Likeness

by David Macfarlane

  Many of the streets near our house—Spruceside, Mapleside, Mountain, Fairmount, Undermount, Ravenscliffe, Hillcrest—had names that attested to the inclining nature of the neighbourhood. There were flooded basements in the spring on our street, and lawnmowers that had to be pushed uphill if they were going to be pushed at all. On more than one occasion my mother may have mentioned: not a single blessed thing in our whole entire house was level.

  My mother regarded nature with the wariness of an outpost commander surrounded by enemy forces. And when I got the stepladder from the shed and climbed up on the roof of the pool cabana with the hedge clippers (“before those wild grape vines take over the whole flaming world”) there were hornets to be careful about. And there were peach pits and avocado skins and melon rinds that the squirrels had conveyed from the compost. There were glimpses of neighbours’ yards, and sometimes even of neighbours. But from the cabana roof there was no view of anything like the one in the painting. There’s no view at all. Except of the trees. That’s all you saw, really.

  15

  My father and I played what was still known, in those days, as the Men’s. There was a less demanding course. It was nine holes, woven around the Men’s back nine. It was known as the Junior Course or, if you were stubbornly old-fashioned, the Ladies’. It was a shade-less, unsurprising par thirty-two. I played it every now and then. Between shifts of my summer job at the steel company, I hitchhiked out to the golf club a few times a week. So the story that I like to remember telling Blake at our dinner table was not only a story of the one time in my life I played golf with my father. It was the one time in my life I was on the Men’s Course. I remember standing up after placing my ball on the first tee and thinking: Whoa, that’s a big view. And it was usually around this part of the story that Blake started to laugh.

  Colt believed that it was his job to imagine a course that wouldn’t completely discourage beginners while, at the same time, would demand a good golfer’s best play. He had a genius for this. Which was why the secretary of the Hamilton Golf and Country Club, on behalf of the board of directors, wrote him in the first place.

  The course had to be challenging, even infuriating. And yet it had to be a pleasure. Oh, and it had to be beautiful. And if finding the synthesis of these apparent contradictions was not difficult enough, there was another demand made of great golf course designers—an obligation to the very spirit of the game.

  It was also Colt’s job (Colt felt strongly) to dream of a course on which a truly great player could have a truly great day. If the dream of a perfect round isn’t woven into the texture of the course you’re on, you’re not playing golf. You’re practising. Colt believed.

  His creative energies were entirely regulated by his knowledge of golf. Golfers, he understood. And golfers, he knew, are nothing if not dreamers. Colt felt that his duty to his clients—part of his duty, anyway—was to accommodate (in landscape) the possibility (in theory) of those rare moments (in time) when the human form (in movement) is aligned with the unfolding universe. Effortless. Free. Imbedded in a course’s design had to be the possibility of somebody playing it brilliantly.

  “Gentlemen,” Colt said to directors gathered round where he stood on the highest point of a burdock-covered hill near the village of Ancaster, a few miles west of the city of Hamilton. This was in the spring of 1914. After a dramatic pause, he raised his voice over the blustery wind. “If you have the money to spend, there is no reason why you should not have one of the finest golf courses in America.”

  That the Hamilton Golf and Country Club was not in Hamilton, but Ancaster, was only confusing to those who didn’t belong to it. Nobody called it the Ancaster club, although for the two or three summers I had a membership, a few older players still called it “the Ancaster course.” This was a holdover from the time when it was necessary to distinguish the Ancaster site from the club’s original location—which, as it happens, was only a few blocks west of my parents’ house on Glenfern. It’s a golf course still. Chedoke is owned and operated by the City of Hamilton. Quite a lovely course, actually—possessed of the same incline as our back garden, its fairways lined with the same kinds of trees I’d been able to see from my first bedroom window.

