by Tom Coyne
Over the course of the last five weeks, I had become a why man: Why is it raining again? Why aren’t the putts dropping? Why are the numbers adding up wrong again? I needed to get back to the notion that had put me on the plane, the inkling that had sold me and my family and my friends on this adventure. The next morning, Garth would be on his way back to the States and I would be on a tiny plane up to a ferry to a drive to the northernmost golf course on the northernmost island in the United Kingdom, because months before I’d believed I might find the secret to golf there. Why? Because if you’re after something they say doesn’t exist, you have to go to places they haven’t been. Maybe—just maybe—the secret was in Shetland. Why? Because my week with a sub-100 golfer had reminded me: Why not?
Upward
The rental agent was one of three people in the airport when I arrived for my flight—the other two were staffing the small café—and as I returned my keys (I had been instructed to park my rental car anywhere in the lot upon return; there wasn’t far to look for it), he inquired about what had brought me to the Orkney Islands with golf clubs.
It was an innocent and polite inquiry, but its unintended weight gave me pause. What the hell had I just done with the last thirty hours of my life? My journal noted that I had taken three flights and two ferries, visited four golf courses, and bought two puffin puppets for my girls, but what had really landed me here? If we had a week, I thought, maybe I could offer an explanation.
It would start somewhere around age thirteen, when I emerged from a winter’s worth of lessons to the season’s first round on Teeth of the Dog in the Dominican Republic—I was a tagalong on one of Dad’s business trips—where I banged a first drive, stuck a 5-iron, and dropped a birdie putt, and for an instant, golf was effortless and ideal. From that moment, I was golf—not just a golfer but a person who dreamt golf and loved and resented the game in equal measure, who could abandon it for months or years and still feel it there, binding his foundation. And until I found another birdie like that first birdie, until I again knew effortless and ideal, I would be traveling to places like Kirkwall with this quiver full of arrows.
But I was tired and my phone was in need of charging, so I handed him the keys and told him I was a golf writer here to sample all of Scotland, and had read that the Stromness golf course was worth the trip.
I planted myself next to the only outlet in sight and barricaded myself behind my golf bag. In this one-room terminal, my rolling sack felt like a coffin on wheels. It had barely fit onto the plane that brought me up here, and I had a plea prepared should it raise flags during the next boarding. I would buy another seat for my sticks if need be. I didn’t care if they had to move the copilot out and let my clubs ride shotgun: the Mizunos were flying today.
I looked up from my laptop to see the car rental agent standing in front of me, looking relieved to have caught me before takeoff. He had just returned from inspecting the car, and I felt myself sliding downward in my seat, wondering if there was room in that coffin for me to hide. We were five minutes from boarding the flight back to Inverness; I had nearly made it, but now I braced myself for news that Kirkwall’s inventory of two rental cars had been cut in half. Ours had been a short partnership, but I was certain I’d inflicted a warranty’s worth of abuse upon the transmission of my innocent hatchback. An automatic was not on the rental menu in the Orkneys, so I ground my way around the island, expertly shifting from first to fourth, then testing out what reverse felt like at forty miles per hour. The lack of radio stations on this subarctic isle was not a problem; I wouldn’t have been able to hear any music over the sound of the moaning gearbox, which, if the agent needed it back, he would likely find in the left lane of traffic about a half mile up the road.
He stood before me with a half smile on his face, his cheeks bronzed by northern life, and I waited for him to hand over a damage report or request a credit card. I’d been careful to ruin the car both inside and out, veering into walls and vegetation as I whiffed at the clutch. I could accept the cost and would willingly pay for whatever alterations he’d located on the Skoda I so thoroughly bushwhacked—not a panel had been spared—but I had yet to decide whether the mounting price of my island jaunt had been worth it.
