by Tom Coyne
As I sat in the driver’s seat of my yellow Ford, I weighed the probability of whether or not I had arrived. A sign marked GOLF had pointed me along an unpaved path, and that path ended here, so while there was no parking lot to speak of, I figured I must be at the course. There was a tattered flagstick atop some gray rocks in the distance, but there was no clubhouse—not even a shed. There was a steel storage container and a fence with a gate, but what made me most doubt my destination was the black bull staring at the hood of my car. It was roughly the size of a dump truck, with a bona fide brass ring hanging from its nostrils (I thought bulls had those things only in cartoons), and I had no doubt that it could flip my hatchback around like a Frisbee if the mood struck. With my eyes fixed on the bull’s, I wondered if I could find reverse in this stick-shift should it make a move. I hardly noticed as two gentlemen in caps and jeans approached my window.
I still don’t know how Murdoch and Roddy knew I was going to be there at that exact time, but I was relieved to find two Barra members to show me around what was indeed the golf course. They told me I was right to be wary of the bull; he’d been a bit of a problem lately, charging foursomes and busting through the fences protecting the greens. Ravens were actually the bigger problem at Barra, they explained, as they liked to scoop up one’s ball and fly it up the mountain and drop it on the rocks, thinking they had snatched an egg.
The course was mostly rock, with patches of moss and turf off which we could play our shots—a local rule gave everyone two club lengths to move their ball everywhere—and we entered each green through an iron turnstile, fences having been put in place to discourage the cattle. There was no missing the cows—or their droppings—at Barra, but for all its ditches and blind shots and hoofprints and rocky caroms, I loved every minute of my two-hour hike along this craigside terrain. I felt like Garrity and Irvine at Askernish, discovering a golf course in hiding. And it was well hidden, even as we played it. Nine concrete tee boxes covered in worn plastic turf would have been impossible to locate without my guides, nor would I have known which fenced ring to aim for without their direction. We traversed ravines and climbed boulders in search of my tee balls. I was too busy minding my next step or taking in views of the beach on which I had just landed to find each shot, but Murdoch was a golf ball clairvoyant. My greatest feat in Barra, grander than if I had won the gold medal at St. Andrews, was that I played the course without losing a single Titleist.
Murdoch and Rory explained that the condition of the course varied depending on members’ availability. They themselves pulled mowers out of the metal container I had parked beside and cut the grass, which may have explained why the ninth fairway, all of four feet wide, was the narrowest in Scotland—who had the time to bother broadening it? The members’ stake in the course was the best scheme for course ownership I had ever encountered. The club paid rent to a local farmer solely for the square footage of the greens, and the rest of the land they shared with the herds. The greens were like putting on Velcro, but no matter—Barra GC had made golf not just affordable but possible on this improbable stretch of mountainside. And in so doing, they had made a complicated game feel as simple as it should: hit your ball, chase it, mind the cows, and smell the roses. As my shots pinballed off volcanic humps against a backdrop of whitecaps crashing on the beach, I was keenly and gratefully aware that this was a game, and I was playing.
• • •
When I teach poetry to my freshmen in English 101—rather, when I implore nineteen business majors to abandon their aversion to verse, because this was going to be on the final—I always go to Billy Collins. Our former poet laureate’s work is accessible yet dense with ideas and emotion. The kids know the words, and they feel empowered to interpret them. I also enjoy telling them that Collins is a big golfer, a fun fact I love. I feel like a golfing poet laureate buys me some cred in academia, where not that many other professors have canceled class for a mid-amateur qualifier. Golf has the cadences and emotions and images of good poetry, so why don’t all poets golf? Why am I the weird one? A friend who golfs with Collins told me of his passion for links golf in particular, and when I saw the below on Askernish’s website, I decided I had to follow the footsteps of not just John Garrity or David Owen or Old Tom but Billy Collins, whose job is knowing beauty, and who does his job very well.
South Uist
There’s a handful of reasons to come here.
The salmon’s as good as the drinks.
