            –Ralph Waldo Emerson

The picture above is from the classic 1980 horror film, The Shining. In the family portrait, patriarch Jack Nicholson, who has been isolated with his family for the winter, is showing signs that he is cracking under the pressure. By this point, many of us, too, are getting restless. The weather is warming up, and the activities we normally associate with spring and early summer are greatly curtailed, if not completely halted. As we search for ways to entertain ourselves in these difficult times, I have a suggestion: work on yourself. Anyone who is my age has probably experienced times in their adult lives where they wished they had more time for self-improvement. Well, now you have the time. Take advantage of it.

I’ve always been a bit fanatical on trying to improve myself in one regard or another. In some ways, that’s what the title of this blog, Take Five, is all about. Psychologist Carl Jung once wrote that men mature later than women, but that at some point, the various threads of their life begin to come together. The variety of things I have done in my life have all enjoyed a resurgence in recent weeks as I have sought ways to entertain myself and burn up some excess energy. Perhaps this means that I’m finally starting to mature. I have also discovered the value of YouTube videos to teach almost anything.

Even before this thing began, I was running or walking every day and doing lots of push-ups and other exercises while trying to stave off weight gain. I’ve taken that up a notch in recent weeks by adding a 5K time trial once a week. I mapped out a 3.1-mile course along a rocky ridge in a park near my house, and I run it for time once a week. There are two brutal hills leading to the top of the ridge, and I still have to walk partway up those hills, but the times are improving steadily. Even the downhill sections offer challenges, as I discovered last week when I tripped while trying to gain time on the steep finishing stretch. The trouble with falling while running downhill, as any trail-runner will attest, is that your body doesn’t stop when it hits the ground. You tend to bounce, slide, and roll down the hill before coming to a stop. Then you get up, check for injuries, wipe off the blood, and look around to make sure no one saw how stupid you were. Obviously, at my age, any physical activities come with a law of diminishing returns—my body won’t allow me to do what I once did, and I’ll only get slower as I age. So I understand that I’ll never run the 5K under 15:00 again, but the time trials give me a goal and a reason to run intervals and hill workouts each week.

Another thing I’ve always done is read and write for a while each day. In addition to working on my novels, I usually find myself reading three books at a time. I am currently reading one about the craft of writing, called, The First Five Pages. It focuses on the importance of the beginning of novels but also gives great tips on how to improve and streamline your writing. I always have a fun and relaxing novel going; right now I am reading a John Sandford novel featuring his detective character, Lucas Davenport. Davenport operates out of Minneapolis and often includes locations that are now familiar to us. Finally, I usually have a history book going at the same time. I just finished a history of Wisconsin and am now reading one called Wisconsin Frontier, by a River Falls native. I actually read that one years ago while researching my first novel, but picked it up again last week when I noticed that the dedication was to the town of River Falls. I am enjoying learning a little about my surrounding area through these books. In addition to reading, I have been trying to beef up my vocabulary by adding three new words to my repertoire each day. I make index cards and quiz myself periodically until I reach the point where I can own these words and use them in my writing. Hopefully, this work will help me abstain from solecism and pleonasms, use stronger words as succedaneums for flaccid and enervated vocabulary, and result in prose with a more refulgent quality. We’ll see.

I have also added two new diversions to my daily routine. For the first time in fifteen years or so, I have started playing guitar again. It took several weeks to get beyond the finger blisters and develop new callouses on my fingers, but the muscle memory and latent music theory is starting to return. It was almost like learning from scratch at first, with all of the frustrations of being a new musician. I’m now at the point, though, where I can learn new songs and try to develop better techniques by watching YouTube films. (And I thought they only had cute videos about cats and babies!) In particular, I am trying to improve my finger-picking, and I’ve found some great films about that skill. I am seeing some progress by practicing for about an hour a day. In addition to the things I have done in the past, I have taken up golf as well. I’ve always been terrible at golf, but I love being out on a course. As an 11-year-old caddy, I developed an appreciation for the beauty of golf courses, especially early in the morning when the rising sun is glinting off of the dew. The cost of the game and my inability to hit that damn ball consistently, however, have kept the opportunities to enjoy such scenes to a minimum. But I have tried to play once every 3 or 4 years just to keep my game sharp. I mentioned earlier that I now live right on a golf course, and I have scavenged nearly 200 golf balls from the woods during the winter months. Now, with time on my hands, I take a basket of balls to the nearby park and hit to my heart’s content. Ben, who was on his golf team in college, has showed me a few helpful things, and I have studied some YouTube videos to pick up some more tips. After running each day, I stop at the park and practice these new techniques for about an hour. Here, too, I am seeing some progress, although I have not as yet tried my skills on the actual course.