• • •
Aside from postcards of small horses, and the fact that its name sounded very far away, I knew nothing of Shetland. I would learn that it was an ancient archipelago with prehistoric ruins that had been inhabited by Picts, Romans, Vikings, and Norwegians, the former eventually passing along control of the Shetland Isles to Scotland in a dowry deal when the king of Norway’s daughter married into Scottish royalty in the 1400s. The unassuming islands played an important role in World War II when a covert Norwegian convoy called the Shetland Bus ran refugees and intelligence between Shetland and Nazi-occupied Norway. Today, the islands’ inhabitants made their livings finding fish and petroleum in the northern seas. The largest of these hundred islands was called Mainland (a rather unimaginative title for such an ancient archipelago, I thought), and an hour’s flight from Inverness brought me there, to where twenty thousand denizens shared three golf courses for their amusement.
The crush of links awaiting me back in Inverness and the Highlands had shrunken my Shetland island-hopping down to a one-evening stay with a return layover through the Orkneys (another island group halfway between Shetland and the Scottish mainland) to squeeze in Stromness, a course warmly regarded by Gary Sutherland in his island golf book Golf on the Rocks. My upward detour from Inverness was the untidiest and most ill-planned portion of the trip, a side jaunt challenged by once-a-day flights, tight ferry timetables, and a thin smattering of places to sleep. I had little idea how I was going to make it from the airport to a golf course, then up to a ferry at the north end of Mainland that would take me out to the isle of Whalsay, home of the northernmost golf course in the UK, and then back to catch the last return ferry to Mainland because wee Whalsay was without accommodation, all with enough time to hustle back down to sample the Shetland Golf Club before setting off to find the lone hotel, with fingers crossed that the lights might still be on in the kitchen.
I expected to be panicked on the morning of my departure, but instead I felt at peace about the day ahead. With no real design to worry about, I was forced to take the next thirty hours as they came. I hoped for the best as I pulled out of the Mainland airport, following signs that had me driving across the runway I’d just landed upon. It seemed I was heading the right way. There was only one road, and only one direction to go—up.
In less than an hour I was pulling into the Asta Golf Club, where I found an empty parking lot just large enough for two foursomes. I was excited to visit this island nine-holer on the banks of Tingwall Loch, where a handful of weary flagsticks were nestled between green and pebbled hillsides. My anticipation had less to do with the course’s pedigree—scour the Internet as you might, the tiny course had no real reputation to speak of—than it did with my fascination with its website, which was written entirely in yellow Comic Sans font, a typeface typically reserved for the business cards of birthday party clowns.
I was either about to play Scotland’s worst golf course or its biggest surprise; no matter what, it would be worth the hour flight up to Shetland, which I spent wondering how this former four-beers-and-an-Ambien flier had found himself on a budget airline called Flybe in a plane designed to fit neatly inside other planes with a pilot who, I was certain, was up late playing video games in his parents’ living room. I imagined the headlines about my demise—surely it would get some coverage in the Highland news—folks shaking their heads at the tragic folly of someone who booked a seat on an airline that sounded like a child’s imaginary friend.
Asta was not worth risking one’s life for (and I didn’t—Flybe turned out to be a smooth and hassle-free conveyor), but it was worth chancing a ferry reservation for the opportunity to walk around its tiny glen of a golf course. The lochside scenery was both stunning and spare, and aside
from the road next to the course, there was little reminder of civilization in sight. There was no one in the clubhouse (more like a cabin) when I arrived, but the door was open and visitors were encouraged to drop their greens fees into a box. The scorecard showed a simple map of nine holes—mostly par 3s—with names of both English and unknown origin. The course was mostly a lakeside field with a few vaulted greens and quirky turns, a plot of interesting hillside and waterside grass with a handful of pins inviting you to find your own golf course. Reminiscent of St. Andrews’s bygone strategy for managing course wear, Asta’s website mentioned that the layout was meant to be played clockwise for two weeks, then counterclockwise for the rest of the month. I had no idea which week I had arrived on, so I played it crisscross-counterclockwise, hitting to whichever flag presented itself and inventing Asta Golf Club as I went.