Some like the whisky, some like the beer,
But I’m happiest when out on the links.
It’s fine to be a student of genealogy
Busy tracing your family’s course,
But the only ghost I need for company
Is the ghost of Old Tom Morris.
The hikers come for the air and the sights,
And the anglers are here for the fishing,
But nothing is better under blue skies
Than when I’m Askernishing.
—Billy Collins
US Poet Laureate 2001–2003
There is playing golf, and there is golfing; we’re familiar with both. But then there is Askernishing. Before I had been there, I thought it a clever pub bet of a poem—Hey, Collins, I bet you can’t rhyme Askernish! But Askernishing was a thing, a genuine experience, and one bigger than a game of plastic balls and iron rods. Askernishing was understanding the indiscernible. It was feeling your own insignificance with joy and with relief. Whether you found it on mountaintops or in magazines or on golf courses or in church, to Askernish was to realize. To be alone yet feel connected. It was good. It was the stuff of poetry.
The first ferry from Barra brought me to the bottom end of South Uist early in the morning. I dropped my bags at my hotel—the hotel—on the way up to the course, and by the time I pulled into the field that served as the course parking lot, there were three cars there in the grass ahead of mine, Tom Young’s being one of them. I wasn’t sure what a found golf course would look like; there were no diggers from where the holes had been unearthed, no archaeologists brushing sand off the tee boxes. There was a lot of grass that looked gray beneath low clouds and thousands of tiny white flowers dotting what seemed to be both fairway and rough. It was all sort of flat, from what I could see, which was only as far as a wall of dunes in the distance.
There was a small teahouse/pro shop where I sat down with Tom and his wife, Tracy, for a cup. There were some Askernish shirts and souvenirs in the back, and up front there were paperbacks spread around the room, as if they wanted to make the writer feel at home. The woman behind the counter made excellent soup and scones, but she also ran an independent press, ThunderPoint Publishing. Not only were they preserving Old Tom’s island legacy at Askernish but they were also keeping literary fiction alive in print. The place immediately felt more rare and important; they fought the uphill battles out here on the edges, making things as they figured things ought to be.
Tom and Tracy had arrived the evening before after two nights at the Rusacks Hotel that overlooks St. Andrews’s eighteenth—a worthy splurge for the view, never mind the creaky floors. A reader of both Owen and Garrity’s accounts, Tom was as eager to visit Askernish as I was, and he had already gone around in the twilight the evening before.
“Well? Is it that good?” I asked him. “Is it worth coming out here for?”
Tracy smothered a laugh. Going from the Ugadale in Kintyre and the Rusacks in St. Andrews to the wee Borrodale Hotel in South Uist was a leap (the latter was actually nicer than I expected, clean with islander charm and a lively pub), and she must have been wondering how her vacation days from work came to be spent trying to find eighteen holes in the rain in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. She truly loved her guy, and her guy seemed to know why they were there, even if he wasn’t letting on.
“You tell me,” he said. “I’m not saying anything until you’ve played it.”
So we played. The first three holes behind the teahouse were sleepy and plain, e
ven as they circled us around a field of geographical anomaly known as machair, a fertile seaside soil that hugged the dunes and was unique to this corner of the Hebrides. It harbored the rarest of fauna and small wildlife and seemed an appropriately exclusive carpet for the links I hoped did not just top the list but made its own list, on which Askernish was the only entry. But these opening holes, while fair and fun enough if they were the start of my backyard links, had me worried. I hadn’t come all this way to find that the miracle of Askernish was simply that it existed, when I expected it to both exist and alter my golfing worldview. But the layout mimicked something of Garrity’s experience in finding the original course, when he begins his day slowly, then peeks over a hilltop and finds the verse.
The course warms and hints at the drama to come until, at number seven, you ascend the tee, and you have arrived. You have chased Old Tom all this way, to a peak overlooking a valley of deep fairway twisting through towering dunes, and you feel as if you’ve finally grabbed the old man by the tail of his coat. He turns around to congratulate you and welcome you to the culmination of his work.