As the American writer Ernest Hemingway once said, “There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.” Self-improvement has been one of the core values of Western Civilization since the days of the Roman Empire. Rather than bemoaning the fact that we can’t be doing all of the things we would like to do, this is a great opportunity to learn something new or improve some aspect of our lives. I have encouraged Kathleen to take up gymnastics or triathlons, but she has thus far rejected most of my suggestions. She has, however, started reading Tolstoy’s 1400-page War and Peace (Seriously). As for myself, I was thinking about learning how to fish. Or perhaps some artistic pursuit, such as oil paints. Esperanto has always intrigued me . . .

Update: In a previous blog, I mused about the possibility of floating on waterways from River Falls to the Gulf of Mexico and beyond. Well, the other day I read about a worker on a Mississippi River bridge who had his hard-hat fall from his head and float away on the water. It had his name and contact information, but, of course, he never expected to see it again. Recently someone found his hat and called him about it. The amazing thing about this story is that the man found the hat on the coast of Ireland. The adventurous chapeau had apparently ridden the current down the Mississippi to the Gulf, and, from there, caught a ride on the Gulf Stream before winding up on the Emerald Isle. Pretty cool.

Take a Hike

On Wednesday of this week, I filled my gas tank. That may not sound like a big deal to you, but I last put gas in my car in November, over four months ago. That was good gas, though. It must have been, because it was that high-priced, $2.54 a gallon stuff. This time, I filled up with that cheap, $1.79 gas, so I’m sure it won’t last as long. This morning I read that gas is under a dollar a gallon in some places in Minnesota. I don’t want any part of that crappy petroleum, though. It might ruin my car. While I was at the gas station, I took my car through the car wash. When you are as proud of your vehicle as I am of my 15-year-old Ford Focus, you try to keep it looking good. So I wash it every other year, whether it needs it or not.

Like many other people, I have been trying to find ways to stay busy during this period of enforced captivity. More than anything else, I have used the time to write every day. My friend Bruce recently read a draft of my first novel, Forest Primeval, and made some excellent suggestions. So I have been working on incorporating those ideas. (I think this is about the 14th or 15th draft.)

I’ve also been working on another novel, tentatively called A Million to One, that centers around golf. One sporting event that we watch religiously each year is the Masters, which usually takes place in mid-April. Kathleen and I often put down a small bet on a golfer with relatively long odds. It gives us someone to cheer for, and, with a little luck, we could win four or five hundred dollars for our $20 bet. We have never actually won these bets, mind you, but it gave me the premise for this new book. In this story, a guy bets on a journeyman golfer to win all four major tournaments in the same year. As the golfer catches fire and wins the first few majors, the man with the bet stands to win an enormous amount of money and becomes a national celebrity. The title indicates the odds he received in Vegas for his $100 bet.

As the weather has warmed up, I have also enjoyed going out for a 4-6-mile run or walk each day. The need to go outside is especially powerful up here, where people have been cooped up all winter due to the cold temperatures. When it finally warmed up, the stay-at-home orders kicked in. Because of that, I thought that the Kinnickinnic State Park would be crowded with hikers when I went there earlier this week.

The park is less than 10 miles from my home, and it covers the last mile of the Kinnickinnic River before it empties into the St. Croix River. This was my first trip to the park, and I thoroughly enjoyed it on a warm and sunny day. To my surprise, I did not encounter anyone else, except for a group of the fattest wild turkeys I’ve ever seen. I politely gave them the right-of-way. The trails are mostly grass covered, although some them still had sections of ice or snow or were muddy from the recent melt-off. I covered six miles on meandering trails, and it was a great opportunity to allow my mind to wander and ponder the possibilities presented by the little river that runs through River Falls. If I were so inclined, I could build a crude raft, Huck Finn style. I could put it in the water of the Kinnickinnic downtown, just past the dam and falls that give the town its name. Then I could let the current carry me, theoretically at least, down to the St. Croix, which feeds into the Mississippi a short distance from here. From that confluence, I could float past St. Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans, into the Gulf of Mexico. At that point, a person would become part of the great waters that make up the oceans and seas of the world. You could sail to Japan, Africa, Europe, or India. The very thought makes the imagination soar.

With no actual Masters tournament to watch this year, I have found it to be somewhat cathartic—and a whole lot of fun—to at least be able to write about a fictional golfer. Similarly, while being locked up at home most of the day, my mind is kept alive by thoughts of travelling to distant parts of the world where I have never been. An American cyclist named Jamie Paolinetti once said that “Limitations live only in our minds. But if we use our imaginations, our possibilities become limitless.”

We may all have to remember that over the next few months.