Winter Golf | Twisp, WA | February 2020
Soccer teams play on muddy fields. Runners dash through rainstorms. Bicyclists pedal on sheets of ice. But golfers seem to brave more inclement weather than almost any other sports enthusiasts. They’re on the links in downpours, blizzards, 15-degree cold snaps, 100-degree heat waves and even wind conditions that whisk away their bright-colored caps. I had a friend who’d drive 200 miles in early spring to find a golf course with a strip of bare dirt. And, of course, people fly to California, Hawaii and Scotland to knock a little white ball into a little round hole. It’s an elusive allure that’s hard to describe. But I’ve heard golfers, fishermen, rock climbers and beachcombers all try to define this mysterious draw of the not yet done, the not yet discovered. It’s completing the action or finding the object — a putt, a trout, a summit, a rare shell — that they know is there, just out of their grasp, only seconds away from real.
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