The Sand Trap (4 page)

Welcome to the North Saskatchewan River Golf
and Country Club

Green Fees: $20 per day (you can play after
dark but watch out for the killer bats that come out at night)

Please insert payment in the slot. Cash,
Checks, or IOU’s accepted.

Local Course rules:

1. It is winter all year in Saskatchewan.
Move your ball anywhere you want.

2. All penalties are “lateral”. One stroke
penalty anywhere you cannot find or retrieve your ball.

3. Stay out of the wheat, corn, soy and
barley fields. There are poisonous snakes and grizzly bears.

4. Don’t go swimming after your ball in the
North Saskatchewan. There are sharks.

5. Use your own balls at your own risk. Free
balls are provided at the tee boxes and the landing areas.

6. No cursing, yelling or any sort of rowdy
behaviour permitted before you tee off on the first hole.

7. Laugh a lot.

Signed:

Dougal McDougal

Head Professional and Proprietor

Melanie had been an integral part of the
golf course since she was old enough to go into the corn and wheat
fields to retrieve golf balls and refill the free golf ball barrels
at each tee box, landing area and green. In the early days there
were many of those balls since very few of the golfers that visited
McDougal’s folly could claim much golfing talent. The players were
mostly local teenagers out for an afternoon of fun, or seniors and
retired farmers who figured that somewhere in their sixties was the
perfect time to take up the game. Neither group could hit the
landing areas nor the greens and most never came back a second
time, likely seeking out more ego-massaging courses to enjoy their
golf. For the teenagers it was the new miniature golf just opened
at the soft ice cream store in Bumstead. For the seniors it was
more likely to be a $10 municipal course in Sun City, Nevada rather
than anything during the Saskatchewan summer. Consequently it did
not leave much of a clientele to support Dougal’s golfing vision.
That did not bother Dougal or Melanie much. For Dougal it was not
about the money or the player popularity of the course. He was
content to carefully manicure his precious greens the way others
massaged their roses. Cutting the grass landing areas was a simple
once a month affair that Melanie started doing as soon as she could
drive the small tractor, around eight years old on a typical
Saskatchewan farm.

From the time Melanie started school, until
she left for Regina to go to high school, she and her dad were
quite content with the golf course operation and arrangement. He
still ran a farm and she still went to elementary school. When they
were not separately engaged in farming or schooling, they shared
the golf course. It was theirs.

There were players who had discovered the
course. They were mostly sent there the first time by one of the
increasing number of campsites or bed and breakfasts around
Bumstead. The occasional golfer who was driving across Canada and
saw Dougal’s “Cheap Golf” sign on the Trans Canada Highway
sometimes showed up. Some of these golfers kept coming back. And
back. And back. There was one couple from Winnipeg who planned
their summer holiday around two weeks of golf at the Folly. There
was one travelling salesman of veterinary products who made regular
stops at the course. There was a group of eight golfing buddies
from Saskatoon who spent a week in Bumstead every spring, golfing
at the Folly and drinking far too much at Johansson’s, the only B
and B in the region that would take eight guys and tolerate their
partying. Whoever combined a love of golf and good sense of humour
appreciated the Folly. The combination of quirkiness and skill
testing was simply irresistible to some golfers. But while both
Dougal and Melanie often met the golfers who come to the Folly,
neither interacted with them much. Dougal just did not care to
spend much time around people and Melanie was shy, content to cut
grass and retrieve balls.

It was not that Melanie was uninterested in
other sports. Baseball and hockey were a huge part of rural
Saskatchewan life and every community had teams in both sports that
engaged in serious rivalry with neighbouring communities. While
they played these sports in the playground at the Bumstead
elementary school, the problem for Melanie was that there was not
much in the way of organized sports for young girls. The teams were
all for boys. Girls were simply not allowed to try out for the
boy’s teams.

This was a shame.