The fifty-eight-yard seventh hole, Da Neuk, was a quick favorite as I lobbed a ball into a nest of mounds at the edge of the loch, the green sitting below the humps like a lost tomb; yard for yard, it was a clever little treasure. That evening I researched the hole’s name. A Dutch translation for Da Neuk came back first, and while it would make sense for a golf hole to borrow from Holland, where colf was born, I couldn’t understand why they would have dubbed this corker of a hole That Fuck. More research revealed that the Scottish translation was The Corner—a more fitting moniker, as it sat at the far bend of the course.
As I played my way back to my car along what I guessed was the ninth fairway, I heard what sounded like a waterfall. In the thick grass banks along the edge of the course I found a small gap where a cascading stream was pouring off the neighboring mountain, the water flowing beneath the course on its way to the loch. It looked like a sort of secret and ancient spring, and I couldn’t help myself—though I was in a rush to get up to the ferry port, I stopped. I suddenly felt the strongest compulsion to baptize my clubs at the top of the world. I rinsed each of them in the fast-moving water, even giving my putter a splash, hoping that this was where the magic was and that the bogeys might all be cleansed away. I leaned over to take a handful to drink, then thought of the livestock dotting the hills all around me and the centuries of sheep shit in which I had just bathed my clubs. Lang may yer lum reek, Asta Golf Club. I found my car in a lot that was still empty and made my way north.
• • •
In three weeks’ time, I would meet a crowded field of players with proud tournament résumés and world rankings and invitations to events where I could only hope to score a press pass. There were not enough days left in my golfing life to truly become one of them, but as I stood at the top of the home of golf on the edge of the Whalsay Golf Club, a dark ocean separating my feet from the polar ice cap, I realized that I had come this far in search of something I already knew. I thought I had traveled to the northernmost golf course in the UK because none of those players would have. They wouldn’t know Asta or the Orkneys, would never have played a round with a muddy four-wheeler for a golf cart or been greeted as I was that afternoon by the club manager, who shook my hand outside the clubhouse and said, “You must really love golf to be all the way up here.”
I did, and that was why I was here. I could chase the secret to golf and my perfect round until my feet bled (and my crumpled toes did some days), but I would likely find no better answer for this game and what I was chasing than that I loved it. I was here because golf was here. I was a golfer afflicted, always had been, and so were those players down in Edinburgh. In three weeks, it would be nice to walk together.
My ferry ride over to Whalsay was like thirty minutes in an elevator: of the five other cars on the boat, nobody else was getting out, so I sat there as the bridge went up in front of me. We moved. Bridge went down, and there I was on this island off an island. Though I had been disciplined about walking the courses, I was behind schedule for the last ferry back to Mainland. I had also never before had the chance to travel a golf course on a four-wheeler—the only “golf cart” on the property—so I tossed my clubs in the back and we roared toward the first tee. We got to properly play only fifteen or so—plenty enough to get the idea that this was a good golf course anywhere, but set on the northernmost cliffs above the fishing boats, it was an absolutely special one.
Like most of the island courses, Whalsay was clay and turf atop rock instead of a sandy-bottomed links, so the wet winter clung to the earth stubbornly, making for a muddy afternoon between silvery rocks that kept the fairways from sliding into the ocean. You didn’t come to a place like this unless you wanted something different, and the course offered that in full, a track of yawning fairways stretched over the crest of a hilltop, calm and cold water all around. Far below the greens, mackerel and scallop boats moved slowly at the top of the world. Some courses felt natural, but at Whalsay, one felt consumed by nature on a track that blended golf and earth on a faraway northern isle. Look for the pin, send your ball after it, chase it down, and mind the sheep and the cliffs as you went.
Graeme, the club captain and my on-course chaperone, hustled me around from one snapshot view to the next, incredibly proud of this place where he and his friends were making golf happen in a land where the sun disappeared for months at a time.
