Empty Calories & Male Curiosity, #10

Eulogy For A Golf Course: Part 1, Silver Spring

QUICK HITTERS:

1. Reminder that this newsletter aspires to be informative, insightful, and fun. Hopefully you come away with at least one of the three every week. (Tons of pictures in this edition…that means don’t worry about the scroll bar to your right 😉)

Cool pic of a Sun Dog that I snapped earlier this week with my phone. You can kind of see the rainbow where the ring is (it was much clearer in person).

2. DRINK OF THE WEEK: Angels Envy Rye vs. Angels Envy (original). Recently I wound up with a bottle of each of these. Whiskey is typically my drink of choice, but lately I’ve been liking some bourbons as well.

   However, in the past I’ve not liked the Rye versions of anything. So with the help of my wife I decided to do a blind taste test.

   

   GO BIRDS

   To my surprise it turned out I liked the Rye version better. It smelled like maple syrup and went down smoother than the original. My wife enjoyed a glass of wine while I compared and contrasted, although she did take a sip of my bourbon.

   It did not go well…

3. SilentPunt stickers have been designed & ordered! If you are enjoying reading and listening to my nonsense please forward to a friend. Here’s how it works:

   1) Share with 1 friend: Shout-out in this newsletter and social media.

   2) Share with 3 friends: Shout-out & free STICKER.

   3) Share with 25 friends: Total conciousness.

   (Yes Bob G., the person you forward it to needs to subscribe in order to count 😊)

   Special shout-outs to readers Tim Dawkins and Paul Horton for recommending SilentPunt in their publications this past week. You can check them out by clicking the link in their names. I subscribe to them both and enjoy their writing!

4. This week’s book recommendation is There It Is, by none other than SilentPunt subscriber Jim Talone. The book is a gripping tale of Jim’s tour of duty in Vietnam. In addition to a 5/5 rating on Amazon, you can find a good review here. If you’re a fan of history and/or war books add this one to your list!

Maverick says this book passes the sniff & lick test.

5. OVERTIME: Earlier this week Travis & I talked about traveling with kids in our SilentPunt podcast (here). In the OVERTIME portion below we discuss our experiences with fist fights…

6. Tell us what to talk about next!!!

GOING DEEP:

Have you ever seen one of those articles with pictures of abandoned places? Like Chernobyl or an old hospital? For some reason those have always fascinated me.

Actual picture from Pripyat Hospital, inside the Chernobyl quarantine zone.

About three months ago I went for a walk in a graveyard and described it here. This week I decided to go for a walk in a place where death can be abundant as well…a golf course.

No, I was not referring to lost golf balls when I mentioned death. I meant a golf course that is literally dying. It is being carved up in order to put single family homes on the land. Up until a few years ago Silver Spring Golf Course was comprised of two 18 hole golf courses, situated side by side.

You can see the old course that is being developed for houses on the right.

A few years ago they sold the land for one of the courses to a housing developer. In the past year or so the first houses have started to spring up. The plan is that when all of that land has been gobbled up for houses they will start building on the remaining course.

So I thought it might be neat to go for a walk at the confluence of the two courses. Thinking the juxtaposition would be interesting.

All of the holes used to have tee markers like the one on the left. People have started to steal them from the few remaining holes on the old course.

As I traveresed the landscape I got more of a war zone vibe than a graveyard one.

There are 100s of tree stumps like these.

Tree stumps litter both the land that has not yet been fully developed and the existing course. Like many areas in the Midwest the past ten years or so have been devastating to our local trees. Bugs like the Emerald Ash Borer have left many beautiful trees to rot.

When the threat of them breaking and causing damage to humans or property gets to a certain point they must be taken down. With the future of this land already plotted out there is no need to re-plant.

Many areas of the existing course have already begun to be prepared for destruction. Very expensive golf course management equipment sits outside to corrode in the Wisconsin winter. The building it used to be housed in has already been razed.

There is an old building between the two courses that used to house bathrooms with what looked to be bullet holes in the windows. Upon closer inspection those were cracks from balls that people have either thrown at the windows or deliberately hit their balls into (the building isn’t remotely in line with any holes…even for crappy golfers like Travis).

I finished my trip by walking the back nine holes of the remaining course. Its signature hole is a Par 3 with an island green. I’ve got no idea how they plan to incorporate that into the future housing development.

I’ve deposited many a golf ball into the surrounding pond.

As with the loss of any land for development there is some sadness in the process. In this case it’s not just the loss of the course, it’s also the loss of the nature and green space. While this is lamentable, I also understand that many people now live on land that was once something else. Or someone else’s.

Change, whether viewed as progress or regression, is difficult. No matter how hard we try to hang on to the past we can never re-capture it. Many of us hold dear to our hearts the physical reminders of our past because of this.

A few months ago I wrote about my propensity to steal (here). The picture below is something I salvaged from the old course after it shut down, but before its destruction began.

Just another item I’ve re-homed.

Flag from the green of hole 6 on the old course. Even though it is the first to be demolished, it was actually the younger of the two courses.

Part 2 of Eulogy For A Golf Course will come in a few weeks.