At baseball, there was not a pitch that
could get past her. No matter how hard or fast the pitch she always
made connection with the ball. She did not really try that hard.
She just could not understand why the other players could not do
that. When her classmates were awed she just quietly responded, “It
wasn’t that hard. The ball was moving pretty slowly.” She did not
mean it as an insult, but some of the boys who tried to pitch her
out thought she was making fun of them and started bullying her and
calling her “freak” and other names. So she just quit hitting the
ball.

One day when she was ten the boys needed
someone to go in goal in a game of pick up hockey. They thought it
would be funny to put the “freak” in the net so they could hammer
her with shots. The same thing happened. She stopped all of their
shots. It was like she knew where the puck was going before it got
there. By this time she had realized that she did not win any
friends this way, so she let every third or fourth one in. She
started to play a game with herself, letting in only the shots of
the boys she liked, the ones who did not bully her or call her
names. Some of them were not very good hockey players so their
friends were amazed at the good day they were suddenly having,
while some of the top scorers were inexplicably shut out.

Over the years she started to realize that
not everyone saw things the way she did so she just started to hide
her skills. She did not know why or how, but her brain processed
things differently. She had never heard of slow motion at seven
years old, but later she would say that is how she sees some things
– in slow motion. Not really slow and jerky she would say, just
apparently a little slower than most other people. She could hit
the fastest pitch because she could get ready. She could stop the
fastest and most curving slapshot because she could get in
position. But at seven years old all she knew was that she was made
fun of, bullied, taunted and ostracized.

But no one ever laughed at Melanie when they
came to the Folly.

When Bob and Helen saw Melanie at the golf
course in 1975 she was fifteen years old and had been living with
her grandmother in Regina for the past two years while she went to
high school. For over half of those years, the Folly and golf had
been her passion and her refuge from a world that she did not
understand. The feeling for the course itself came from her father,
but the golfing part she just picked up along the way. Most of the
Bumstead locals did not know much more about golf than she did, so
she relied for her lessons on watching the odd assortment of
visitors that came to the Folly on occasion. It was too bad there
was not a collection of better golfers who used the Folly during
those early days or her swing might have looked a little different.
The best, at least the most enthusiastic, were probably the group
of young Saskatoon guys who came each spring. One of those, Bert
Rollins, was actually not a bad golfer and could break one hundred
fairly regularly. One day before the others arrived for their daily
game he gave an eight-year-old Melanie a club and showed her how to
grip it. He even let her try to hit a teed up ball and was
surprised when she actually hit the ball. It went directly into the
cornfield thirty yards away, but she actually hit the ball the
first time she tried. He remembered whiffing it most of his first
year of playing.

From that day forward, armed with that one
simple ‘grip it and rip it’ lesson, a 7-iron, putter and 3 wood she
found in the wheat field one day (she had learned that golfers
sometimes lost their temper and threw their clubs) and a stack of
1970 golf magazines (she fell in love with Hale Irwin), an eight
year old Melanie set out to master the game. Seven years later she
had done it, at least by Bumstead and the Folly standards. She
could turn an iron shot into the prairie wind with a draw or a fade
that would take the ball to any spot she wanted to place it. Her
golf skill was not a secret, of course. The boys from Saskatoon
still came every year and Bert still gave her an annual lesson, but
instead of her watching them play, the highlight of their trip was
playing with Melanie. She had been beating them all since she was
ten and was a Folly scratch golfer by thirteen. Those old
elementary school bullies now tripped over themselves to not only
play golf with her but to get her out on some sort of date. But she
rejected them all just like she did the boys at the high school in
Regina. She had her Dad, their golf course and by now a full set of
second hand clubs. She went to school because she had to, but felt
her life would soon be back at the Folly.