The irresistibility of Askernish among design disciples is its time-capsule purity. It’s an opportunity to see genuine Old Tom, unaltered by greens committees and updaters. It’s unique on the golfing planet as a window into golf’s past; academically, Askernish mattered, but I was not here as a professor. I was here to play, and I did so like a child without a curfew.
I’ve experienced rounds when I didn’t want the golf to end, but there was something about the rising action at Askernish that seemed to pull me through the golf course, a pleasure cruise I couldn’t depart. When the airport was fogged in the next morning, meaning I would miss my practice round for the qualifier and a long-planned visit to the final rota course at Musselburgh, I was thankful for the chance for more Askernish.
Maybe it was the solitude, with nobody on the course save the three of us, and then just me after Tom and Tracy left for their flight to Glasgow. Perhaps it was the remoteness of this edge of the known world, driving golf balls toward Nova Scotia. Maybe it was the holes themselves and the mystery of their sitting unsown for a century, left to the sheep and the wind, waiting to be found again. Maybe it was that there was nothing else to do on the island (I’m sure there was, but I wasn’t there to bird-watch). But to me, the ultimate pull of Askernish was in the implications of its deep and unspoiled roots—the place proved the game to be timeless and profound. It validated my golf obsession. First discovered by an old man from St. Andrews and then by a writer from Missouri, Askernish was evidence that there were corners of god’s earth, rare and remote, that had been gifted to golfers. It might stretch the bounds of grandiosity to conflate golf and one of its courses with a divine plan, but as I climbed each dune to discover another perfect golf hole that seemed to have no business being there, I couldn’t help but feel the providence all over this place. It wasn’t heaven on earth—now that would be grandiose—but if I make it to heaven someday and find that it isn’t Askernish, I fear I might be disappointed.
I’d played with a Scot back on the east coast who had warned me that Askernish was nothing special, a golfer who doubted its connection to Old Tom (That’s a Morris course? Not the course I played. That’s a bundle of pish), and I understood the dichotomy of our reactions. After the time and travel and legends and hype, which I’m presently guilty of inflating myself, Askernish cut two ways: You either felt it in your gut or you kicked yourself for not spending two more days in Ayrshire. The greens are shaggy and severely kinked; the white flower buds dotting the fairways make finding your ball a dizzying endeavor, and you will find dozens of sandy rabbit holes for each one with a flag in it. Askernish won’t make everyone on your next Scottish buddy trip smile. But for the open-minded golf soul seekers, they will want to go around again. And again. And did I ever.
My first time around, I was playing golf, snapping pictures, and getting a feel for the place, reconciling what I was seeing with what I had read. After some soup in the teahouse, on my second eighteen I was golfing, my shoulders loose from the morning warm-up and my body trying to shape shots that complemented the landscape. By my third round, I was hungry but unable to stop myself and turn for the car, and by my evening round, after the teahouse was dark for the day, I was Askernishing.
The weariness of flights and ferries and seventy-two holes relaxed my head into a state of mushy mindfulness, and I saw the old man in brown wool climbing the windy dunes ahead of me. He was fit for his age, still swimming every morning in the cold Atlantic waves. I had to hustle to keep up with the white beard in the distance, a test to earn my time on a course he knew they would forget about. It was meant to ripen and age until it was needed. And I felt a tingle in my eyes and a tugging at the top of my throat—I could have cried if I was the crying sort, because a wave of recognition nearly knocked me over. I needed Askernish. For a moment, I was entirely convinced that Old Tom made this place for right now, and for me.
I don’t know why my parents named me Robert and then decided to call me by my middle name, Thomas. I suspect there was some Irish family secret about my namesakes, but they said I just looked more like a Tom when I was born. I appreciated their reasoning, but if they would have waited a few minutes before filling out my birth certificate, they could have saved me a lifetime of confusion in doctors’ offices and with telemarketers (if anyone calls our house asking for Robert, we hang up immediately), and on the first day of class when the teacher asks if anyone has a variation of their name by which they preferred to be called. My profs expected Robert Coyne to say he went by Robby or Bob, but when I asked them to call me Tom, each new semester began with a classroom chuckle, and so was born my college nickname, Robert-Call-Me-Tom.