  The Chedoke municipal course bracketed the western border of our neighbourhood, merging briefly with the Bruce Trail. The rough of the back nine tumbled westward into sumac and milkweed. It wasn’t quite the wilderness out there. But the escarpment was overgrown and tangled enough to pass for wilderness for us. Neighbourhood children were the kind of nuisance the membership of the private club elected to avoid.

  By the early years of the twentieth century, the directors could see that the pressure of the city’s growth was bound to compromise the pastoral nature of the original course. Westinghouse, Otis Elevator, International Harvester, Procter and Gamble, Dofasco, and Stelco were the foundations of the ambitious city’s industry. That was Hamilton’s official self-description: the Ambitious City. There was a tobacco company. There was a cotton company. There were wire companies. A friend lived down the street whose grandfather had founded a company that made (only) casket handles. And the presence of this industry gave the city an unfussy practicality. Hamilton was a lunch-bucket town, and it wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. There was smog. There was noise. And yes, the harbour was polluted. So what? If you don’t want smog, noise, and pollution go to a city that doesn’t make steel. That, in broad strokes, was Hamilton’s position on environmental protection for the better part of the twentieth century. But this cut both ways for the city’s businessmen and lawyers. They weren’t sure they wanted to play golf next to a roaring industrial economy.

  By the early years of the twentieth century there were complaints about the train tracks across the seventh fairway and about the drifting soot from the TH&B engines that chugged through approach shots. And so the membership of the Hamilton Golf and Country Club paid the celebrated golf course designer Harry Colt to create a private course in Ancaster.

  There was some initial concern that the new Hamilton Golf and Country Club was too far away from Hamilton. But those worries passed soon enough. A new affluence was being established by Hamilton’s upper middle class, and among its characteristics was the idea that the city of Hamilton, profitable as it was, might not be where you’d want to spend all your time. Resorts flourished. Summer cottages were built. And, as part of the same courtly instinct, country clubs enjoyed their heyday in North America.

  The time it took to get from downtown Hamilton to the locker room of the golf club was not a disadvantage. Distance from the bustling corner of King and James became part of the club’s cachet. You could get to it from Hamilton by motor car or by the commuter train on the old radial tracks.

  Ladies did not wear slacks on the Ancaster course. And certainly not sleeveless sports blouses. If men wore shorts—a relaxation of the dress regulations of which not all members approved—they wore Bermuda shorts, with knee socks.

  The golf club was a stately, embassy-like mansion where a buffet was served in the dining room on Sunday evenings. There were New Year’s Eve parties and silver anniversary celebrations and wedding receptions—for members, of course. But it was far from being a social club. Or even, for that matter, a country club. Not really. There was no pool. No tennis courts. There was no croquet or even shuffleboard. It was a golf club—and its chief attraction was the Colt-designed course that spanned outward from its staid, central clubhouse. There was a patio that overlooked the eighteenth green, and its proximity to final putts kept voices down. People were always softly clapping.

  Colt was the kind of Englishman for whom plus-fours, tweed jackets and flat caps were created. It was hard to imagine him in anything else. He was already a legendary designer of golf courses by the time the directors of the Hamilton club sought him out. (Formby and Royal Liverpool, Stoke Poges, Swinley Forest, Southfield at Oxford, and Pine Valley in Philadelphia, to name bu
t a few.) The directors wanted Colt’s opinion on a property of orchards and pasture just outside of Hamilton. And Colt’s opinion, offered that windy May morning in 1914, was encouragingly self-serving.

  The directors gathered around him on the hillock he’d chosen for his unhurried survey of the Grange farm near the village of Ancaster. The club’s secretary valiantly kept the notes from blowing away. The cuffs of the directors’ uniformly grey flannels were by then full of burrs. But this was the great thing about Colt. He paced the land. He breathed it. He felt the terrain in the tread of his burnished Crockett & Jones walking shoes.

  The directors followed the Englishman’s discerning gaze. And what did they see?

  A pig sty.

  A cattle slough.

  A fence that needed as much attention as the orchard it enclosed.

  Muddy tracks around a hill.

