Fond memories of snow, golf and bicycling may run against the norms and general mood of the populace this time of year, which is growing rebellion against winter's snow and cold. But here goes:
This snowbound winter has brought back memories of childhood winters in Wisconsin, where the snow came and stayed through to spring. If there was any interruption, it would have come during a "January thaw"--words that stick in memory with no images attached. Sometime around March, the snow would slowly release its grip on the sprawling lawns of the Ohmsted landscape I grew up in (designed by John, brother of Central Park designer Frederick), bringing revelations of green.
Drawn outdoors by the warming breeze, golf club in hand, I would practice hitting a golf ball from one green patch to another. When my aim was off and the ball landed in a distant snowdrift, I might get lucky and find the hole in the drift where the ball had entered, then follow the tunnel to retrieve the ball. Otherwise, it was one more ball lost, at least until the snow melted further. A colored ball would have helped, but those hadn't been invented yet.
It may seem strange that a nature lover--particularly one who cheers the digging up of lawn to plant a wildflower garden--had a passion for golf early on, since golf is predicated on avoiding anything botanically interesting. On a golf course, there is an inverse relationship between the height of the vegetation you find your ball in, and your degree of happiness. One aims for the green, which has the shortest, least diverse grass of all, and ultimately for the hole, which has no vegetation whatsoever. But it did get me outdoors, under a big sky with endless variations of clouds drifting by. The wondrous capacity of my body to invent new variations on slices and hooks often landed me in the rough, where I learned to scrutinize the foliage closely, even if the object being sought was a Titleist rather than a wildflower.
The golf course where I played, next to the observatory where my father worked, would not measure up to anything in the present day. The fairways were a patchwork of different grass species with scrubby trees dotting the edges. If you were lucky, your ball would land on a short, tightly knit kind of grass that grew in flat, even patches, like brain corral on a reef, surrounded by much more scraggly species. If my slice was acting up, my drive might fly over the fence into a field of alfalfa, risking the wrath of the farmer if we went in search of the ball. All this made it easier to understand how the great early golfer Sam Snead might have started out with a knotty piece of wood for a club and a hickory nut for a ball.
Though I pursued a low score, with just enough success to keep at it, there were peripheral joys, like the feel of contacting the ball just right, or the beauty of the arc a well-hit ball made, cutting through the air. Even though trees were intended primarily as obstructions, theirs was a sporting presence that added to the meaning and challenge of the game. The ball's flight was all the more pleasurable if it just barely cleared the top of a tree standing between me and the green.
And that may be one reason why I bear less resentment towards a lingering winter, perhaps seeing winter less as a dreary presence than an obstacle that requires some sport to overcome. Which finally brings me, or you, to the picture at the top of this post, intended to illustrate another sport associated with the spring thaw--bicycling in the snow. There was the look of the bike tire's tread in the snow and mud, which was satisfying for some reason--maybe because the imprint in the softening snow marked another winter outlasted--and the slippery, slidy sport of staying upright while plowing through drifts of snow with my red, 3-speed Schwinn on the dirt road that led to school.
It takes a real winter to get that special feeling when the snow finally begins to melt.
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