I knew that traveling the UK for two months on my own was going to stir up warm-bellied memories and old inclinations, but I decided to leave them to a different version of me, and in trying to describe the experience of a life lived in such distinct chapters, I would call that version Robert. Much has changed in four years—so much that I recall many of my yesterdays as belonging to someone else. There were a lot of good times, and then some dark and dire times. Robert was my life of the latter.
I had once dreamed of birdies and bestsellers, but my fantasies changed through those foggy years. I came to long for a nonexistence in which my days might somehow be over before they began. People went to work and shopped and met their friends for laughs and conversation; it all looked impossible while I wandered in life’s margin, searching for a way to disappear. I dreamed of normal. I dreamed of not needing a drink before I could steady my feet beside my bed. I dreamed today would be different; when it never was, I dreamed tomorrow might be. I dreamed that I even cared.
Robert joined me and spoke more loudly on some parts of this trip than others, in moments when I wanted to complain or quit or escape. I could have left that side of myself in my notebook, but keeping him quiet requires honesty, and it would have been fiction to leave out the drive behind every swing and every step, to pretend that it really mattered whether I golfed Scotland or qualified for the Open; truth was, that I was now dreaming about either was my life’s miracle. I don’t suppose I needed all this golf to know it, but it helped remind me that my daily prayer had once been to cease existing, but something still thought that I should. And then I did so. Determinedly.
I don’t think I’m special because I made a change in my life, nor do I think booze is the devil’s elixir. I loved the stuff, with every atom of my being. Still do. Alcohol wasn’t my problem; rather, it was my solution. The problem was that when it stopped being my solution, I couldn’t stop drinking it. Ay, the rub, to find the thing that makes your life run smooth and forward, and then find it gives you the shakes and makes your spouse cry at night and sends you to the emergency room, where you flatline three times while your wife and two-year-old daughter are on the other side of the glass.
How a few years later I could find myself stan
ding on a hill on a Scottish island, blood pumping through my muscles, with clear eyes and mind—it was pure mystery, but the soul-affirming kind. It was very much a different life, as distinct as a Robert and a Tom. When I let obsession take over or try to strangle life into coughing out the results I demand, I’m letting him speak for me; but in taking things easy and in small pieces, he goes silent, and so far, so good. That’s the daily grind and gift of life today. You have to have dangled your toes out over the abyss to really know it, but no matter whether you can drink with impunity or pig out without consequence or screw around without remorse, I think there are two kinds of people—the chasers and the found. The latter is a rare species. So just because I order club soda these days and eat ice cream by the bucket (there’s a lot of sugar in Chardonnay that needs replacing; sobriety comes with a wicked sweet tooth), we’re not that different. We’re people, programmed to want that which we cannot have, to feel a void that we need to fill with distraction or with purpose, with sadness or joy, with vocations or with drinks. Same problems, different medicines.
My former strategy for living was: Life is uncomfortable, so get comfortable. It was a crap design with an inevitable conclusion, and the new plan has yielded far healthier fruit: Be honest. Try to listen. And try to try. Three simple axioms that got me from dead on a table to Askernishing in South Uist, where there was no room for any Robert part of me on this tight little island. I felt thankful in a way that made me suspect that gratitude wasn’t a side effect of good fortune or a condiment to be spread over happiness but the whole damn point in itself. I felt certain that I had found what I’d come for in Askernish, an undeniable answer in the feeling of being truly present. BE PRESENT was engraved on the back of my wedge, but it had taken me forty years to feel it without worry or pretense or distraction, and to feel entirely available to my current circumstances. I suspect it felt like harmony, grace, and joy, but more than anything, it just felt.