Bob recognized Melanie from the school and
although he had yet to teach her he knew that most in Regina
thought her a little odd. She dressed a little differently for a
start, perhaps half hippy and half farmer and rarely in feminine
clothing. She actually wore coverall Carhartts on occasion and
flannel plaid shirts were her staple. Unlike other girls she never
wore makeup or skirts and seemed to have no interest in the
pubescent class of high school boys. She was a loner. She spoke
when spoken to. She spent her time on her own. She was a competent
but not outstanding student. He knew that both students and staff
could be cruel when someone does not conform and some of them
gleefully started all sorts of rumours. There were rumours about
her sexuality, mostly from boys that she rejected. The girls she
ignored made fun of her height and lack of cosmetics. Teachers who
could not motivate her diminished her intellect. He knew she lived
with her grandmother but did not know where she came from or any
other personal details.

He was not even sure if she recognized him
from the school; certainly the Melanie he saw that day was nothing
like the caricature he had formed from the Melanie at the high
school. A very friendly and outgoing young lady met them at the
parking lot and asked if they needed help with their clubs. The
only odd thing Helen noticed was that, despite this being 1975 she
seemed to be dressed in typical men’s golf attire from the late
sixties. Melanie told Helen that men often left things behind –
shirts, pants, clubs for sure, and even the odd pair of shoes. A
teenager, Melanie was already close to 5’10”, and she had quite a
collection of items in the barn she could choose from. Strangely
enough, other than it being men’s clothing, it all looked quite
attractive on an oddly attractive young girl.

They exchanged small talk while they
organized their clubs and Melanie did recognize Bob. She told them
how her Dad had built the course and now takes care of the greens
while still farming, and she takes care of everything else. She
goes to school so she is only here fulltime during July and August,
but comes home most weekends in the spring and fall to operate the
course. They don’t get much business here in the spring and fall
anyhow, she suggested, so her Dad can manage on his own. Bob and
Helen also learned that like her mother, Melanie’s grandmother had
left her grandfather a long time ago, had never come back and only
reluctantly agreed to let Melanie stay with her during the school
year.

They learned this between the parking lot
and the first tee, where Melanie explained the local course rules
and wished them a good game. She and Bob had no children of their
own and were both teachers and Helen immediately liked Melanie.
Helen asked her if she played the course as well as worked at it.
Maybe she would like to play with them if she had the time?

Bob scowled at his wife. For a start, he was
not one for fraternizing with his students. Secondly, this was a
strange girl. She was not acting at all like she did at school and
this suggested some sort of bimodal behaviour that made him
uncomfortable. More importantly, as Helen knew, he was a serious
golfer. He had played on the Clapshorn varsity golf team that had
won a state championship in 1960 and at one time he had notions of
a golf career. Golfing with Helen was a sacrifice enough – she was
a fair golfer but did not share his passion for the game – so to
have to babysit a country bumpkin was a little much. Helen’s
returning scowl was enough to make him stow away his misgivings.
This was a holiday with her after all, not a golf holiday.

Melanie agreed to give them a playing tour
of the course. And the game began.

Bob went first and with a classic, rhythmic
swing landed the ball softly on the landing area of the 344-yard,
straightaway par four first hole. This was a good thing, since Bob
refused to use the free balls that were provided and used his own
brand of ball. They were special and expensive but Bob insisted
necessary for his level of skill.

There were no “ladies” tees at the Folly, so
Helen went next and hit from the one tee box available. She hit a
free ball into the middle of the cornfield between the tee box and
the landing area 200 plus yards away.

Melanie went next and both Bob and Helen
could not help suppressing a snicker. She was an odd sight. A too
big golf shirt adorned with the logo of a grain feed lot in
Saskatoon. Pleated madras pants that fit at the waist, youth golf
pants from somewhere that were three inches short for her.
Well-worn golf shoes with the “fashion” tongue so popular in golf
shoes at the time missing on one. The only non-golf part of her
attire was the hat. Useful for wind, sun, rain and the occasional
snowstorm, it was a well weathered and faded baseball hat with the
name "Bumstead” stenciled on the front that fit snuggly over her
head of massive Gaelic curls. A Saskatchewan farmer’s fedora as it
was called.