  This was a nothing kind of place.

  “Gentlemen…”

  Colt’s pause was mere convention. He already had everyone’s attention.

  16

  “A touch of polio” must have been what my father said on the Burlington Beach strip when my mother first asked about the thin leg made suddenly obvious by a bathing suit. This would have been on an early date in the late forties. Because that’s what my mother always said. “A touch of polio.” And it always sounded like she was quoting someone.

  A year or two before my father died, we were driving in Hamilton to one of the medical appointments that had become part of his life. He’d been retired for almost fifteen years by then, but he had a doctor’s clear, unsentimental view of what his body had in store for him. His thin leg was getting thinner, for one thing. He moved more stiffly than he used to.

  He bore the slow approach of decrepitude with some irritation but without surprise. Being a passenger in his own car, being driven to one clinic or another by one of his children or grandchildren was not his idea of fun. But it was inevitable. And anyway, it gave him a chance to remark on Hamilton landmarks, which was something he liked doing.

  His knowledge of the city was triggered by the buildings and streets themselves. He was not a collector of books about Hamilton, nor was he a member of any amateur history group. In fact, he sometimes described people who were in his view too obsessively devoted to the preservation of local history as “kooks.” But almost any drive anywhere in Hamilton with my father was a chance for him to point out sites and recount ancient gossip. As an example: when we passed the Masonic Temple at the corner of Queen and King Streets he told me about the scandalous circumstances of the death of the man who had built it and whose private residence it had originally been.

  Tuckett was the name. Tobacco was the business.

  By the end of the nineteenth century the Tucketts had amassed a considerable fortune. It was the kind of wealth that, in the early years of the twentieth century, in Hamilton, was acquired by hard work, a solid, English name, white skin, and the good fortune to catch a small market town transitioning to a sizeable industrial one.

  Hamilton had a good port. It was on railway lines. And it was close to the two most important geographic points of reference in the Canadian economy: Toronto and the United States. Now, it was true: if you were poor in Hamilton at the turn of the twentieth century, you could be really poor. Tar-paper-shack poor. Rickets poor. But the thing was: if you were rich, it was possible to get really rich. Black-plumed-carriage rich. Mausoleum rich. It was the kind of money that built the big stone churches that are now mostly empty on Sundays and the mansions that nobody can afford to heat. Some of the money lasted for generations.

  For a while, the Tuckett fortune was wealth that could hold its own against the wealth of Pittsburgh or Cleveland or Manchester or Sheffield. As events transpired, it was a fortune that did not endure long, but it was the kind of money that, in more carefully managed Hamilton families, would still be in play a century later. My mother referred to this cluster of mostly related, alma-mater-sharing, golf-playing, summer-cottage-going capitalists as “the fine olds.” They were families who had made fortunes in manufacturing, steel production, cotton, insurance, and tobacco, and part of the pleasure my father took in recounting the story of the Tuckett scandal had to do with the revolutionary tone with which he told it.

  The residential locus of Hamilton’s wealth shifted westward as the twentieth century unfolded. In general, and true to form, money wanted to get as far away as possible from the chimneys and slag heaps that produced it. As steel production and its attendant industries grew, the part of Hamilton that was in the shadow of the mills devolved to rooming houses that smelled of smog outside and poverty within. Meanwhile, the lawyers and doctors and teachers and accountants and shopkeepers moved steadily away from the open-hearth and rod mills—into more tranquil, tree-lined neighbourhoods. The wealthiest of the businessmen moved further away still, to the country estates of Ancaster and Dundas. There, they actually did shoot skeet and ride to the hounds. Which my father considered a bit much.

  Mr. Tuckett’s end came suddenly one night but not, alas, in the majestically carved bed he customarily shared with his wife in their grand west-end residence. As we drove past the brick Victorian mansion at the corner of Queen and King Streets that Mr. Tuckett had built my father said, “He died.” There was a pause. “In the east end.”

