This story was originally printed in Volume I of The Massachusetts Golfer, which was published in April 2024. The Massachusetts Golfer is a print publication, first and foremost, which is exclusively available, at no charge, to Mass Golf Members.
If you are a member and have not received a mailed copy (note that copies are limited to one per household), please update your address on file. Kindly direct any enquiries to Stephen Hanjack: shanjack@massgolf.org
Darkening skies have long loomed as the enemy of golfers. I’d decided to lean into the conflict, reveling in the scarcity of light cast over a far-flung island on the year’s shortest day, stealing 18 holes under a sun that barely raised its fiery head before ducking back down under the covers. Each ensuing round would fall under a new season of golf, with daylight steadily stretching out to accommodate more birdies and bogeys, muttered expletives and awkward fist pumps, $5 Nassaus and turn shack hot dogs.
Part of the appeal of my quest centered on cosmically imposed parameters. I will confess, I underestimated the natural extremities and literal windfalls that accompany our universe’s larger cyclical motions, leading to an amendment of best laid plans. When I ruefully wrote to reschedule, Mike Haberl, Miacomet’s Director of Golf, responded:
“I get it. Did you see that the waves were higher than the Green Monster out there a couple days ago?”
Such was the inherent risk of venturing out into the Atlantic to play December golf. I’d anxiously monitored the forecast leading up to the 21st. Undeterred by harsh projections, I was prepared to break my own rule that if the wind speed surpasses the temperature, it’s probably time to go back inside.
I was, however, extremely deterred by the National Weather Service urging mariners to: “Remain in port, seek safe harbor, alter course, and/or secure the vessel for severe conditions.”
I pictured myself as hapless Wile E. Coyote, standing in left field at Fenway as Bugs sawed out the base of the Monster. I pictured a wave, four stories high, curling over the top of the ferry. I pictured the Pequod going down, down, down into the depths.
Reason prevailed.
I set sail a week later, on water so placid and amid fog so blindingly dense that it felt like the ferry was carefully wrapped in a cloud, weightlessly gliding above the Nantucket Sound.
As we neared port an hour later, a few persistent sunbeams bored through, exposing a smattering of boats and birds, gently bobbing about in our vessel’s wake. I’d thought this trip would be about braving the elements for the love of the game, but all was disarmingly serene. Sans elements, it would just be love of the game and a benign seaside stroll. You could do worse.
I chose Nantucket for my Winter Solstice retreat because the shortest day of the year on an island that sees its population shrink from over 80,000 in the summer to a scant 15,000 hardy souls in the winter seemed idyllic in terms of quiet, nature-imposed solitude.
Herman Melville further lured me in with the promise of expansive desolation in an increasingly constricting world:
“Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it–a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background.”
X
The Winter Solstice to Winter Solstice golf season was something I began observing during the pandemic, when time seemed destabilized and abstracted. Days, weeks, months spent inside piled up and melded together. Lighting out for the golf course, pool noodle lined cups or not, offered sweet escape. As such, I became less picky about what constituted “golf weather” and soon learned to love winter golf, maybe even prefer it.
If the course was open, I succumbed to its magnetic pull. Sure, in a cold snap the ground could freeze and make approach shots bounding over the green an inevitability, but there was also something revelatory about accepting those results, embracing the uncertain outcome of a well struck shot on indifferent terrain. I learned that the golf course didn’t owe me any reward for execution. I was fortunate enough just to be out there.
Golf boomed during the pandemic and drew in a slew of new players. As a lifer, my interest in the game had never really waned, but I noticed that it began teetering on obsession. During that first year of lockdown, I was furloughed from my job for a few months, and I had a pretty good idea of how to pass the time.
I packed my car with a sleeping bag, duffel bag, and golf bag, and set off across the country. For two weeks I subsisted on canned cold brew and hastily schmeared peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, gleefully barreling across state lines en route to the next X on my map. The majority of the world was at an eerie standstill, but the golf courses and national parks beckoned. Adventure ensued.
A friend and I outraced a tornado on I-80 through Nebraskan prairieland after a round at Wild Horse Golf Club. I drove nine hours straight from Seattle to Eureka, Montana, before teeing it up for an evening loop. The fleeting tranquility of New England twilight feels like stolen beauty, but out there, under impossibly tall skies, I could swear all 18 holes were embossed in gold before the sun finally dipped behind the Canadian Rocky Mountains at 9:30.