Island life was quiet and hard. People came up here for work, to a world of heavy shoulders and cracked palms where a golf course might feel like an experiment or a desperate diversion. But Whalsay had maintained its tight fairways and soft greens for forty years with a handful of holes that any designer would covet; the tee on the cliffside par 4 sixteenth offered an elevated perspective of a soft blue horizon that seemed to wrap around me entirely. The Ryder Cup trophy had visited the year before, and in the pictures from the celebration, it looked as though the whole island had shown up to touch it, with kids waving Scottish flags at the camera. I had come to experience a golf extreme, to follow Scotland’s trail of holes to its farthest end, expecting to find a sort of golfing Everest inhabited by off-the-grid hermits. What I found were good people on a great course where running a golf club wasn’t a curiosity or a sidenote but a natural part of a peaceful life.
I was sorry to leave Whalsay in such a rush, but the final boat beckoned. From the return ferry, I raced down to the Shetland Golf Club to quickly sample my third track of the day. My morning in Inverness felt like a childhood memory; I knew the days were long up here, but this one had whole weeks to it. I parked in a lot half full of cars and grabbed a scorecard out of the empty clubhouse. From the first tee I could see a vast inland track below me, treeless holes stretched across a deep valley and dissected by a wandering burn. It looked like a fun and proper test, the course dotted with evening threesomes on holes that ran down and then back up the Shetland hillsides. It also looked like too much. For this day, far too much. I ripped a driver off the first tee and took two steps to follow it, then stopped, marked my card with a 1, and dragged my clubs back to the car. I had played Shetland Golf Club—just not quite all of it.
When I got back to the Scalloway Hotel, the bar was shoulder-to-shoulder, a blend of families and fishermen bringing a close to the work week. Men with beards and heavy jackets cast tired stares over tables of foam-lined glasses. Some of them spoke Spanish, visitors in search of mackerel. I found a spot back in the corner next to an old man reading a book and nursing a pint. My fish and chips were lovely and disappeared in a moment, and I surveyed the pub as men and women toasted Friday night. The windows were still bright at 10:00 p.m., giving the tipsy room the feeling of a strangely timed party. It was a place of travelers and laborers and deep-rooted locals all squeezed together as if to check in on one another, demonstrating the camaraderie of people who shared the joys and hardships of life faraway. I felt at home. I was so fortunate to be a golfer, I thought. I could be in Philadelphia right now, browsing Home Depot for paintbrushes.
I sank into my chair and thought of my friend. Robert would not have cared much for the golf that day—too much work to see more golf beside the water—but he would have m
ade the flight for this pub. It was a room full of conversation-hungry strangers he would never see again; such places were Robert’s most beloved milieus, chances to practice his sincerity and see the world as a genuine place. It was like an airport bar, where talk came easy and you could be anyone you chose. For Robert, these settings tingled with possibility, and he would have worked his Yankee accent to its fullest potential, owning the room as he and a table of fishermen cured all the world’s ills before sunrise. He would talk of the books he had written and the miles he had traversed; he would win their approval, and not because he could but because he had to. I knew, because I once won that way. Gaining a stranger’s appreciation was a panacea above all others, a salve to heal whatever sort of mess our lives presented us the next morning. That evening on Mainland, I missed Robert. I missed the Robert part of me.
I did not miss the hangover the next morning as I departed at dawn to catch a flight down to Kirkwall in the Orkney Islands, where I was stopping off for a few hours to play the Stromness Golf Club. Rain dampened a round I had been anticipating on this 125-year-old layout enveloped by dark sea, with holes woven into an overlapping tapestry. The whole place slanted across a hill that was still soft from the dark months. At the water’s edge, concrete World War I bunkers were tucked into the earth of Stromness, and at the far end of the course, a World War II armory sat dormant behind tall barbed-wire fences. The faded green walls and shuttered windows of the long, squat buildings haunted the course in the rain. I thought of soldiers who once crossed these fairways to man a post and await an invasion, and I wondered how I ever could have thought my golfing days were hard. I was so soft, and so fortunate to have the chance to be so.