  And then, as if that were not scandal enough for a prominent Hamiltonian, my father elaborated. “In the arms of his paramour.”

  My father was proud of where he fit in the order of things. I don’t think he’d have put it that way. His pride in anything was usually expressed so quietly you got the sense he preferred nobody to notice. But there was a confidence to his position that was the confidence of his class. His was no stalled ascension. His life was not the acceptance of less than he wished for. This was exactly what he wanted. Wages were earned, savings were made, inheritance was bequeathed, social services were provided. You went to Rotary. You went to art gallery balls. You took up collection on Sundays. And you played golf with your son. Now and then. Before we are all dead and buried. This was the way things were supposed to be.

  Seven-thirty a.m. Dr. Macfarlane. Party of two.

  Big, I’d have to say. Big was the word that came to mind. And blue. Very, very blue. With white clouds catching the soft magenta of the eastern sky.

  Harry Colt’s original design at Ancaster—a par seventy-three in those days—was a challenge to the greatest of players while remaining a pleasure (if an exacting one) to the weekend amateur. “Golf,” Colt once wrote, “is primarily a pastime and not a penance.”

  There are more dramatic vistas. And certainly there are more fabled courses. But the view from the first tee at the Hamilton Golf and Country Club—specifically, the view from the first tee on a long-ago August morning—was blue if you looked straight skyward. It was misty in the long golden light of more horizontal observation.

  “Crick in your neck?” my father asked. He was not keen on elaborate rituals of loosening up.

  And it was the fractal patterns of that light—and not the ordinary objects that reflected it—that held the composition together. The air has its own dazzling. I made a few small adjustments to my grip.

  Language and music suggest an order. One word comes before a second word. This note follows that. What we normally understand as the sequential nature of time is as predictable as a golf course. The dogleg of the eighth always comes after the footbridge of the seventh. The putter follows the nine iron which follows the three which follows the driver.

  The Hamilton course was delightful, even for non-golfers. It was not uncommon in the club’s early days for non-players to accompany a foursome just for the pleasure of the walk.

  I made the first feathery strokes of the head of my driver as if to make sure that no adjustment had been made to its weight or length since the last time I’d picked it up.

  In front of a right
-hander’s stance, and in receding order, there was the pro shop and the putting green and the driving range and, beyond the line of oak that marked the edge of the club’s property, the village of Ancaster’s water tower. It was a pleasant view—notable, at seven-thirty in the morning, for the absence of any human form and humble in everything except the generosity of proportion. No part of it was in any way spectacular. And yet everything was exactly as you’d wish it to be. And it was that view, I think, that saved me. This is going to be beautiful, I realized—meaning not my play. That remained to be seen. What I meant was: we were stepping into a landscape that had been designed to be, among other things, beautiful. The light, you’d have to say, was perfect. I mean: perfect.

  Were you starting to turn your attention to the business of striking a very small white ball with the accelerating curve of your drive it was hard to imagine a better place to be or a better time of day to be there. It was a calming view. Which was a good thing. Calm was what I was looking for in my swing. To be calm was my objective.

  The technique that J. Douglas Edgar championed could not be broken down into mechanics. It could not be reduced to a series of stills. What Edgar called the movement was a continuum of adjustment, and to teach it Edgar created a wooden gate that bracketed the practice tee. A player’s first objective, in Edgar’s view, was not to hit the ball. The goal was to swing a club in such a way that its head passed through the gate. Hitting the ball would automatically happen—with the movement. It was the fluidity of the stroke that was the secret of its success. Edgar called this fluidity “abandonment.” He said that golfers had to let “a little joie de vivre creep in.” He wasn’t fastidious about where the backswing began and where the follow-through ended, but he was insistent that a stroke’s central four feet—the two feet before contact with the ball and the two feet after—be approached by a player with mindful focus. The ball, he said, was merely an incident in a swing. “Meditation and concentration are the way to a life of serenity.”—Baba Ram Dass. Greetings from Barstow, California.