A few days later, I pulled off the road and slept in my car in a Walmart parking lot in Escanaba, Michigan, because the remote, northern skies were so inky black that I had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting a coyote, which locked eyes with me, stretched, and sauntered into the surrounding woods. The next morning, I bathed in Lake Michigan, then eased on down the Upper Peninsula for a tee time at Forest Dunes.
This is all to say that I found golf was worth chasing.
Upon returning to my desk after the furlough period ended, my mind remained on the golf course. One day I saw a job posting for a position at Mass Golf. The role required experience shooting and editing video. I didn’t have much of either, so I dragged a bundled up, semi-golfer friend out on the Winter Solstice and chronicled his round on the half-frozen tundra.
I debated whether I should submit the video at all—it was amateurish and rough around the edges. As you may have ascertained based on the handsome new publication you’re reading this in, I got the job. Channeling my life-long affinity for the game into a career was not something I had really thought possible, and the work has been deeply rewarding.
I’d started the Winter Solstice cycle following around my friend with a phone camera and now, a year later, I found myself walking to the first tee at Miacomet with a proper photographer inching behind me in a golf cart. How strange, and indeed, full circle.
X
I am never so engaged and conversant with my own thoughts as I am during a solo round of golf. That sort of introspection is not always conducive to good play, but I believe it’s invariably good for the soul, and a welcome respite from the ceaseless tyranny of glowing screens.
Perhaps because I had set out on this venture specifically to reflect, my mind was pleasantly vacant throughout the day. As I write this, I’m not quite sure what I was expecting to find out there. Transcendence? Inspiration? More questions?
Less lofty, but I suspect more essential, I found myself at ease for the first time in a long time. There was no sense in asking how I came upon this state of ease or what it portended going forward into a new season. That would betray the very nature of it.
At 34, I’ve got the sort of swing that looks extremely lived in. Competent if not exactly inspiring. On this day, with the fescue shorn down for winter and hardly a breath of wind in the air, Miacomet was rendered defenseless, and I had no trouble guiding my ball around the rolling links.
The routing is largely flat and unambiguous, making for a pleasant, ambling walk. Many of the fairways and greens are framed by intricately shaped bunkers that evoke Alistair Mackenzie’s signature stylings. It wasn’t hard to imagine that a few gusts of wind could transform those aesthetically pleasing design flourishes into scorecard chomping teeth.
Perhaps a bit too aware of the camera, I was a quick three-over through three. But after I sent Teddy off to explore more photogenetic subjects, I played the next 14 holes at even par.
The 18th is a par 5 that works its way back to the modest, low-lying clubhouse. It is not decadent like the palatial, Spanish rooved behemoth at TPC Sawgrass. Or more locally, it would occupy a mere sliver of the stately yellow structure at The Country Club. Like much of Nantucket, it nestles sleepily in neutral brown shingles, below the ocean breeze.
A devilish, revetted bunker lurks in the center of the fairway, but fortunately for me, it wasn’t in play that day. I knocked my approach on the green in two. While closing out my maiden round in this new season with a birdie would have been nice, a three-putt par from some 60 feet away was more fitting. Unhurried and comfortable as my day at Miacomet.
With plenty of time to spare before the return ferry was scheduled to push off, Mike urged me to take a stroll down the dirt road that meanders out past the third hole. About a half-mile from the clubhouse, the ocean pools in multitudes at the foot of the bluff. Mike had sworn he’d seen whales out there. The Ishmael in me took Ahab’s word for it and set to walking toward the island’s edge.
I didn’t spot any whales that day, just an infinite expanse that, with low lying clouds, betrayed no horizon line. The water was a thousand shades of blue grey that extended up into the sky, heaving gentle current to and fro. Less roar, more contented sigh.
I made my way back to the ferry and reluctantly stowed my clubs below deck, the lone set amid a tangled heap of sandy bicycles. Glancing back at the triangular roofs of somnolent downtown shops, I thought again of Melville:
“For my mind was made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island, which amazingly pleased me.”
Setting course for Hyannis, we were quickly blanketed with that familiar fog. I wondered if it had just been lingering there, a little way off the shores of Nantucket, a smothering counterpoint to my clearheaded island day. And I thought about embarking on this new season of golf, and how I would invariably consider my Solstice on Nantucket the serene inception, which amazingly pleased me.
